Keep Your Eye on the Dolchstosslegende

William Kristol is an intellectually bankrupt thug. It's a point that hardly needs elaboration, but Jon Chait elaborates quite satisfyingly on it anyway, coming to a nice summation of the state of the Dolchstosslegende:

The theme of traitorous liberals is becoming a Standard trope. Last week's cover depicted an American soldier seen from behind and inside a circular lens--as if caught in the sights of a hostile sniper--beneath the headline, "does washington have his back?" The Weimar-era German right adopted the metaphor of liberals stabbing soldiers in the back. Kristol is embracing the metaphor of liberals shooting soldiers in the back. I suppose this is progress, of sorts.

There was a time when neoconservatives sought to hold the moral and intellectual high ground. There was some- thing inspiring in their vision of America as a different kind of superpower--a liberal hegemon deploying its might on behalf of subjugated peoples, rather than mere self-interest. As the Iraq war has curdled, the idealism and liberalism have drained out of the neoconservative vision. What remains is a noxious residue of bullying militarism. Kristol's arguments are merely the same pro-war arguments that have been used historically by right-wing parties throughout the world: Complexity is weakness, dissent is treason, willpower determines all.

Ross Douthat objects to Chait's piece -- not on the merits, but because Chait's magazine, the New Republic, has never taken a coherent stance on the war.

This, to me, seems entirely beside the point. Matt Freeney agrees, pointing out the structural reasons why TNR hosts a range of opinions on the issue. He also invites Douthat to offer his own opinions on whether Kristol's buffoonish rants should be taken at face value, or seen as something a little more performative.

To my mind, authentic or not, the Dolchstoss discourse has the same effects. And what's peculiar is that Douthat himself has denounced it in the past:

Myself, I think that liberals should be praying that the Right embraces the "stabbed in the back" theory of what went wrong in Iraq (and possibly Iran as well), because it will push conservatives toward political irrelevance. Yes, many conservatives have long nursed the belief that we could have won in Vietnam if liberals hadn't turned gutless and anti-American, but this belief hasn't won the Right any elections ...

So when Dinesh D'Souza tells conservative cruisegoers that "it's customary to say we lost the Vietnam war, but who's 'we'? ... The left won by demanding America's humiliation," he isn't broadening conservatism's base - he's shrinking it. Which is what a post-Bush conservatism that obsesses over how the liberal media undid the Iraq Occupation by failing to "report the good news" would do as well.

This is a pragmatic argument, not a principled one, though there's no reason to believe that Douthat has any sympathy for Dolchstoss talk on any level. Maybe he was simply using Chait's piece as an opportunity to grind an axe over TNR's editorial policy. But it sure would be nice if he, as a conservative, would also take the opportunity to denounce the thuggery of his ideological cousin.

Labels: Dolchstosslegende, Jonathan Chait, Ross Douthat, William Kristol

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 1:48 PM 0 comments

  All the Conservative World's a Stage

Henry Farrell responds to Ross Douthat on the question of whether (and to what degree), when they wrote their infamous paper "Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy," Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan were more concerned with the political fate of the Republican party than with the national interest.

Douthat, I think, is correct to note that theorists usually believe that what is good the nation will be good for their party, and vice-versa. Otherwise, they wouldn't believe what they believe. At any rate, Farrell, in his response, links to a paper he wrote a couple of years ago, and I bring this all up because he cites a very interesting passage from that essay:

As Corey Robin has argued, both neo-conservatives like Irving Kristol and David Brooks and more traditional conservatives such as William F. Buckley appear to have been in the market in the late 1990’s for an existential struggle between good and evil, a rationale for crusade that would make politics seem exciting and meaningful. In David Brooks complaint, “The striking thing about the 1990s zeitgeist was the presumption of harmony. The era was shaped by the idea that there were no fundamental conflicts anymore.” It’s obviously easier to cast politics in sweeping moral terms when you can use a struggle of this sort as a metric, even if the struggle isn’t really there, or isn’t the kind of struggle that you claim it is. It’s also easier to galvanize the conservative movement into action:

