In NeoCon's, Blimpish spoke of neocons making common cause with other conservatives to win the war on terrorism. Most of the comments spoke to neocons being liberals in disguise and their proabortion stance was what usually exposed their liberalism. Misspent spoke of neocons infusing a much needed morality into foreign policy. Yet, what a neocon was, was still a muddle. Joseph Bottum addresses the incoherence in the conservative movement and finds the common bonds that runs beneath the surface of the conservative movement in The New Fusionism. If J. Bottum is accurrate, then all of this came together just in time for Supreme Court Justice Alito.
As the article is particularly long I will highlight some of the most important aspects but please read it. It is fascinating. Here is how Bottum delineates what defines conservativism's common cause;
"Social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, libertarians, agrarians, communitarians, foreign-policy hawks—who can figure them out? Neocons and theocons and paleocons, to say nothing of soccer-mom Republicans, country-club Republicans, and just plain, garden-variety Republicans: If you read much political commentary, it must seem as though there are more ways to sort conservatives in America than there are actual conservatives to be sorted.
'And what about the issues for which these different conservatives care? Abortion, tax cuts, school vouchers, judicial overreach, the government’s bloated budget, bioethics, homosexual marriage, the creation of democracies in the Middle East, federalism, immigration, the restoration of religion in the public square—on and on. They bear no more than the vaguest family resemblance: second or third cousins, shirt-tail kin at best.
"Back during the Cold War, conservatives could all be counted upon at least to share an opposition to communism, while various writers—from Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises to Russell Kirk and Michael Oakeshott—sought something resembling a unifying theory through the rich pages of Adam Smith’s economics and the deep prose of Edmund Burke’s traditionalism.
"What now remains? Hardly a single concern is common to everyone labeled a conservative, and the chance of finding a meaningful pattern in the Right’s political muddle appears hopelessly remote. It’s true that nearly every conservative ended up voting for George Bush for president in 2004. Even the paleoconservatives opposed to intervention in Iraq finally seemed to admit, for the most part, that the alternative of an openly liberal administration under John Kerry was unendurable. But only in the fevered imaginings of the far Left—or in the speeches of Democratic party activists looking to score partisan jabs—does all this really cohere. Conservatism in America is neither a well-defined political party nor a well-formed political theory. It’s a crack-up waiting to happen.
"Except perhaps for this curious fact: Those who believe the murderousness of abortion to be the fundamental moral issue of our times and those who see the forceful defeat of global, anti-Western Islamicism as the most pressing political concern we facepro-life social conservatives and the foreign-policy neoconservatives, in other words—seem to be increasingly voting together, meeting together, and thinking together. If you want to advance the pro-life cause, you will quickly find yourself seated beside those who support an activist, interventionist, and moralist foreign policy for the United States. And, conversely, if you are serious about the war on terror, you will soon discover that you are mingling with those fighting against abortion."
So when it is all boiled down, neocons are uniting with all of the other cons over the war on terror and abortion. Bottum calls this the New Fusionism. Here Bottum lays out why abortion and foriegn policy have alot more in common than most would like to acknowledge;
“The remoralization of America at home ultimately requires the remoralization of American foreign policy, for both follow from Americans’ belief that the principles of the Declaration of Independence are not merely the choices of a particular culture but are universal, enduring, ‘self- evident’ truths,” William Kristol and Robert Kagan wrote in the journal Foreign Affairs back in 1996. “That has been, after all, the main point of the conservatives’ war against a relativistic multiculturalism. For conservatives to preach the importance of upholding the core elements of the Western tradition at home, but to profess indifference to the fate of American principles abroad, is an inconsistency that cannot help but gnaw at the heart of conservatism.”
"It was a line for which Kristol and Kagan have been occasionally pilloried in the years since, but there is a practical truth here about the way moral movements in a culture actually grow and colonize adjacent fields and draw in supporters. One could name various American experiences, but the clearest example may be the Wesleyan remoralization of English domestic life, and its well-documented relation to the British campaign against international slavery, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
"More, at the level of political theory, there’s a reasonable connection between what we do at home and what we do abroad—or, at least, between the attitudes that cause us to enact certain domestic agendas and the attitudes that drive our foreign policy. A nation that cannot summon the political will to ban even one particularly gruesome form of abortion is unlikely to persevere in the grueling work of building international democracy simply because it seems the moral thing to do. And a nation that cannot bring itself to believe its founding ideals are true for others will probably prove unable to hold those ideals for itself.
"The abolition of abortion and the active advance of democracy have more in common, I believe, than is usually thought. But even if they are utterly separate philosophically, this much is true: They both require reversing the failure of nerve that has lingered in America since at least the 1970s, and success in one may well feed success in the other.
"The goal in either case is to restore confidence in—well, what, exactly? Not our own infallible rightness, surely. But neither can we live any longer with the notion of our own infallible wrongness. We need to restore belief in the possibility of being right. There’s a reason the leftist Christian magazine Sojourners started life in the 1970s as something called the Post-American. Many religious activists in those days seemed to have reached a point where they couldn’t tell an admirable patriotism from the murderous ideologies of nationalism—and, besides, if you squinted hard enough, social defeatism looked like a secular version of the Christian doctrine of Original Sin. The result was hardly what they hoped for: a cynical policy of Realpolitik abroad and a culture of death at home."
I had never thought of the connection between Realpolitik and the culture of death but it is unmistakable. Bottum then goes on pointing out, though not truly understanding why, that the new fusionism has brought about a large shift in the neocons' attitude : They are adopting a more socially moral attitude. They are slowly becoming more prolife.
