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H-NET BOOK REVIEW 
Published by [log in to unmask] (November, 1997) 
 
Mark Gerson.  _The Neoconservative Vision:  From the Cold War to the 
Culture Wars_.  Lanham, Md. and London:  Madison Books, 1997.  x + 
368 pp.  Bibliographical references and index.  $27.95 (cloth), ISBN 
1-56833-054-5; $16.95 (paper), ISBN 1-56833-100-2. 
 
Reviewed for H-Teachpol by David J. Rovinsky <[log in to unmask]>, 
Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania. 
 
        The Neoconservatives:  The New Vital Center? 
 
Neoconservatism in American politics is a phenomenon that social 
scientists, especially that majority whose political home remains to 
the left of center, have never fully understood.  The term is 
regularly misused, primarily in reference to free-market philosophy 
during the 1980s and 1990s.  In this sense, neoconservatism is not 
properly distinguished from conventional conservatism, or 
"paleoconservatism," in the parlance of the neoconservative. 
Neoconservatism refers to a specific intellectual school in the 
United States descended from the liberal anti-communism of the World 
War II era and its aftermath.  It is distinguished primarily by its 
rejection of the pronounced radicalism of both the American left in 
the early years of the Cold War, and early twentieth century 
conservatism. Neoconservatism is thus not simply another branch of 
American conservatism; in fact, a substantial majority of its 
adherents continue to support the Democratic Party, despite their 
intellectual proximity to the Republican administrations of the 
1980s.  The 1980s represented, in some ways, the climax of the 
neoconservative movement, in that its views on such matters as 
Communism and American foreign policy, welfare, government 
regulation of the economy, religion in the public sphere, and race 
relations became part of the conventional wisdom of American 
political life.  To the extent that the Left has resurrected itself, 
it has done so by embracing many of the arguments of 
neoconservatism. 
 
In _The Neoconservative Vision_, Mark Gerson presents a detailed 
synthesis of neoconservative thought, going back to the battles 
among pro- and anti-Stalin factions within the American socialist 
movement of the 1930s. In the wake of World War II, democratic 
socialists were frequently lumped together as "fellow travelers" 
with pro-Soviet intellectuals.  The future neoconservatives resented 
this association, and quickly came to see the radical Left as more 
of an enemy than the mainstream Right.  Gerson takes his summary of 
the writings of neoconservatives from Sidney Hook, Lionel Trilling, 
and Reinhold Niebuhr in the 1930s and 1940s through the observations 
of the likes of Irving Kristol and Michael Novak as they 
contemplated a world without Communism.  Based upon an extensive 
reading of neoconservative journals and essays (the favored form of 
neoconservative writing; Gerson observes that neoconservatives write 
few books) as well as dozens of interviews with major 
neoconservative personas, Gerson provides an impressive and perhaps 
unprecedented review of the literature of neoconservatism, one that 
will make _The Neoconservative Vision_ an important reference work 
for students of political ideologies and American political thought. 
 
The neoconservatives began their political lives as New Dealers, 
originally opposing the extreme laissez-faire individualism embodied 
by the Republican Party of the 1920s.  These New Dealers rejected 
traditional conservatism not primarily for economic reasons, but for 
social ones.  Traditional conservatives were white, Anglo-Saxon 
Protestants who discriminated against all those unlike themselves. 
The future neoconservatives did not reject the mythology of American 
life.  Rather, as representatives of traditional nineteenth-century 
immigrant groups like Jews, Polish, Irish, or Slavs, they sought to 
integrate themselves into American society through the accepted 
route of hard work and individual achievement, only to find 
themselves excluded due to their non-British stock.  To this day, 
neoconservatives are disproportionately Jewish and Roman Catholic, 
the "assimilated" immigrants. 
 
Neoconservative intellectuals treat another group of intellectuals, 
the "anti-anti-Communists" (later to become the New Left), as their 
chief antagonists.  In the wake of World War II, many Western 
intellectuals remained enamored of the Soviet Union and "Uncle Joe" 
Stalin, convinced, as was Walter Lippman in the 1930s, that in the 
USSR they had "seen the future, and it works."  Neoconservatives, 
the liberal anti-Communists, argued, as did George Orwell in his 
novel _Animal Farm_, that it was unprecedented for the intellectuals 
of a democratic country to fall under the sway of a totalitarian 
ideology.  Neoconservatives like Norman Podhoretz, editor of the 
journal _Commentary_, later went on to argue that democracies 
inherently have difficulties standing up to totalitarian regimes, 
for these latter ideologies are able to penetrate into democracies 
and influence political debate. 
 
