Fighting Words: The story of how liberals became Neocons

This is a follow up to my earlier post, Iraq, Iran and how the Neocons failed (Part I), but I couldn’t bring myself to call it part II, if only because it’s about neoconservative successes.

Ben Wattenberg, these days best known now as the moderator of PBS’s Think Tank, has written a witty account of his role in neoconservatism’s rise (he was a speech writer for President Johnson and then for Vice President Hubert Humphrey, and eventually part of the circle of smart young men advising the late Washington Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, the movement’s human cornerstone). It’s called "Fighting Words, A Tale of How Liberals Created Neo-Conservatism."

In an interview, he described it to me as the story of "How come a nice Jewish boy from a moderate political family in the cultural center of Jewish America … where everybody was either a liberal, a radical liberal a communist, how does a nice Jewish boy end up being called a conservative anything?"

I have some problems with the book — Wattenberg never gets around to a cogent definition of neoconservatism, and one is left with the impression (perhaps this is what he believes) that it is essentially the liberalism that modern liberals have left behind. He describes neoconservatism frequently in terms of what it is not: "If there is one thing that most neoconservatives do not believe, it is that America is too arrogant in trying to purvey its message." He occasionally loses his temper and bomb-throws — Michael Moore, he says without explaining why, is "anti-American"; I’m not a Michael Moore fan, but, if anything, the sin of his documentaries is to frame critiques of this country’s elites with an ultra-jingoism that would put the reddest neck in Nashville to shame.

Wattenberg also is guilty (we all are) of fudging among his cohorts what he finds unforgivable among others. For instance, he correctly identifies neoconservative as convenient code for "Jews" among some European elites; but he willfully ignores his hero Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s use of similar codes to excoriate Soviet elites, and instead relates a moving — but not in this case relevant — tale of his grandfather’s encounter with Russian pogromists. (The matter arose during Wattenberg’s confirmation hearings in the early 1980s to join the board of directors of the bodies overseeing Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe. Solzhenitsyn was delivering commentary on the networks, and thanks to Wattenberg, continued to do so — and good for Wattenberg for making a full range of views, however necromantic, available to Eastern Bloc listeners.)

Those caveats aside, I highly recommend the book. It first of all bares a neglected corner of the movement’s history: its rise as a belief system addressing the ills of domestic liberalism, as opposed to the interventionist foreign policy with which it is now almost exclusively identified. Wattenberg describes the seeds of neoconservatism as a salve to liberal gloom in the 1960s and 1970s. Here he contrasts uber-liberal Walter Mondale (as a Minnesota senator in 1971) dealing with the inner cities, with the approach of his boss and hero Hubert Humphrey in his successful 1970 campaign to return to the Senate.

Mondale:

The sickening truth is that this country is rapidly coming to resemble South Africa. Our native reserves and Bantustans are the inner cities. And our apartheid is all the more disgusting for being insidious and unproclaimed.

Humphrey:

The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadow of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.

Mondale identifies an angst, and continues to anguish; Humphrey identifies a problem and seeks to repair it. Doers as opposed to kvetchers.

Also recommending the book is its Bronx-born tough and at times hilariously self-aware tone. Here’s Wattenberg in a Miami hotel lobby in 1972, running into George Wallace, the 1972 presidential candidate who hadn’t yet completely renounced his segregationist outlook:

"You’re Wattenberg, aren’t you?"

I responded, "Yes, Governor, I am."

He said, "You’re a good man. You ought to come work for me."

I was petrified, lest someone overhear the exchange. "I’m working for Senator Jackson," I said.

"Well," said Wallace, "he’s a good man."

I retreated with speed. Actually, I may have run away.

Wattenberg completed the book a year ago, before the election, and so it does not address the concrete evidence of the movement’s more recent failures — the overwhelmingly Democratic Congress and Barack Obama’s presidency. He won’t count out neoconservatism, he told me: The movement "changed the face of the world, maybe for the better, and maybe for good." It is, he said, about "common sense, you want to defend yourself."

It could also do, in its current state, with Wattenberg’s refreshing self-awareness, a quality that allows for reassessment — something the movement, I think, now lacks (as I related in my previous post). Wattenberg, for instance, softens towards feminism when he becomes aware of the treatment of women in Middle Eastern societies.

The usefullness of the engagement with the world Wattenberg embraces comes through most strongly in a Think Tank interview he reprints, with Norman Podhoretz, one of the movement’s founders. In it, Podhoretz credits movement intellectuals with fostering among Americans an awareness of the evils of totalitarianism. Wattenberg counters:

What about the idea that this process doesn’t go on as trickle-down but as bubble-up? People understood the evils of totalitarianism. There is a huge ethnic population in the United States who, by the grapevine of their people in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union, knew damned well what was happening.

Podhoretz says he is a believer in the "common sense of the American people" but adds: "Voters on their own don’t have a glorious record."

"More glorious than the intellectuals," rejoins Wattenberg, who goes on to wonder whether Podhoretz has become bitter; Podhoretz says his bitterness toward his political enemies arises out of his own "seriousness."

I would have exclaimed, "And you are seriously a pompous ass!" But Wattenberg’s rejoinder is far superior: a warning we should all heed, whatever stripe of conservative or liberal:

Doesn’t that lead, then, to a certain parochialism — you hang out with your guys, they hang out with their guys — instead of getting the blend that many of us would think is the source of wisdom?