Bye Bye Bush

Heilbrunn's way into the vicissitudes of the Bush administration is to track the historical trajectory of neoconservatism. He claims that none of the many books on the movement so far has gotten its essence right. Neoconservatism is not an ideology, he argues, and it is not a reaction to disillusionment with the left; it is a "Jewish mindset" that was "decisively shaped by the Jewish immigrant experience, by the Holocaust, and by the twentieth-century struggle against totalitarianism."

Heilbrunn augments his definition of the neoconservative "mindset" as his narrative develops: "the immigrant experience" turns out to be the Jews' status anxiety and resentment of the WASP patriciate, and the "struggle against totalitarianism" comes down to a visceral disgust with irresolute liberalism. Heilbrunn also refers in passing to secularized expressions of the Jewish prophetic tradition, in which zealous dissident minorities defiantly speak truth to power. He thus observes that neoconservatives have thrived under conditions of minority and outsider status, and that once near the pinnacle of power they have sought to maintain that self-image by casting unimaginative government bureaucrats and intelligence-agency ciphers as the neoconservative equivalent of the Man.

Yet Heilbrunn leaves this observation at the periphery of his thesis when it should be central to it. Whatever else neoconservatism may be, it is a parochial Jewish expression of the modern penchant for religious energies to attach to politics. Neoconservatives, who tend to be far more deeply read in politics and history than religion and are generally less than orthodox in their religious practice, have substituted democratic ideology for Jewish theology as the central core of their belief system. The intra-Marxist debates that Heilbrunn describes as having taken place among the children of Jewish immigrants in the 1930s, and the way Leo Strauss read ancient philosophical tomes to tease out their meaning, are nothing less than the application of the intensely moral, text-oriented methodology of Talmudism to different texts. Second-generation neoconservative idealists have in turn substituted the heroic and optimistic narratives of American and Israeli history for the far dourer, realism-inducing narrative of Jewish history. They believe that embattled minorities armed with the truth can transform history. Like the prophets of old, they are a chosen few with a message about the messianic age ahead -- in this case, the age of global liberal democracy and lasting peace.

Of course, as Heilbrunn knows, not all neoconservatives have been Jewish. It is not difficult to appreciate why other American idealists would sympathize with the neoconservative project as it came of political age. In the mid- to late 1960s, the neoconservative movement developed as a critical and idealist rump within the Democratic Party. Its members, mostly New York intellectuals, were disappointed by the party's failed domestic social-engineering projects and repulsed by its lurch toward countercultural values and dovish national security policies. It is understandable that Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a man from a poor New York Irish Catholic family who also suffered status insecurity, would associate himself with such a movement, and that Jeane Kirkpatrick, a small-town Middle American woman in a man's world, would, too.

Most neoconservatives then moved to fill an idealistic void on the right in the 1970s and 1980s, as the Republican Party was reacquiring power and Ronald Reagan arrived on the scene. The last decade of the Cold War saw a virtual merger between neoconservatism and Reaganism, which neoconservatives continued to nurture after Reagan left office. Nor is it hard to see why, in the wake of 9/11, at a time that seemed to require hope in something more elevated than sheer power, conservative realists such as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and John Bolton would make common cause with neoconservative idealists.

Heilbrunn gets much of this story right, but his "Jewish mindset" thesis falls by the wayside as he proceeds. Moreover, like Kaplan, he takes a long detour from the events of the past seven years, recapitulating the history of neoconservatism from its origins in the 1930s to the present. His book describes everyone who was anyone in the movement, as well as their arguments, antipathies, and friendships. It is eminently fair to its subject and often deeply insightful -- as when it points out the transformation of neoconservatism as it evolved from a movement made up of New York intellectuals to one of Washington policymakers and wonks.

But Heilbrunn does not get everything right. He underestimates the power of domesticity, and of the concomitant exhaustions of parenthood, to turn youthful Marxist firebrands into more seasoned conservative intellectuals. More important, he underestimates the seminal importance of domestic policy issues to neoconservatives, as symbolized by the 1965 creation of The Public Interest as the movement's flagship magazine. By privileging foreign policy, Heilbrunn undervalues the strength of the original neoconservative antipathy for value-free social analysis and the proclivity for social engineering that comes from it. That, in turn, may be why Heilbrunn is reluctant to accept the conclusion of many of the movement's founders that neoconservatism is unrecognizable in its current form. Heilbrunn concedes that the second generation of neoconservatives lacks "the deep sense of historical irony that had distinguished Irving Kristol" and does not display its predecessor's "skepticism and sense of detachment." So why then does he chide Francis Fukuyama and others for having defected from the neoconservative brand rather than chastising the latecomers for cheapening it?

TRAGIC FLAWS