For American intellectuals, the McCarthy period dominated the 1950s. 
This was a difficult period for all American leftists, as all were 
suspected of connections to the Soviets.  During the McCarthy 
hearings, the split between pro-Soviet and anti-Communist liberals 
became pronounced, as liberal anti-Communists refused to join in the 
anti-McCarthy hysteria encouraged by the far Left, while opposing 
McCarthy's witch hunts, claiming that they distracted from the true 
anti-Communist struggle, the Cold War. 
 
Neoconservatism came into its own during the 1960s and 1970s, and 
during these decades became a force that would oppose the Left far 
more than the Right.  Neoconservatives view the cultural sphere as 
the most important one, a sphere from which economics and politics 
draw their meaning. Therefore, a battle over the definition of 
American culture is one that neoconservatives view as one for the 
American soul.  The New Left appeared after 1960, with an agenda 
supporting civil rights, the restructuring of the American 
university, and opposing the use of American military power overseas 
on the grounds that the United States lacked the moral legitimacy to 
act as a global force.  Neoconservatives joined the New Left in 
opposing the Vietnam War, but on the narrower grounds that the war, 
as defined by the Pentagon, was not winnable, and that the overall 
strategic interest of the United States in Southeast Asia was 
questionable. Neoconservatives also supported the civil rights 
movement, in that it offered the potential for African Americans to 
join the American mainstream in the same way that their own 
grandparents did.  However, the civil rights movement soon spawned 
affirmative action programs that offered elaborate racial and gender 
preferences to traditionally disadvantaged groups. 
Neoconservatives, sympathetic to individual achievement without 
regard to membership in a social or racial group, opposed 
affirmative action for both ideological and self-interested reasons: 
they believed that the true path to success in the United States was 
the one taken by their own families, and they were resentful that 
the discrimination faced by their own families (especially Jewish 
ones) was repeated, this time as reverse discrimination. 
 
Neoconservative disaffection with the Democrats mounted particularly 
during the Carter administration after 1976.  They saw it as 
embodying New Left values, and the Iranian hostage crisis and the 
administration's limp response to it showed that it remained a 
hostage to the Vietnam syndrome. For these reasons, most 
neoconservatives supported Ronald Reagan's successful bid for the 
presidency in 1980.  Reagan promised not to be afraid to project 
American military power and undertook a substantial buildup of 
American armed forces to send a clear message to the Soviets. At the 
same time, Reagan turned Washington away from attempts at economic 
management in the direction of a less fettered capitalist economy, 
another favorite topic of neoconservatives, still chafing at the 
resentment many New Left activists harbored toward capitalism and 
the way of life that upheld it. 
 
While Gerson's historical review of the neoconservative movement 
illustrates well the reaction of the group to specific periods in 
American political history, it runs the risk of obscuring the common 
themes that have animated neoconservatism from the beginning.  Above 
all, neoconservatives stress the centrality of ideology and culture 
(they are two sides of the same coin for neoconservatives) in 
determining the course that a society ultimately follows.  While 
paleoconservatives differ from neoconservatives in their apparent 
lack of interest, and even contempt for, culture, the New Left shows 
active hostility to an American culture developed over more than two 
centuries.  Neoconservatives believe it is this New Left critique of 
the United States that is more nefarious and that demands pointed 
opposition.  All neoconservative writing is inspired by this 
perceived need to protect American culture and the forces that 
support it. 
 
Neoconservatives believe that politics is about morality, and that 
morality should infuse political behavior.  Democracy thrives upon 
what they call "the bourgeois virtues" of thrift, the delaying of 
gratification, honesty, probity, and loyalty.  The importance of 
individual moral responsibility is the flip side of the classical 
liberal's insistence upon personal freedom and initiative; 
neoconservatives maintain that each side is needed to make the other 
work.  For example, while material wealth is necessary for a 
thriving society with a high standard of living, it is not an end in 
itself.  This wealth can be put in the service of the things that 
truly "matter" in life, such as education and intellectual vitality; 
civil society, as in those mediating institutions that give society 
a collective existence independent of the state; and religion. 
Religion is the source of the moral virtues that animate both 
individuals and the society in which they live. 
 
