What we talk about when we talk about neoconservatism

The paradox of the persuasion and a loose definition of "the Neo gene"

Writing in the 1990s toward the end of a long and active life of ideas, one of the fathers of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol famously described his own political development, questioning:

Is there such a thing as a “neo” gene? I ask that question because, looking back over a lifetime of my opinions, I am struck by the fact that they all qualify as “neo.” I have been a neo-Marxist, a neo-Trotskyist, a neo-socialist, a neoliberal, and finally a neoconservative. It seems that no ideology or philosophy has ever been able to encompass all of reality to my satisfaction. There was always a degree of detachment qualifying my commitment.

This question has remained with me since undergrad, when I first leafed through Neoconservatism: the Autobiography of an Idea in the stacks of our brutalist monstrosity of a university library. That idea as well-a “neo gene” that seemingly compels a slightly heterodox stance, perhaps even necessitates a turn away from the utopian dreams of the left and even the more realist goals of the left of center crowd-has been a constant companion through the whole of my subsequent observation of American political and intellectual life, online and off. I’m by no means the only person to have asked this question over the years either. There have been many attempts to connect neoconservatism to Jewish-American Trotskyism in the interwar period, to the writings of Leo Strauss, and even (in my view much less persuasively) to Stalinism and Nazism. I’ve never been entirely convinced however that you could explain this all away solely by intellectual means. Something has always seemed to ring true in Jacob Heilbrunn’s 2008 assertion that the movement might best be understood as “an uneasy, controversial, and tempestuous drama of Jewish immigrant assimilation-a very American story.”

In his more theological moments Kristol sometimes mused that there were two strains in Judaism: the legalism of the Pentateuch and the Talmud and the declamatory cry to the heavens for justice in the Prophets, a binary he argued existed as an Orthodox-Gnostic split in every major religion.¹ In that spirit, and acknowledging as Kristol did the link between politics, culture, and theology, it might be fair to speak of something like an orthodox-gnostic or perhaps legalist and prophetic-neoconservatism. In its earliest stages in the 1960s and 1970s the movement was legalist, standing for bourgeois limit as opposed to the ambitions of the New Left, Black Power, and the liberations of the sexual revolution. In its second generation it became prophetic, espousing a kind of amped-up Wilsonian imperial vision of the United States as a unique agent of history with an obligation to spread democracy and capitalism throughout the world-by force if necessary. This prophetic neoconservatism reached its peak under the George W. Bush administration, and while discredited by the imperial misadventures of that era, continues as something like the bipartisan house philosophy of the State Department.²

Maybe then part of the puzzle is that neoconservatism is not an ideology but a process-not itself a coherent form but rather one of the ever-shifting sides in an intellectual civil war that has been raging-sometimes smoldering in the distance, sometimes, as in the 60s and in the 2010s cracking the pavement of the very streets we walk down every day-since 1968 at the latest. Many of those who have tried to write about the movement have come to similar conclusions-the French historian Justin Vaïsse, writing around the same time as Heilbrunn describes the evolution of the movement as a succession of generations in his book Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea, and I think this is a useful lens. A movement of generations and phases. The kind of Neoconservatism I talk about when I talk about Neoconservatism was always at least two heterogenous things existing in an uneasy dialectic. We could easily do a bigger number, but let’s stay with two for now and name these diverging tendencies. We’ll call the first “Inegalitarian Officer class Liberalism” and the second “Elite-Populism” and they exist together within most thought that I would describe as belonging to the first and most authentic lineage of domestic neoconservatism, what I like to call “the persuasion.”

By “Inegalitarian officer class liberalism” I mean roughly the conservative version of the thought process I somewhat loosely sketched here, wherein Plato’s maxim that the noblest state is ruled by philosophers is taken at face value, sometimes under the influence of Leo Strauss, sometimes under a more generally midcentury U of C rubric, other times informed simply by the elitist worldview of an educated urban intellectual in the middle of the last century. Culture is overseen and governed by an “officer class” (not usually explicitly thought of in exactly those terms, but analogous nonetheless) gatekept by institutions but accessible to those with aptitude and drive, people like the neocons.³ Generally the model for the original neoconservatives seemed to be an idealized version of 19th century bourgeois democracy, opposed to what Lionel Trilling described as an “adversary culture” that had

not dominated the whole of its old antagonist, the middle class, but… has detached a considerable force from the main body of its enemy and has captured its allegiance.⁴

Adherents of the persuasion then see the central conflict of modern (here meaning late 20th and early 21st century) western cultural history as struggle between opposing wings of the intellectual portion of the officer class, both imagining that they speak for the common people. The enemies of the Persuasion are by the typical account intellectuals seeking to align with the masses against the mercantile classes out of a mix of resentment and jealousy at having been usurped from their perceived rightful place as governors of the polis, as Kristol argued in 1972.