"But mostly one can see the new fusionism in its results. “Neoconservative” is a word whose meaning has undergone some changes over the years. It began life in the 1970s when the socialist Michael Harrington coined it to describe certain writers and public figures who found themselves moving from Left to Right on a variety of issues—often starting with the out-of-control crime rates of the time: “liberals mugged by reality,” in Irving Kristol’s well-known phrase.
"By the late 1990s, however, the word “neoconservative” had mostly disappeared, except to describe a historical moment twenty years before when—as National Review’s Jonah Goldberg jokingly described it—“a bunch of citified Jews and intellectual Catholics . . . traded one ideology for another.” And then, suddenly after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the word was back in the vocabulary of the nation’s chattering classes, this time used to describe people (particularly anyone with the least connection to students of the University of Chicago political philosopher Leo Strauss) who pushed for the toppling of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
"But taking the word in both the old sense and the new, we should note at least one visible change: The people called neoconservative are much more opposed to abortion than they were even ten years ago. The shift has occurred across the spectrum. The ones who started out solidly pro-choice are now uneasy, the ones who started out uneasy are now more uneasy, and the ones who started out quietly anti-abortion are now strong pro-lifers.
"Maybe it was all the time spent with Catholics, or maybe it was the rise of the worries about bio technology that Leon Kass and others have brought to light, but—whatever group we use the word to encompass—the neoconservatives have generally grown in their alliance with the social conservatives to accept a central place for the pro-life position in any theory of conservatism."
So as the opposition to abortion among the neocons increases, Bottum sees the momentum gathering to finally do away with abortion;
"More, at the level of political theory, there’s a reasonable connection between what we do at home and what we do abroad—or, at least, between the attitudes that cause us to enact certain domestic agendas and the attitudes that drive our foreign policy. A nation that cannot summon the political will to ban even one particularly gruesome form of abortion is unlikely to persevere in the grueling work of building international democracy simply because it seems the moral thing to do. And a nation that cannot bring itself to believe its founding ideals are true for others will probably prove unable to hold those ideals for itself.
"The abolition of abortion and the active advance of democracy have more in common, I believe, than is usually thought. But even if they are utterly separate philosophically, this much is true: They both require reversing the failure of nerve that has lingered in America since at least the 1970s, and success in one may well feed success in the other.
"The goal in either case is to restore confidence in—well, what, exactly? Not our own infallible rightness, surely. But neither can we live any longer with the notion of our own infallible wrongness. We need to restore belief in the possibility of being right. There’s a reason the leftist Christian magazine Sojourners started life in the 1970s as something called the Post-American. Many religious activists in those days seemed to have reached a point where they couldn’t tell an admirable patriotism from the murderous ideologies of nationalism—and, besides, if you squinted hard enough, social defeatism looked like a secular version of the Christian doctrine of Original Sin. The result was hardly what they hoped for: a cynical policy of Realpolitik abroad and a culture of death at home.
"In the new fusionism of the pro-life social conservatives and the foreign-policy neoconservatives, a number of traditional issues seem, if not to have disappeared, then at least to have gotten muted along the way. Where exactly is tax reform and social security and the balanced budget in all this? Where is much concern for economics, which once defined the root of Amer ican conservatism?
"Perhaps they are missing because, however important, they do not bear hard on the immediate question of social defeatism—on the deep changes that might reawaken and remoralize the nation. The one thing both the social conservatives and the neoconservatives know is that this project comes first.
"The angry isolationist paleoconservatives are probably right—this isn’t conservatism, in several older senses of the word. But so what? Call it the new moralism, if you like. Call it a masked liberalism or a kind of radicalism that has bizarrely seized the American scene. Mutter darkly, if you want, about the shotgun marriage of ex-socialists and modern puritans, the cynical political joining of imperial adventurers with reactionary Catholics and backwoods Evangelicals. These facts still remain: The sense of national purpose regained by forceful response to the attacks of September 11 could help summon the will to halt the slaughter of a million unborn children a year. And the energy of the pro-life fight—the fundamental moral cause of our time—may revitalize belief in the great American experiment."
I hope J. Bottum is right. In hopes of underscoring Bottum's hypothesis, here is the openly prochoice neocon David Frum on the nomination of Samuel A. Alito.
Mrs. P
Neocons are boring. Why don't you write about Hapsburg legitimists?
Posted by: Andrew Cusack | November 02, 2005 at 04:28 PM
You know I once dated a guy who thought my lips were Hapsburgian.
Actually, ever since Misspent made his derogatory comments I've been trying to put together a post on that.
Posted by: Mrs. Peperium | November 02, 2005 at 04:56 PM
Now, Mrs. P, we all love Misspent dearly. But--how do you expect your readers to determine the time period you are referencing if the commencement date is the date of Misspent's "derogatory comments." Which derogatory comments?
And I agree with Andrew: Neocons are boring--at least when they are being "neocons" instead of something more easily defined.
Posted by: Steve M. | November 02, 2005 at 05:34 PM
Misspent's derogatory comment was in NeoCons;
"There are plenty of IR theorists that reject the Enlightenment, we call them postmodernists. Frankly, I don't see much differente between their postpositivism and the anti-Enlightenment pre-positivism of many on the right who lambast neocons. The idea that it is possible to return to a pre-Westphalian world of monarchs, papal armies, and cold blooded, Machiavellian realpolitik is not conservativism, it is lunacy."
If the Kings are ordained by God and ruled by Divine right (you know that tricky Holy Spirit thing), how can we say that is lunacy? More to come on this.
Posted by: Mrs. Peperium | November 02, 2005 at 05:50 PM
Bring it.
Posted by: Misspent | November 02, 2005 at 08:10 PM
Call me a defender of the Old Corruption, but the more I consider Wilsonianism, the more I think Metternich, Talleyrand and Henry the K were on to something.
Posted by: Martin Chorich | November 02, 2005 at 11:46 PM