This raises the question of the role of religion in public life.  In 
recent decades, under the influence of modern liberalism, the 
practice of religion within public institutions has been discouraged 
on the grounds of separation of church and state.  Neoconservatives, 
Jewish and Christian alike, respond that this is too broad a reading 
of the concept.  They note that the Constitution prohibits the 
establishment of an official state religion but does not say that 
religion has no place as a motivating force in politics.  The state 
merely cannot do anything for interfere with the individual practice 
(or non-practice, a point on which neoconservatives do not all 
agree) of religion. Judeo-Christian morality is the starting point 
of American culture, and neoconservatives believe that such 
controversial events as invocations at public school graduations and 
Nativity scenes on municipal property reflect this morality and do 
not stop followers of other faiths from practicing them. 
 
Neoconservatives have displayed a religious fervor in their defense 
of capitalism.  In fact, religion and capitalism together create 
what neoconservatives view as the ideal social order.  While most of 
the paleoconservatives praise capitalism for promoting economic 
growth and personal freedom, neoconservatives view the market as an 
ideal mechanism of moral restraint.  Libertarian arguments for 
capitalism point out that the market efficiently translates 
individual demand into social outcomes. Neoconservatives respond 
that capitalism, having no values of its own, requires some form of 
moral background to sustain it, a moral background that is to be 
found in religion.  If a public is infused with religious morality, 
it will influence consumer demand, meaning that all participants in 
the economy, if they are to thrive, must acknowledge this morality. 
Therefore, economics cannot pollute culture, but a corrupt culture 
can be propagated by the ruthlessly efficient market.  Therefore, 
neoconservatives do not fret over the likes of selfishness and 
greed--they are moral failures that religion, not socialism or 
government regulation of the market, will cure. 
 
The neoconservative theologian Michael Novak has put forward a moral 
defense of capitalism along these lines that seems to have 
influenced even Pope John Paul II.  Keeping in mind that the support 
that neoconservatives offer to capitalism is more for moral than 
economic reasons, several writers worry openly that capitalism, an 
inherently amoral system, is coming to undermine the Judeo-Christian 
ethic, just as it sustained it in the past.  For this reason, Irving 
Kristol has written that capitalism deserves only two cheers instead 
of the traditional three.  It supports the production of material 
wealth, and it is the most efficient of economic systems, but it 
also has the potential to undermine religion and morality by doing 
nothing to combat a nihilistic ethic of self-indulgence and greed. 
While neoconservatives are pro-capitalism, they are anything but 
libertarians. 
 
Indeed, neoconservatives have a diffident attitude toward democracy 
and freedom.  Neither is a good in itself.  Rather, they are 
acceptable only to the extent that they are consistent with the 
bourgeois virtues.  While they oppose totalitarian regimes on the 
grounds that they impose an all-encompassing ideology upon society, 
the bourgeois virtues seem to take on the same kind of global role. 
While castigating New Left intellectuals for lacking touch with the 
common people, neoconservative intellectuals also complain that the 
United States is too democratic in its ideology, leading the people 
to reject the wise advice that neoconservatives are offering them. 
Similarly, neoconservatives believe that freedom is inherently 
subject to abuse, with liberty dissolving into license, in the 
terminology of John Locke.  Criticism of the bourgeois virtues 
ultimately undermines society's institutions, meaning that dissent 
is a threat to society rather than a vehicle for improving it. 
Therefore, society is inherently fragile and under constant threat. 
Perhaps neoconservatives are not aware that they are using a similar 
argument to that of totalitarian Marxists.  Gerson, content merely 
to summarize neoconservative writings, never addresses this 
contradiction. 
 
Similarly, what is the role of the intellectual?  Traditionally, 
from the Greeks to the present age, the intellectual has been the 
force to discomfort the comfortable, the gadfly to shock society out 
of its complacency.  Life is to be examined, not simply to be 
accepted for what it seems to be.  Indeed, through Gerson's words, 
the neoconservatives dwell upon the consequences of ideas, arguing 
that what intellectuals debate at their conferences today dictates 
the shape of society decades down the road.  The neoconservatives 
thus condemn the New Left intellectuals who challenge the accepted 
institutions of society. Neoconservatives criticize social 
scientists for putting forward ideas that are not necessarily 
workable, yet the Canadian neoconservatives David Bercuson and Barry 
Cooper argue that inventive intellectual suggestions are vital to 
the political system, and that the give and take of politics, and 
the inherent need to compromise, generally sand down the most 
unrealistic edges of intellectuals' prescriptions.[1] From American 
neoconservatives we again see the belief that to contest society is 
to destabilize it.  Instead, neoconservatives pride themselves upon 
_celebrating_ bourgeois virtues and society's existing institutions. 
Is this to mean that the intellectual's obligation is to serve 
merely as a cheerleader for the status quo?  Stalin demanded the 
same of Soviet intellectuals--in what way is this different? 
 
