neoconservatives offer an effective opposition to liberalism, or not? In connection with
, here is a letter I wrote to Irving Kristol in 1994, in which I attempted to summarize my concerns about the neoconservative or mainstream conservative movement.
May 24, 1994
Irving Kristol
The National Interest
Washington, D.C. 20036
Dear Mr. Kristol:
Your column in the April 18th Wall Street Journal about the “Goals 2000” education bill raises many troubling questions. First, I couldn’t help but wonder why you waited until after the bill was passed before you criticized it. You said it’s your rule never to support any measure the educational establishment likes. Then why did you go along with this one? Because, you said, your friends the “experts” said it was good. But in your column you also said that it is the “experts” who are the problem. So what gives? Furthermore, since you were earlier inclined to believe your friends, what made you change your mind? Specifically, what made you change your mind about the bill after it was already passed? Your column left all these questions hanging in the air.
Your column particularly struck me because I was already appalled at the absence of any real public discussion of this bill, including any serious criticism by conservatives or any attempt by them to alert the public to what was going on.
The failure to oppose liberal measures until after they have already been effected seems to have become a pattern among establishment conservatives. For example, the March Commentary had a piece that agreed with Pat Buchanan’s argument that NAFTA is a threat to U.S. sovereignty (while, by the way, the same piece dismissed Buchanan as an extremist). Where was Commentary during the NAFTA debate, when Mr. Buchanan could have used some allies in his lonely defense of U.S. sovereignty?
Similarly, conservatives have gone along with the campaign to force South Africa to become a unitary state ruled by the A.N.C. Only in the weeks leading up to the election, when A.N.C. rule became a certainty, did conservatives (and some liberals) start making their pathetic little noises indicating that, hmm, well, maybe A.N.C. rule won’t be so nice after all. Where were these conservatives earlier, when intelligent, principled opposition to the horror of a Jacobin “multiracialist democracy” in South Africa might have done some good, or at least injected some reality into the situation?
Of course it’s very unfashionable to say these things right now. But in the long run the glow of good will created by Mandela’s conciliatory inauguration speech will have as much reality as the eternal glow left by Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. In both cases, the attainment of political and legal equality, that wondrous moment of joy, is only the prelude to a radical demand for economic equality—and thus to a never-ending war against every free institution. Yet as the reality of that “equality” agenda turns society ever more nightmarish, people in South Africa, just like Americans, will keep looking back longingly to the great moment of “the dream”—not realizing that it was precisely that dream that has led to the nightmare.
Then there was the Somalia mission, which everyone went along with until serious trouble occurred, then they all began running around saying, oh, my, we didn’t want this to happen! We only wanted a humanitarian, not a military mission! But of course such trouble was inevitable, it was built into the nature of the mission from the very start. The mission was not “humanitarian,” as people liked to imagine, but military, its purpose being to suppress the forces that were attacking the food shipments. Once again, the “dream” of humanitarian assistance led directly to the nightmare of military engagement and death, but no one wanted to see that. From the beginning, the only way the mission could end was either by the U.S. forces suppressing the warlords and taking over the country, or by the U.S. forces simply pulling out, leaving Somalia to return to the chaos that had brought us there in the first place. Yet the number of notables, including conservatives, who forthrightly opposed the Somalia mission at the start could be counted on one hand.
Worst of all, in this catalog of dreams, is the way conservatives “oppose” multiculturalism while allowing American culture to be steadily dispossessed and Balkanized by an unassimilable flood of Third-World immigrants. Perhaps in the year 2000 or 2030 some of these conservatives or their spiritual descendants will wake up to the sight of a ruined country and culture and say, oh, my, we didn’t want this to happen! But by then, of course, it will be too late.
All of the above, and many more examples I haven’t mentioned, show a profound lack of seriousness among conservatives. At bottom, they imagine they are opposing liberalism when in fact they’ve already surrendered to it in every way that counts.
A notable exception, by the way, is your son William Kristol’s campaign to get the Republicans to oppose the Clinton health care proposal on principle, not just at the edges. Mr. Kristol is fighting the good fight; but I fear the problem is that the Republicans don’t have any principles. Plato in Book VIII of The Republic speaks of the Oligarchic Man, who only believes in money and has no higher principles, and who thus cannot prevent his children from sliding down into the next stage of decadence which is Democratic Man. The Republicans are like that Oligarchic Man. Much as they like to imagine themselves as opponents of the left, at bottom there is nothing within them that can effectively resist society’s slide into radical democracy, then tyranny.
In a collection on the end of the Cold War published last year (in The National Interest, I believe), you contributed a fine essay in which you said that your own “Cold War” was not against Communism but against liberalism. While I was moved by the essay at the time, on further reflection I have to tell you that I don’t think you’ve been engaged in any kind of war against liberalism. Your modus operandi is to stand off to the side, an intellectual guru commenting on the scene. To adopt a phrase from Samuel Francis’s Beautiful Losers, when it comes to opposing liberalism, the most that you do is to engage in elegant reprimand—never in principled confrontation. Without such principled confrontation there is no war, only endless surrender. Your self-image as a Cold Warrior against liberalism, like that of establishment conservatives generally, is a tragic delusion. Tragic, because by enabling the delusionists to monopolize the “respectable” conservative label, it prevents the arising of a true opposition to liberalism.
Sincerely yours,
Lawrence Auster