[quoting from Kristol and Kagan]Without a broader, more enlightened understanding of America’s interests, conservatism will too easily degenerate into the pinched nationalism of Buchanan’s America First, where the appeal to narrow self-interest masks a deeper form of self-loathing. A true conservatism of the heart ought to emphasize both personal and national responsibility, relish the opportunity for national engagement, embrace the possibility of national greatness, and restore a sense of the heroic, which has been sorely lacking from American foreign policy—and from American conservatism—in recent years.

This emphasis on conservatism as a movement which must have a sense of the heroic lest it dwindle into mere selfishness, has the paradoxical effect of emptying out the core of conservatism. Kristol and Kagan suggest that what matters is a sense of “national greatness” rather than a specific set of virtues, or goals, or policies. Rather than being a defence of a particular set of transcendent values, conservatism becomes a kind of perpetual crusade, a continued attempt to create a sense of national greatness and of heroic endeavour. The content of politics – the particular tasks that the heroes must carry out, and the dragons that they must slay – becomes secondary to the heroic form. Here, conservatism is reduced to nothing more than a more-or-less aesthetic disposition towards politics, a kind of “proto-cognitive itch.” Not so much a commitment to a set of transcendent values, or even a pragmatic Burkean attachment to tradition, as a desire that politics provide a sense of the heroic.

Emphasis mine. I think that such impulses have been pretty apparent in both the behavior of the Bush administration and the rhetoric of its apologists -- the endless references to Churchill and Lincoln and "long wars," etc. I suggested just a few days ago -- in what was hardly an original observation -- that there has long been a link between the Republican party and the portion of Americans, particularly in the elite, who feel a need to attach themselves to some promise of "transcendence." What's fascinating is how performative conservatism seems to have become in many respects -- less a set of beliefs than a way of acting, and a way of watching oneself acting. One very often gets the impression that conservatives are trying to convince themselves that they're well-suited by the costumes they wear. This self-conscious performance moves to the center of the conservative experience, which, as Farrell says, is in turn emptied of any permanent content of its own.

Labels: conservatives, Crooked Timber, Henry Farrell, Robert Kagan, Ross Douthat, William Kristol

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 4:30 PM 1 comments

  Bill Kristol Is Feelin' Fine

In a Time column, everyone's favorite neocon tells us why "Republicans are smiling" despite their losses last November.

[M]y fellow conservatives and Republicans are pretty upbeat. After a rough 2006, conservative magazines are seeing an uptick in subscription renewals, right-wing websites are getting more hits, and Republican and conservative groups here at Harvard (yes, Harvard!) seem invigorated.

Why all the good vibrations? Try not to act surprised when I tell you that Kristol cites his very own pet "surge" as reason one. Said surge, and the artful new arrangement of the deck chairs that accompanied it, "gave hope to those who still think success is possible in Iraq." Which includes nearly everyone at the Weekly Standard.

Reason the second: the Democratic Congress.

It's difficult to be in charge of Congress, especially when your grass roots are pushing you to do something about the war, and it's hard to do anything without seeming to undercut the troops or denying Petraeus a chance to succeed.

Indeed - if you are Bill Kristol, and you are thoroughly convinced by your own talking points, then you look right past the part where the majority of Americans want the Democrats to do something about the war, regardless of GOP nonsense about "undercutting the troops," and you can't help but smile serenely.

Of course, Kristol's real best hope is that the Democrats continue to believe what he's saying. Certainly the public will not look kindly on Democrats in 2008 if they fail to do - or even try - what they were elected to do in 2006: take the war out of the hands of failed ideologues like Kristol, and bring the troops home.