Religion played an important, if not primary, role in the formation 
of neoconservative thought.  Yet the place that religion is to have 
in the neoconservative vision is far from clear in the text.  For 
example, Gerson frequently writes that neoconservatism is a unique 
alliance of Jewish and Christian (largely Catholic) intellectuals 
making a common defense of the Judeo-Christian ethic.  In other 
places, Gerson portrays neoconservatism as a Jewish movement that 
only begrudgingly tolerates a Catholic presence. In places, Gerson 
hints that the Jewish neoconservatives welcomed Christian allies 
when politically useful (such as their courting of the Christian 
Right, another force that wanted religious morality to direct 
decisions in the marketplace), but on other occasions depicts 
Christian conservatives as a threat to Judaism in the United States, 
such as in a peculiar digression into Irving Kristol's heated 
opposition to religious intermarriage (p. 302).  Is neoconservatism 
an ideology that is meant to offer something to every American, or 
does it boil down to the self-interest of Jewish intellectuals?  Is 
affirmative action distasteful because its groupist focus is 
illiberal, or because it threatens the faculty positions of future 
Jewish intellectuals?  Is U.S. support for Israel laudable because 
Israel represents an important strategic interest of the United 
States, or are the neoconservatives merely another manifestation of 
the Jewish lobby?  Once again, the approach of reviewing literature 
never brings this contradiction into the open, and even in choosing 
the texts to review, Gerson's text often shows little distinction 
between the important and the trivial. 
 
As Bill Clinton's "New Democrats" and Tony Blair's "New Labour" 
preside over a renaissance of the Left in English-speaking 
democracies, the question of the origin of this post-Reagan Left 
arises.  While Clintonite policies are typically derided as 
warmed-over Reaganism by the most strident liberals, in many ways, 
Clinton's administration may well signal the reconciliation of the 
neoconservatives with the Democratic Party.  For example, the 
Clinton administration has not shied away from the use of the U.S. 
military, defends welfare but supports measures forcing individuals 
to seek private employment, and maintains an overall attitude of 
tempering private activity with concern for its effects on the 
entire community.  Blair's government in Britain is even more open 
about its support for these traditionally neoconservative themes. 
The success of Clinton and Blair against paleoconservatives is 
rudimentary proof that the neoconservatives were more liberal 
critics of liberalism than converts to conservatism--their ideas 
were partly responsible for the resurrection of the Left.  As 1990s 
conservatives continue to place economic growth before the health of 
civil society, Kristol's refusal to give capitalism "a third cheer" 
seems increasingly valid. 
 
While the analysis is severely underdeveloped, Gerson provides an 
excellent summarized history of neoconservative thought.  For this 
reason alone, _The Neoconservative Vision_ seems to be a prima facie 
candidate for classroom use.  The only problem I foresee in my own 
courses is where to place it upon a syllabus.  Neoconservatism is a 
rather specialized intellectual school, and as such, does not rate 
more than cursory attention in introductory classes.  In 
"Contemporary Political Ideologies," my department's first level 
course in political theory, I already ask my students to read a 
chapter from Kristol's _Two Cheers for Capitalism_, which is all the 
time that can be spared for a short course that covers ten distinct 
ideological systems.  "American Political Theory"  would be a 
possible candidate for this book, though again, in this course I 
focus on primary texts (including Kristol and Novak).  Gerson, 
however, may make useful supplementary reading.  Where I see Gerson 
as being most useful in the classroom is at the graduate level, 
especially in a seminar on American conservatism or in recent trends 
in American political thought.  Above all, Gerson's detailed summary 
and bibliography present an interesting and useful overview of 
neoconservatism for those who intend to go on to more detailed study 
of the subject. 
 
Notes: 
 
[1].  Bercuson, David and Barry Cooper.  _Derailed:  The Betrayal of 
the National Dream_.  Toronto:  Key Porter Books, 1994, p. 114. 
 
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