The Neocon Reader
Edited by Irwin Stelzer
(Grove Press, 328 pages, $15)
Margaret Thatcher. Tony Blair. George Will. These are also three
people one doesn’t normally think of as neoconservatives. Yet they
all appear in Irwin Stelzer’s provocative new compilation, The
Neocon Reader, which provides as many views of this benighted
stream of political thought (nee “movement”) as there are essays in
the collection.
Or more, recalling the old wag about five rabbis, six opinions.
Which is an unfortunate if inevitable analogy, given that, as David
Brooks points out, to altogether too many critics, the “neo” stands
for “Jewish.”
In any event, the inclusion of Lady Thatcher, along with the
most successful Labour prime minister ever — who in both
Britain and America seems to have more support among conservatives
than liberals — and the dean of old- (not to be confused with
paleo-) con opinion writing, only enriches this very readable
Reader. And the book itself is a useful update of the
multifarious surveys of neoconservatism, starting with godfather
Irving Kristol’s Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an
Idea, running through Mark Gerson’s decade-old The
Essential Neoconservative Reader, and continuing into such
works as Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke’s America Alone: The
Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order.
Neocon agoniste Stelzer, director of the Hudson Institute’s
Center for Economic Policy and contributing editor to the
Weekly Standard, sets the proper tone in his meaty
introduction. Stelzer knows that anyone who picks up his book will
likely be doing so somewhat warily — out of a grudging desire to
keep “current” on the Big Ideas in Washington while feeling
slightly burnt out by all the talk about “neocon” conspiracies —
and to answer two main questions: 1.) What exactly is a neocon? and
2.) What light can this new collection shed on contemporary policy
debates?
And so he begins by dissecting the conventional wisdom that the
Iraq War represents the “culmination of a neoconservative takeover
of America.” In the course of this discussion — in the first two
pages! — he first labels George W. Bush and Dick Cheney as neocons
and then finds the roots of neocon ideas in the policies of
Theodore Roosevelt and the aforementioned Prime Ministers Thatcher
and Blair. (A think tank policy paper this ain’t.)
After charting the development of the neoconservative philosophy
— robust government that aligns incentives to harness the better
angels of our nature at home and abroad — Stelzer surveys the
political ideas and policy prescriptions that have come to the fore
in the last few years, skillfully interweaving salient points from
the essays that follow.
The doctrine of pre-emption and the perceived urgency of dealing
with “rogue states,” for example, “have deep roots in American
history” and, as Michael Gove points out, were espoused by
Palmerston and Churchill long before their adoption by a Bush
administration that paid scant attention to foreign policy before
9/11. Adam Wolfson adds that the roots of Bush’s foreign policy can
even be traced to Locke’s Second Treatise, in which he
argued that people must take action before “it is too late, and the
evil is past Cure.”
Similarly, in the domestic sphere, James Q. Wilson and George L.
Kelling — who contribute an excerpt of their ground-breaking work
from decades ago — show that Rudy Giuliani did not magically
discover “broken windows” policing. To this foundation could have
easily been added the iconoclastic Daniel P. Moynihan, an even less
likely candidate to be prisoner of neocon ideologues than Tony
Blair — adding weight to Stelzer’s provocative quip that
neoconservative ideas “are more a product of the circumstances in
which the world finds itself” than of any intellectual conspiracy
(or Kristol’s that neocons are “liberals mugged by reality”).
Neocons saw the failure of the Great Society as an opportunity
to start pulling the levers of the state in a different direction
instead of advocating their disassembly. It is thus no coincidence
that the first public face of President Bush’s “compassionate
conservatism” was John DiIulio, the lifelong Democrat and Wilson
disciple chosen to inaugurate the Office of Faith-Based
Initiatives.
“In short,” Stelzer neatly summarizes his subject, “just as
neocons broke with conservatives in the foreign-policy arena when
they adopted nation-building as a goal, they also broke with
traditional conservatives in the domestic-policy arena by making
their peace with the welfare state.”
The larger issue, which came out at the America Enterprise
Institute forum that launched this book, is that the long-term
survival of neoconservatism depends on its ability to resolve the
contradiction between the costs of a muscular foreign policy with
the resulting unsustainable debts. (The late Wall Street
Journal editor Robert Bartley contends that deficits are not
what we should look at when deciding what we can afford.)
Returning to first principals, it is clear that Thatcher, Blair,
and Will would not agree with many of the ideas espoused in the
Neocon Reader — but each would agree with some. It is a
testament to the vitality of those ideas (and to the strength of
the book) that none of them seem out of place in describing this
strange non-movement called neoconservatism.
