> This is where the neoconservatives and old leftists, such as Paul
> Berman, are different. Their radical vision of an American state, filled
> with revolutionary élan and military steel, battling heroically and
> alone with outside enemies, is anti-liberal, yet they call it liberalism
I'm usually an Ian Buruma fan, but here he is hitting a very big nail not quite on the head. American liberalism has always been a fighting faith. And, necessarily but paradoxically, it has not only always had an illiberal side, it has always been based on illiberalism. Liberalism was originally conceived of as a faith, the strength of which depended directly on having an enemy who was out to destroy everything it stood for. The liberal faith, as originally conceived, was something that would only stay strong so long as it was perpetually mobilized for battle.
A lot of confusion on this question arises from thinking that liberalism was born in the 60s. To really understand liberalism we have to back to the moment when modern American liberalism was born, at the beginning of the cold war. Although there were also some preliminary contractions in the late 1930s.
And if we look at the pattern of American liberalism over the entire half century of its life span, I think it suggests an explanation for the recent spate of anti-anti-war liberalism. It'Òs not a new phenomenon in liberalism. Rather it'Òs a perodic and constitutive feature of liberalism. This sort of fissioning and falling out is almost as regular as the business cycle. It happens just about every thirty years.
To simplify, but not too much, there was no liberalism in the 30s. The only things on the left side of the spectrum in the 30s were progressivism, trotskyism and communism.
Progressivism largely entered the national historical stage at the turn of the century with sudden advent of Theodore Roosevelt. ItÒs most important quality during the thirties -- and what distinguished it from what was to become liberalism -- was that it was not anticommunist. It was against anti-communism on principle.
There were three main reasons for this. First was the principle of tolerance, the idea that suppressing people's views was wrong on principle. Second was the principle of solidarity, the idea that attacking one'Òs own flankmust obviously weaken the progressive half of the spectrum. And lastly, there was the international situation. Progressives despised fascists. It was one of their defining characteristics in the 30s, a decade largely defined by the Spanish Civil war. And the Soviet Union was the only avowedly anti-fascist country in the world until the end of the decade.
Of course there was also uneasiness. When you were talking communism in the 30s, you were literally talking about Stalinism at the apogee of its badness, during the purge trials and following the famines. Not to mention the way communism crushed the Spanish anarchists even as it provided them with arms.
This is the simple reason why many people who later became cold war liberals -- many of them New York Jews who had an extra beef with Russia -- started out as Trotskists: because if you were on the left in the 30s (and almost every college age person was), the Trots were the only people who were ferociously anti-Stalinist. Theirs was the only group where you could be against both Stalin and Hitler. And if you went to City College in the 30s, you had to join a group. It was de rigeur. (Another advantage of the Trots is that they were co-ed. It's where Irving Kristol met his wife, Gertrude Himmelfarb. Also Trots in the thirties don't seem to have been vanguard organizations, at least the one on City College Campus. It sounds more like a big heated discussion group. When people decided which group to join, it seems like there were deciding between discussions clubs.)
Thus when people keep trying to find a hidden connection between Trotskyism and the later beliefs of people who later became cold war liberals, and then 30 years later neoconservatives, they are breaking down an open door. Being against Stalin and Hitler -- equating the two -- was the original central defining belief of cold war liberalism. It was anti- totalitarianism in a nutshell. For the original liberals, anti-stalinism, anti-communism and anti-totalitarianism were all equivalent terms.
(This is why Buruma's -- and Michael Lind's -- idea that the deep connection between trotskyism and neoconservatism is "permanent revolution" or "revolution from above" is basically piffle. It's the kind of answer you might get from a smart student who hasn't actually read the books. It's an inspired guess. But it has nothing to do with the actual history of neoconservatism. Or trotskyism, for that matter.)
(The one other thing 50s cold war liberals took from the Trots was their belief that high culture, and especially literature, mattered a lot. It was this that was behind Partisan Review, Encounter, etc.)
When I say anti-communism was the defining belief of liberalism, I mean that quite literally. The original liberal was a progressive who was anti-communist, both domestically and internationally. On all other beliefs the two groups were in agreement.
