Looking for the Black Box of Neoconservatism

Attempting to defend neoconservatism these days is a bit like walking out of the house naked, many strange looks and pointing ensues. That reaction is of course not wholly unwarranted, there are many fronts on which neoconservatism has failed miserably and many ways in which it has helped to bring the U.S. to its current state of disrepair. No one can say that neoconservatives’ hands are clean with a straight face, or condescend to attribute the troubles of the country to unforeseeable and unavoidable consequences that would have lay in wait for any administration.

The problem with all of this epitheting is that as Andrew Sullivan has noted of his own blogging, we have come to use the term neoconservative/ism as a sort of short hand to indicate everything that is wrong with country, and in some moments of fanciful hyperbolizing, everything that is wrong with the world. As careful as I try to be with nomenclature, I know that I have been guilty of such meaning dilution, as well. It is not at all clear to me that we have a common and clear lay person definition of what we mean when we speak with condemnation about neoconservatism, though it is commonly understood that our reference tends to be about foreign policy and the  debacle, to put it euphemistically, that was the invasion of Iraq and the larger War on Terror.

In many ways neoconservatism is a victim of its own success, as are most ideologies when the rubber hits the road. Given its influence over the last few decades, we often forget that neoconservatism was originally a dissenting impulse. Left leaning intellectuals who felt that Johnson’s Great Society liberalism had lost its way, the neocons may well have foreseen the destructive end point of the boomer-era culture wars in their disdain for counterculture and its in your face change tactics, actively digging in their heels against that mounting trend. Timing being everything, the neocons found themselves on the wrong side of history in terms of the domestic struggles of the era, but their real politik critiques of the broad and shallow analysis of the anti-war movement foisted them to power with the advent of the Cold War. It was in the decades that followed where the over-zealousness and overreach of their vision was allowed to fester, in some senses truly coming to fruition with George W. Bush. By the lights of a certain perspective, the neocons are not unlike any group of dissenters who come to power. Often times ill-equipped to take their critiques and mold them into prescriptive and coherent policy the temptation to over-correct when the opportunity arises is too great and undermines the very strength of the ideas that have lit the way to power.

And so the sober, realistic assessment of foreign policy provided by neoconservatives has given way to imperialistic, geo-political chess game. The black and white of the players belies the nuance present in the dynamics on the board and the unitary vision of a stable and peaceful world assembled at the barrel of a gun becomes a God project to remake the world in one’s own image. It is, to my mind, in this regard that neoconservatives have most badly warped the tracks in their own journey of discovery, thus informing my own insistent kid gloving of the cultural dynamics that make up the world’s diversity. Preservation of those differences in each element of modernization’s realization, it seems clear now, is not just a preferred course of action, but a vital element to any kind of meaningful success.

But the nagging question at the back of my mind, the one that forces me to walk about of the house naked, is to inquire what useful remnants we might pull from the flaming wreckage of neoconseravtism’s contemporary crash site? Ironically, my own estimation is that it is neoconservatism’s emphasis on moral clarity, the hubris that has spelled its intermediate doom, that offers the greatest strength we might cull from its many wolves (and perhaps not ultimately very ironic at all as circumstances have shown us often enough that an ideology’s Mjöllnir seems ever destined to become its Achilles heel).

While applied in a overzealous and dangerous manner, I don’t think the moral clarity sought by neoconservatives is in itself wrong headed. While it might be true that the diversity of perspectives present in the world require from us a quantum leap in attenuation and sensitivity than we have often offered, this doesn’t mean that we ought to abandon all hope or efforts in the direction of being able to accurately and effectively deliver normative claims about the actions of different geo-political actors. Indeed, we rarely do give up such prescriptive announcements in full, but rather learn to apply a certain cultural and moral relativisms to those analyzes with which we disagree, while sheltering our own prefered pronouncements from the debilitating onslaught of such devices. The logical end result is a morally relative morass that effectively disables us from making any meaningful determinations about right and wrong actions by degrading all such conclusions to mere proclamations of preference.

The audacity of the neoconservtive is to then stand athwart this kaleidoscoping of ethics and yell, “Stop!” The reality to which the neoconservtive adamantly points is that beyond the necessities of cultural sensitivity (and such sensitivity is indeed necessary in the truest sense of the word), there are the banal facts of sincerely detestable actors who, if explained away by the shattering of a coherent moral analysis, will propagate truly horrific acts against innocent people who deserve better in a world where the stable luxury of the American living room is a realized benchmark. In short, where we can act to avoid such tragedy we ought to develop the moral fortitude to act, lest we engage in some kind of tacit abrogation through our lack of action.

Such actors and their corresponding moral requirements persist in no uncertain terms, despite the ensuing horrors of the decision to invade Iraq (and Vietnam before it). Americans wallow in a certain masochistic guilt complex about their role in destabilizing a country that had done nothing to instigate such a misguided overreation, and rightly so. That such a fundaental decisions was allowed to be co-opted by as a crude a barometer as anger and resentment is indeed a damning national pox that demands the kind of self-reflection now under way.

However, at some point that inner turmoil has to come to an end and lessons have to be learned for application in the future. I think one of those lessons ought to be that rather than seeing the struggle for moral clarity in geo-politics as a necessarily flawed form of idolatry, the generation of such clarity is an extremely difficult task  full of pitfalls and the tempatation to subjegate sober assesment to national interests and that it requires much in the way of rigor and honesty. All of that said, such moral clarity may well prove indespensible to us at some point in the future, so our project of rescuing this vital element of neoconservatism from burning to ash with the rest of the fuselodge can’t start soon enough. So as not to leave one with the sense of a whitewashing, a good deal of that project involves understanding how the neocons of recent past have utterly failed in this mission.

Tagged as: Foreign Policy, moral clarity, neoconservatism