The Kristol Method

Both “Ross Douthat”:http://rossdouthat.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/08/partisanship_and_the_national.php and “Matt Yglesias”:http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/08/may_i_have_another.php suggest that I was wrong to “claim”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/08/06/trahisons-des-clercs-2/ last week that Kristol and Kagan were more interested in Republican hegemony than in the actual worth of their foreign policy ideas when they wrote their famous 1996 “essay”:http://www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=276 on the virtues of a neo-Reaganite foreign policy. What I said then was short-hand for what I said at greater length in a paper that I wrote a couple of years ago for an APSA panel that Russell Arben Fox chaired on conservatism. The paper has never seen the light of day, and probably never will (it wasn’t really an academic paper so much as a glorified form of current commentary; something less than academic research but more than a blogpost), so I may as well link to it “here”:http://www.henryfarrell.net/conservatism.pdf and excerpt the key bit that speaks to this argument (below the fold).

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[open quote from essay] William Kristol and William Kagan’s article (and subsequent edited volume) provides a good example of this, as it slips back and forth between three levels of argument. First, Kristol and Kagan claim to be providing a new vision that will unify a conservative movement that is “adrift” and “confused.” Second, they claim to be providing a means towards maintaining America’s dominance and hegemony over the world. Finally, they claim to be providing a vision for a new world order, where democracy, free markets and liberty would be spread to the corners of the earth. Kristol and Kagan decline to provide a rank-ordering of these goals, simply asserting that “[a] neo-Reaganite foreign policy would be good for conservatives, good for America, and good for the world.

This perpetual shuttling back and forth of goals, in which a vital and unified American conservative movement means the maintenance of American dominance which allows America to take on a mission civilisatrice which creates a vital and unified conservative movement feels more like a sleight-of-hand than a serious argument. And indeed, there is some reason to suspect that Kristol and Kagan’s primary interest is in revitalizing the American conservative movement. As Corey Robin has argued, both neo-conservatives like Irving Kristol and David Brooks and more traditional conservatives such as William F. Buckley appear to have been in the market in the late 1990’s for an existential struggle between good and evil, a rationale for crusade that would make politics seem exciting and meaningful. In David Brooks complaint, “”The striking thing about the 1990s zeitgeist was the presumption of harmony. The era was shaped by the idea that there were no fundamental conflicts anymore.” It’s obviously easier to cast politics in sweeping moral terms when you can use a struggle of this sort as a metric, even if the struggle isn’t really there, or isn’t the kind of struggle that you claim it is. It’s also easier to galvanize the conservative movement into action:

[quoting from Kristol and Kagan]Without a broader, more enlightened understanding of America’s interests, conservatism will too easily degenerate into the pinched nationalism of Buchanan’s America First, where the appeal to narrow self-interest masks a deeper form of self-loathing. A true conservatism of the heart ought to emphasize both personal and national responsibility, relish the opportunity for national engagement, embrace the possibility of national greatness, and restore a sense of the heroic, which has been sorely lacking from American foreign policy — and from American conservatism — in recent years.

This emphasis on conservatism as a movement which must have a sense of the heroic lest it dwindle into mere selfishness, has the paradoxical effect of emptying out the core of conservatism. Kristol and Kagan suggest that what matters is a sense of “national greatness” rather than a specific set of virtues, or goals, or policies. Rather than being a defence of a particular set of transcendent values, conservatism becomes a kind of perpetual crusade, a continued attempt to create a sense of national greatness and of heroic endeavour. The content of politics – the particular tasks that the heroes must carry out, and the dragons that they must slay – becomes secondary to the heroic form. Here, conservatism is reduced to nothing more than a more-or-less aesthetic disposition towards politics, a kind of “proto-cognitive itch.” Not so much a commitment to a set of transcendent values, or even a pragmatic Burkean attachment to tradition, as a desire that politics provide a sense of the heroic. [close quote from essay]

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As Matt says, there is a feeling in the Kristol and Kagan essay that war is a good thing because of its effects on the national character. But what he leaves out – and what is manifestly important to Kristol and Kagan – is that this would allow the Republicans to set the terms of foreign policy debate in a way that favors their political interests and the political interests of the Republican party over the longer term. If the foreign policy debate is about ‘national greatness,’ Kristol and Kagan clearly believe (and argue) that the Republicans will enjoy a dealer’s edge over the longer term. In their own words:

it is hard to imagine conservatives achieving a lasting political realignment in this country without the third pillar: a coherent set of foreign policy principles that at least bear some resemblance to those propounded by Reagan.

[Ross further argues that the willingness of Kristol and Kagan to continue arguing their case after Iraq went bad is evidence that “neo-Reaganism” is more important than Republican political success in their eyes. But this hardly counts as dispositive evidence; various White House gobshites whose reputation is at stake, including Karl Rove, whom no-one has _ever_ accused of an attachment to political principle above all else, have been doing more or less the same thing.]

What’s more of interest to me is the fundamental problems that foreign policy presents for conservatism, and the tortured ways in which conservatives have sought to respond to it. Unlike many CT commenters, I think that there is a lot that is valuable in certain variants of conservatism – specifically the kind of political caution advocated by people like Burke and Oakeshott. This isn’t to say that I buy into their arguments fully at all – but I do think that they are important. However, there is very little of this to be seen in full blown conservative accounts of what the US should do in foreign policy, and I think that there are important structural reasons why this is so (I try to articulate these reasons in the linked essay, and am not entirely happy that I have succeeded to my own satisfaction, but at least I think that my account provides a kind of entry point into thinking about these issues).