Group Portrait, With Bile
by Benjamin Balint, Wall Street Journal
In recent years, "neoconservative" has become a term of abuse referring to the supposed cabal that brought about the Iraq war. . . . In They Knew They Were Right, Jacob Heilbrunn, a senior editor at The National Interest, revels in the term's abusive qualities. He sees neoconservatism as a dangerous moralistic "mentality" that derives from ethnic experience -- "as much a reflection of Jewish immigrant social resentments and status anxiety as a legitimate movement of ideas." Thus he describes neoconservatives as "an elect" of "prophetic personalities," bound by "tribal ties," who looked to Leon Trotsky as their Moses. While Norman Podhoretz used Commentary magazine as "his private Sinai," Irving Kristol acted "like Joshua leading the Israelites into Canaan."
In Mr. Heilbrunn's telling, the neoconservatives, once arrived in the Promised Land of political influence, ill-served their hosts. The "high priests of the Reagan coalition," he writes, "almost wrecked" Ronald Reagan's presidency with their "apocalyptic view of the cold war" and their support for Central American anticommunists. By the time they came to play a "sacerdotal role" for George W. Bush, neoconservatives were stuck in cold-warrior mode and created, in Iraq, "the greatest foreign policy disaster since Vietnam."
The neoconservative mentality is, then, for Mr. Heilbrunn, "ineluctably Jewish." Or is it? At times, it appears in his account to be something less well defined -- akin to a kind of disease that might strike anyone. Noting the strong neoconservative views of Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, Patrick Moynihan, William Bennett, John Bolton, Francis Fukuyama and Linda Chavez, Mr. Heilbrunn suggests that neoconservatism is a "virus" that can infect non-Jews too. George W. Bush, by voicing his support for democracy in every nation, became "not the tool of the neoconservatives but a neoconservative in his own right." Nor is the other side of the aisle immune to infection. That none of the Democratic candidates in the presidential campaign has criticized Israel, Mr. Heilbrunn says, "must be counted as a neoconservative success." . . . As neoconservatives have always existed, they will always exist. They "will not disappear," Mr. Heilbrunn laments. "An elite caste, they will simply regroup."
. . . Mr. Heilbrunn is perfectly right to say that, after the Cold War thawed, the mental habits that the neoconservatives had cultivated continued to inform their thinking. But the task of scapegoating requires him to assume that those habits are baleful, that there was no good reason to see the world -- after the Cold War, especially after 9/11 -- as a place of existential struggle or to define American interests beyond the narrow dictates of Realpolitik.
Mr. Heilbrunn is also right to say that at least part of the neoconservative sensibility has been "shaped by the Jewish immigrant experience, by the Holocaust, and by the twentieth-century struggle against totalitarianism." But he fails to acknowledge that such experience and such concerns, far from leading to a distorting resentment or a dangerous "mentality," may have inspired an especially acute appreciation of American exceptionalism and American values. By failing to treat neoconservatism as a movement of ideas, Mr. Heilbrunn reduces it to something worse than caricature. His polemic suffers for it.
According to the "shirt-tail" bio on his publisher's website, the author is one of those people who runs with the big dogs:
JACOB HEILBRUNN writes regularly for The New York Times, Washington Monthly, and National Interest. He is a former member of the Los Angeles Times editorial board and was a senior editor at the New Republic. He lives in Washington, D.C.
Now look again at what he wrote: neocons are "an elite caste" with a dangerous moralistic "mentality" that derives from ethnic experience -- a "virus" that can infect non-Jews . . .
Holy crap! This almost sounds like something Julius Streicher would've written.
On second thought, no "almost" about it! This is The Israel Lobby squared. This is David Duke on meth. This is the Auschwitz mission statement -- presented as serious thought by someone in the big leagues of mainstream punditry and journalism, published in hardback by Random House.
As far as I can tell from a bit of Googling about just now, nobody on the Left (Atrios, Kos, DU) finds this even mildly offensive. If the Dems win this year, people who read this book and did not think there was anything wrong with it will be running things.
Are you bothered by that? I sure am. |
Though Imam Intikab Habib expressed anguish and regret for comments he made about 9/11 that resulted in his stepping down Friday before being sworn in as chaplain of the Fire Department, some members of the local Muslim community reacted with slightly less dismal emotions. "Fifty years from now, we will think this is all a step forward," said Dr. Abdul Jamil Khan, of Muttontown. The semi-retired chairman of pediatrics at Brooklyn's Interfaith Medical Center said Habib should have been more diplomatic. "He is backing off because he made a boo-boo," Khan said. "You can make many theories, but as a person who was going to be sworn into that sensitive position, he should have been very careful not to hurt others' feelings."