During the thirties, it was felt there was no room for this plague on both your houses stance. It was considered a life or death time. You were either for Stalin or for Hitler and given that choice, Progressives were defined as those who choose Stalin. Progressives who saw first hand how awful Stalin was felt strongly obligated to keep these misgivings to themselves. But it did build a tension.
There was a brief moment in 1939, when Stalin and Hitler signed their non-aggression pact, when people who hated Stalin suddenly felt they could speak openly without being accused of aiding fascists. You can imagine their relief. Several people who would later become key figures in liberalism couldn't say it loudly enough. And then, just as suddenly, they had to shut up and sit on it again when Stalin became the US's most important ally in the war against fascism. You can just imagine how their frustration festered.
So the battle between liberals and progressives over communism was all primed and ready to explode when WWII was over. To make a long story short, the liberals won, and the progressives were crushed. And the cold war began. And along with it, the domestic persecution of communists.
To the progressive arguments of tolerance and solidarity, the liberals responded that attacking their own left wing not only didn't weaken their half of the spectrum, it strengthened it. Having an enemy was a good thing, they argued. It strengthened one'Òs liberal principleby forcing one to defend them, and defend them with force. This strengthening of the faith through overcoming resistance was crucial, they argued, because otherwise liberalism was in continual danger of falling into existential and disastrous despair. As they saw it, liberalism was faced with two dangers: a danger from an enemy without who would give no quarter; and a danger within. But this danger within was not what the progressives said it was, the danger of becoming illiberal by acting repressively. No, the danger was the exactly opposite: it was the danger of having our liberal values weakened by being taken for granted and ceasing to be consciously upheld. All values, Schlesinger and Neibuhr argued, are ultimately based on faith. And if anything, this was even truer for liberal values, because liberalism takes for granted that you can never really know the truth. For these original liberals, the real inner golgotha was relativism and paralysis of the will. And this could only be countered by strengthening the liberal faith. So having an enemy was not at all a bad thing to be mourned. It was rather a god-given opportunity.
Thus was liberalism born. The idea that liberals were slow to go to war is simply nonsense. Liberalism was a crusading faith from its inception. It was born going to war.
So when people think of liberalism was being born in the 60s, they are in sense getting things exactly backwards. The 60s was actually a time when, for the first time in 20 years, liberalism came under attack from its left again. It was essentially a revival of the liberal/progressive struggle. The reason was simple: the cold war overreached itself in Vietnam. It wasn'Òt necessary and it was'Òt justified. Saving Western Europe was one thing -- especially when people argued at the time that if we didn't, it would be end up being controlled by an even more powerful Hitler figure than the one we just defeated. But policing disorder in far off and irrelevant corners of the world was another. And on top of that, it wasn'Òt working. So the whole idea of the cold war -- the defining belief of liberalism -- came under very justified attack.
It was at this time that neoconservatism was born. The original neoconservatives saw themselves as attempting to defend the established fighting faith again attack from the left. The original neoconservatives were liberals who were appalled by the 60s anti-war movement on the basis of liberalism's founding principles. They were appalled by its mass movement qualities, because in their framework, extraparliamentary mass movements were emblematic of totalitarianism. They were appalled by the hot summer riots (which most people have forgotten today, and which are really amazing images if you ever get to see them on video). The pictures of burned out cities made them feel like the 30s might really be coming back. And lastly they felt under attack because they were. The liberal establishment *was* the object of attack of all the 60s movements.
The neoconservatives didn't consider themselves conservatives at first. (In fact some of them never did, just like many of the newest wave still don't.) They considered themselves the true liberals, trying to defend liberalism'Òs heritage. And they were right. They were called neoconservatives, or new conservatives, as a form of abuse. And it was effective; it outraged them, just like it outraged Berman in the 80s or Hitchens today.
