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The neocons doth protest too much
Writing in The Weekly Standard David Gelernter argues that Benjamin Disraeli, the great 19th century Conservative leader and British prime minister, was the founder of modern conservatism. Disraeli-esque conservatism, Gelernter says, is a national conservatism, in two senses of the word: in its reverence for a nation’s traditions and customs, and in its inclusive and progressive attitude toward all classes within the nation. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were practitioners of this type of conservatism. It’s an interesting and I think reasonable thesis. Unfortunately, it occupies only a small fraction of this vast—7,500 words long—and padded article. Gelernter’s main object is not to get at the truth about conservatism but to promote his own brand of conservatism, namely to validate neoconservatism as the contemporary incarnation of Disraeli-esque conservatism (he even refers to Disraeli as a “neocon”). Thus he says that neoconservatism, like Disraeli-type conservatism, is deeply rooted in the nation’s and the civilization’s past. This of course is a laughably false assertion. The very keynote of neoconservatism has always been its anti-nationalism, its rejection of the American nation as a concrete historical entity in favor of the abstract founding ideas of the nation, lifted out of history and universalized. It is true that neoconservatism sounds strongly pro-American in its formal sentiments, but, since it has defined America as only its ideas, which are thought to be universally valid for every human on earth, and now, under the hyped-up, George W. Bush version of neoconservatism, required for every human on earth, this apparent patriotism is really a formula for the undoing of the nation in an endless crusade to democratize the world while simultaneously importing the world into America. This is the profound and, in my view, sinister dishonesty at the heart of neoconservatism. Neoconservatism is conservative in that it supports the nation, and so wins over the adherence of patriotic Americans; but it is liberal (and increasingly leftist) in that the “nation” it supports is not the nation at all, but the global democratist project of which the neocons themselves are the main theorists and promoters. Thus the paraphrase from Hamlet that I use as the title of this piece: the more universalist and anti-national the neocons become, the more they insist on their nationalism. Another strange thing about this article, paralleling its “neocon-centrism,” is its gratuitous, almost relentless Judeo-centrism, a note that I don’t remember seeing before in The Weekly Standard. An example is Gelernter’s treatment of Disraeli’s Christianity. Disraeli, who was of course a Jew by birth, said that he had become and remained a Christian despite his love for the Jewish people because the Old Testament was incomplete and was completed by the New Testament and Christianity. Gelernter loftily dismisses Disraeli’s choice as a “mistake,” an “accident.” Disraeli, he says, should have understood that Judaism already has a New Testament that completes it, the Talmud. Of course, Gelenter ignores the very thing that the Hebrew Bible lacks and the Talmud doesn’t supply: Christ.
This article is not as unhinged as Gelernter’s piece in Commentary a year ago, in which he argued that Americanism (by which he really meant the Bush/neocon version of Americanism) is not merely a civic religion, but an actual religion, indeed a “Judeo-Christian” religion. Nevertheless it bespeaks the same overreaching quality, the same drive to make the neoconservative ideology the messianic heart of the universe. Email entry |