Kristol likes the look of the Republican field and thinks the Democratic field seems quite beatable. It's the kind of analysis you could get going either way, so make of it what you will. In this case, it seems to me like a fairly pedestrian exercise in partisan framing - considering the audience for which he's writing. At any rate, the most interesting reason for Republican revivification Kristol offers is number five:

Fresh ideas. I don't sense that conservatism is exhausted. There's new thinking on domestic policy that could serve as the basis of an interesting agenda for the G.O.P. nominee. Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam explain in their forthcoming book on "Sam's Club Republicans" how the G.O.P. can do a better job of responding to the anxieties of working and middle-class Americans in areas like tax policy and health insurance, and the Ethics and Public Policy Center's Yuval Levin suggests a complementary policy agenda--"Putting Parents First," he calls it--aimed at those same swing voters. In foreign policy, the U.S. will still be at war in 2008--and despite Bush's travails, Republicans still seem likely to be able to claim to be the party of American strength.

Once you've stopped laughing over the part about Republicans being "the party of American strength," spare a thought for what Kristol's saying about domestic policy. I'll have a look at this "Putting Parents First" thingy, and maybe at the "Sam's Club Republicans" book as well. The point is not that Republicans can do anything signficant to help ordinary Americans - as we've seen from their record over the last six years. Conservatism seems ideologically exhausted, not re-invigorated.

But they'll be going around telling everybody that they have great ideas for taxation and health care. And it's on that storytelling front where they tend to win control of the national political narrative. Like I said, I'll check out these texts Kristol cites as examples of the great wealth of conservative ideas. If there really is anything innovative, I certainly will give them their due. But I suspect that, as with so many other conservative "ideas," what I'll find are a lot of cynical old anti-government time bombs dressed up in shiny packaging.

In one respect, however, Kristol is entirely correct: "It's worth remembering," he says, "that off-year elections often aren't predictors of the outcome of the next presidential one." 1994 told us nothing about 1996, nor did 1986 auger anything for 1988. If we think Democrats can coast to victory in 2008 based on general public disdain for Republicans alone, without any bold and well-articulated ideas, without any clear and unapologetic attempt to end the deeply unpopular war in Iraq, without actually doing anything in the next two years - then we're in for a nasty surprise.

Labels: 2008, conservatives, Presidential election, William Kristol

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 10:34 AM 0 comments

  Revenge of the Vulcans

LA Times: The neocons are back already, and they're behind the "surge."

But now, a small but increasingly influential group of neocons are again helping steer Iraq policy. A key part of the new Iraq plan that President Bush is expected to announce next week — a surge in U.S. troops coupled with a more focused counterinsurgency effort — has been one of the chief recommendations of these neocons since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

This group — which includes William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard magazine, and Frederick W. Kagan, a military analyst at a prominent think tank, the American Enterprise Institute — was expressing concerns about the administration's blueprint for Iraq even before the invasion almost four years ago.

Kristol and Kagan are the definitive neoconservatives, though the article notes the split within neocon ranks:

Some leading neoconservatives do not embrace the troop surge proposal.

Wolfowitz, for instance, ridiculed the notion that more troops would be needed to secure Iraq than were used in the invasion.

And Richard N. Perle, a former top advisor to the Pentagon who also advocated for smaller troop numbers at the time of the invasion, is known to be skeptical of the idea of a surge.

The plan's advocates acknowledge the split.

"Before the war, I was arguing for a quarter of a million troops in expectations we'd be there five or 10 years," said Gary J. Schmitt, an analyst at the American Enterprise Institute who has worked closely with Kristol and Kagan. "Richard Perle, obviously somebody else who's thought of as a neocon, thought we should go in" with far fewer U.S. forces.

It is, of course, also a repudiation of the Rumsfeld doctrine.

Still, despite the disagreements, this is the same crowd. Only the bad ideas have changed.

(h/t to chasm at Daily Kos)

Labels: Frederick Kagan, Iraq, Neoconservatives, William Kristol

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 4:45 PM 0 comments