‘As we approach the third anniversary of the onset of the Iraq war, it seems unlikely that history will judge the intervention or the ideas animating it kindly.’

It’s absolutely true, but what a dry understatement. Up there with Hirohito’s ‘The war has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage’ after Nagasaki.

I was thinking of Norman Podhoretz’s famous essay “My Negro Problem – And Ours” from the February, 1963, issue of Commentary.

…So some of us came to regard the U.S. – Soviet conflict, the Cold War, as a battle with the same political and moral weight as the war against Nazism. We were on the American side, passionately, and we were anti-Soviet. Most of the left, by the late sixties, was anti-American, and were certainly not Cold Warriors of any stripe. So that was one very important point. The second point, which was organically related, had to do with the nature of American society. If I had my way, this movement—it wasn’t really a movement, it was more like a tendency—would have been called neo-nationalism because what it really represented was a rediscovery of the values and virtues of American society. And I was and am an American nationalist, an American patriot, whichever word you like to use, and so were all the other neo-conservatives. We loved this country and we came more and more to believe that the traditional attitude of our fellow intellectuals, which ranged from mild disdain to outright hatred, was wrong and dangerous.
http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/conversations/Podhoretz/podhoretz-con4.html

He has to do this. All reasonable people know the U.S. only wants to empower the poor downtrodden brown people. If you think otherwise you’re a crazy person, like that nutty Chomsky guy.

1) Did anyone notice that in his careful enumeration of his many intellectual influences, Fukuyama omitted Alexandre Kojeve? Kojeve is arguably the single most important influence on Fukuyama’s End of History book. Interesting, similarly, that while Fukuyama writes much of Marx in this article, he never mentions Hegel…and Heidegger (through whom Kojeve’s Hegel is inflected) and Nietzsche (who of course provided the idea of the “Last Man”) only show up as thinkers with whom Fukuyama says Leo Strauss disagreed.

2) While Neo-Cons are not, in any simple sense, “small government conservatives” (who may in any case ultimately turn out to be entirely mythical beasts in American political life), they certainly have expressed strong and consistent opposition to certain uses of government. James Q. Wilson on the futility of addressing the social causes of crime has already been mentioned. Affirmative action has also long been particularly hated by the neo-conservatives. Of course what links crime and affirmative action (at least in the neoconservative mind) is race. It’s telling that racial issues are what drove, e.g., Norman Podhoretz to the right. I’m not sure that one can call the peculiar set of neoconservative impulses on racial questions a matter of philosophy so much as a habit of mind (or maybe that’s putting it too kindly…).

3)harry b writes:”Partial dislaimer: I don’t pay for my issues of Commentary, and only read them for informational purposes…”

Is that like reading Playboy for the articles ;-)?

Is there a compulsion for the United States of America to undertake any activity whatsoever of any hue and colour anywhere, outside her jurisdiction, jurisdiction, as defined by her, apparently much revered Constitution?

Lurker asked this in post #12, and I’m having difficulty parsing the meaning. Is lurker asking if the US has a compulsion to act outside the Constitution? We have a Constitution, we revere it, therefore we have to violate it? Unclear.

I read Fukuyama’s famous book several years ago, and I thought, “this is a good summation of several of the ideas of Hegel and Nietzsche”. But it seemed stale: there was no hint of the revolution in our understanding of ourselves that the medical and biological discoveries of the past half century have brought about. The book’s problem is that it is pre-biological.

Maybe I was asking too much. Or maybe a book with such a grandiose title was promising far more than it could deliver.

I think that’s fair enough about soem conservatives (that they are pessimistic about ambitious uses of state power, but not all uses). I also, as I intimated above, think they are often right about their detail-oriented critiques of particular programs, and I think the left in the US would do well to internalise some of those critiques. And, I’ll add, the far left (with which I tend to identify) makes critiques that are very similar, often. But I’d also add that sensible leftists are cautious too, so I’m not sure how distinctively neocon this conservatism is. I do realise, as I write this, that numerous self-declared US liberals have never seen a government program they don’t like, so maybe I define the left as a very small group. But that;s what I suspect it is.

abb1: maybe it something like “as good a life as is feasible”. I confess I haven’t read The End of History. I’m not sure Bill Kristol (or the other second generationers) see themselves as neocons. Moynihan didn’t, though he’s often grouped with them (as Fukuyama does). Nor, I think, did Hook or Shachtman. Yes, I agree about nationalism, though it does vary by individual.

Partial dislaimer: I don’t pay for my issues of Commentary, and only read them for informational purposes…

Or I may be projecting too much here.

It’s fair point that they pretty much replaced marxist communism with capitalism/liberalism (a la Fukuyama’s End of History) and in that sense they are similar to Trotskyists. But like I said – there’s just too much of nationalism in these guys; they don’t even hide it. They are all American nationalists and some are Jewish-American nationalists, that’s just so un-Trotskyist…

And re conservatives’ “staggering pessimism about state power when used on behalf of the less advantaged,” aren’t there two positions? One is that state power can’t accomplish anything and therefore shouldn’t be tried at all. The other is that AMBITIOUS uses of state power will be counterproductive but more local or piecemeal ones can be effective (wasn’t this Popper’s view?).

The second view is clearly what Fukuyama intends; see the reference to James Q. Wilson on crime, for example. Now the cynical view (always amply represented on this site) is that the second view is just a cover for the first, so conservatives only feign concern for the less advantaged in order to maintain the status quo. But if some conservatives really do take that view, aren’t you unfair in talking of their pessimism about state power in general? They’re pessimistic about some, in particular large-scale, uses of state power, but not pessimistic about others.

But, in a way, they are internationalists—they believe, many of them sincerely, that American values are right, and right for everyone, wherever they may be, and might be enforceable by military means. They conflate this with the view that American institutions are right for everyone, and might be enforceable by military means. (And, in my view, this is a bigger disaster than the view that American values are universally right, because I think American institutions are indeed subject to many of the criticisms they make, and there are other models for example of the welfare state which are much more robust against those critiques).

Fukuyama is using “neo-con” very narrowly, and I am adopting his use. So I could just say that what I say is true, and what you say is false, by definition! (I add that just to try and avoid dispute over who counts as a neocon, because lots of people who get called neocons aren’t). I read Commentary regularly, by the way, and while I agree no-one could read it and think they are small govenrment libertarians, even now they are extremely hostile to government action specifically aimed at helping the least advantaged.