The original new conservatives, grouped first around Kristol'Òs magazine The Public Interest (which first came out in 1965) and later Podhoretz'Òs Commentary (which can probably date its sharp neocon turn from 1971 when Pod began writing a monthly column attacking the left) were originally domestically oriented. That was because the cold war framework was still taken as a given by the establishment. With the withdrawal from Vietnam in 1973, essentially admitting defeat, the cold war consensus truly came into question, and neoconservativism began to develop its foreign policy side. But its essence was simple. It was a straightforward attempt to renew, to revive and to make respectable the cold war anticommunism that formed liberalism's foundation and which had now fallen into mockery and disrepute. And they did revive it. Patrick Moynihan and Jeanne Kirkpatrick brought anti-communism back from the nadir of the Church hearings to its original place in the policy firmament within 5 years. Carter'Òs reaction to the invasion of Afghanistan -- essentially a mea culpa -- was the beginning of their victory. The election of Reagan -- and the acceptance by most (although not all) of the neocons that the republican party was where they belonged -- was the end.
Progressivism wasn'Òt crushed this time. But it did loes again on the defining foreign policy front. Essentially by the 80s, what had originally been called liberalism and progressivism had changed their names to conservatism and liberalism, with the latter, while not crushed, under constant ideological fire. But since this overlap of terms is very confusing, I'll stick to the original opposition of liberalism and progressivism. Also because it more clearly represents the genealogy I'Òm trying to trace.
With the end of the cold war in 1989, liberalism clearly faced another crisis. You can'Òt have cold war liberalism without a cold war. ou'd end up with progressivism by default. This thought horrified the men who are now regarded as the second generation of neoconservatives. They argued, in essence, that what you needed in order to keep your values strong was an enemy. Otherwise you'Òd collapse from with in, the death of slackness It was the original liberal argument distilled down one step further so that now it didn't have to be communism that was the enemy.
Rather than call them liberal values, they now called them democratic values, or the values of liberal society. But the basic opposition which they felt had had to be preserved, and which they aregued could be preserved in the absence of communism, was still that of the open society and its enemies. And under their belief system you could only have one if you had the other, we needed to find a new enemy.
And right away, right when the cold war ended, they came up with the functional equivalents in terrorism, WMD and world disorder. They were all present in the original DPG (Defense Policy Guidance memorandum), which was specifically written up in 1992, after Gulf War 1 was over, to decide what we should do now that the cold war was over. Had Bush gotten reelected, it would have begun becoming our official policy the next year. Because of an 8 year Democratic interregnum, it began becoming our policy in 2000.
Obviously in the beginning the only people interested in preserving the virtues of the cold war after communism was dead were dyed in the wool cold warriors, men who had always believed in the cold war's transcendent virtues. But after 9/11, terrorism and WMD were suddenly personified into an enemy that couldn't be a more a perfect candidate to be the functional equivalent of communism: islamic fundamentalism. If you wanted an enemy to strengthen the liberal faith, you couldn't do better than this. It was even better than the original, in many ways. For one thing, you didn't have to worry about ending the world like with the old one. That always frustrated true believers. Now suddenly they could be unleashed. It's what excited them in 1992.
Of course nobody dares calls it this fighting faith liberalism anymore. The neoconservatives say that standing up to this enemy and realizing we need to fight it will strengthen our *American* values. People like Ellen Willis and Paul Berman say it will strengthen our *progressive* values. But scratch the surface of either with a follow up question and both will soon tell you that the opposition is fundamentally one between totalitarianism and liberal society. In other words, the original liberal foundation in exactly the same words. Now matter how they spin it, they both eventually say we need to get heated up for is to defend "modern, liberal society with all its flaws." Which is exactly what the original liberals said.
So what you are seeing now in people like Mark Cooper and Berman and Todd the Git is exactly what you saw at the beginning of the cold war in men like Arthur (The Vital Center) Schlesinger and Reinhold (Children of Darkness, Children of Light) Neibuhr. And it's exactly what you saw thirty years later in the neoconservatives, who attacked the anti-war movement and successfully rescued the idea of the worldwide communist conspiracy. It is the regular periodic struggle between the liberals, who believe our values are founded on a faith which draws its strength from recognizing and mobilizing against an enemy -- an implacable worldwide enemy, who is dedicated to our destruction, and who has agents and allies secreted among us -- and the progressives, who believe that the religious and Schmittian concept of an enemy destroys the very possibility of institutionalizing a rational world order, while simultaneously corroding our most cherished values from within.