The animus toward the business class on the part of members of our “new class” is expressed in large ideological terms. But what it comes down to is that our nuovi uomini are persuaded they can do a better job of running our society and feel entitled to have the opportunity. This is what they mean by “equality.”

Our set of officers then took, and in our time take the opposite track. This gambit, what I’ve sometimes informally called the “Kristol Diagnosis” is a crucial element of the persuasion, and one not always given the discussion it deserves. Renegade intellectuals and intelligentsia side with business interests against the adversarial but paradoxically more establishment intellectuals they view as the true threat to western civilization and the continued prosperity of the masses of common people outside the decadent centers inhabited by both sets of officers. Kristol goes on to argue that

it is only the common people who remain loyal to the bourgeois ethos. As well they might—it is an ethos devised for their satisfaction. Individual liberty and security—in the older, bourgeois senses of these terms—and increasing material prosperity are still goals that are dear to the hearts of the working classes of the West. They see nothing wrong with a better, bourgeois life—a life without uncommon pretensions, a life to be comfortably lived by common men.

Thus Elite-Populism, in the ideal of which the top and bottom are united against the perfidy of the renegade adversary-cultural officer class. The aim of our subjects is thus to be one of the good ones in the middle, one of the officer-guardians who knows the right order and defends the minds of his betters and the interests of his inferiors. What capitalism and the business class have accomplished for the masses of the world-so the argument goes-justifies keeping them around and supporting them against the specter of an adversarial-platonic marxism or inchoate mob rule. Environmentalist and feminist arguments against the business class are in this view simply an underhanded ploy by a defeated left that has failed in every other attempt to achieve final victory through revolution.

There’s an interesting divide here if you’ve noticed-these two tendencies are in many respects in conflict, and this unstable dialectic goes some way toward explaining some of the breakdowns and divides of the persuasion in our own time. After all, this is essentially a vision of the culture ordered and mediated by sympathetic officer-guardians who recognize the beneficence of liberal democracy and bourgeois life, a version of what the sociologist Alvin Gouldner described as “The Platonic Complex, the dream of the philosopher king with which Western Philosophy begins.” The adherent of the persuasion would likely agree with Gouldner’s contention that

In revolutionary politics aiming at mass mobilization, a visibly leading role for members of the new class is dissonant with the movement’s populistic, egalitarian or communal emphases. There is pressure, then to disguise, gloss, ignore, deny, or distort the New Class’s importance in movements of a revolutionary character. The New Class in revolutionary politics has been an invisible class.

And yet the same sentiments can just as easily be used to indict these renegade thinkers and those who follow in the same paths. If the interests of the officer class and the masses are truly so divergent, is it possible to ever escape the occluding cataract of class self-interest? This would seem to me the most damning critique of the persuasion, of neoconservatisms old and new. Elite-populists like Norman Podhoretz fail to ascertain their position and assume that it is possible once one has joined the officer class to truly represent the masses, to defend one’s people, ordinary people from the depredations of more hereditary, decadent officer-guardians enthralled by adversary culture. Imaging that their own interests are in no way different from those of the many they replicate unknowingly the error Gouldner ascribes to the left and the New Class as a whole.⁵ When elite thinkers like Kristol argue for the fundamental nobility of the common folk and their ways, for the supremacy of their moral values:

even today, the masses of people tend to be more “reasonable,” as I would put it, in their political judgments and political expectations than are our intellectuals. The trouble is that our society is breeding more and more “intellectuals” and fewer common men and women.

what are we to make of it? Should we accept the benevolence of those members of the clerisy who claim to have only the interests of ordinary people, good people, simple people at heart? We are ourselves officers, or at least we think we should be.⁶ Should we trust our own benevolence?

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What then is the Neo Gene? Is it something generational? A sensibility, a way of seeing the world? My suspicion is that more than any combination of Trotskyism, realism, or Hegelianism the neo gene is the intuition that for our civilization to properly function someone must always be outside in the cold on the other side of the door, excluded from prosperity, excluded from recognition. Liberalism with sharp edges. Limit must be defined and maintained, the gears of the machinery of culture, the market, and the state oiled and cleaned, every part and every person in its right place. It is a peculiarly American instantiation of that classical vision of the philosopher, of a world ordained by ideas, aligned in unity and perfection from top to bottom, even as it decries the possibility of perfection and counsels an inherent vice that prevents the utopia of the left and center. With that perhaps irresponsibly thin basis for further extrapolation established, I think we can begin to sketch-inevitably inadequately-the carrier of the neo gene.

The carrier of the neo gene is often upwardly mobile-in the twentieth century often the children of recent immigrants, in our own time often coming from the provincial petit bourgeois. It is doubtlessly true that material conditions have deteriorated since the midcentury heyday of the first neocons, but nonetheless one finds a consistent movement-if only in terms of cultural capital-upwards away from the place and class of one’s origin. Justin Vaïsse has described how the original generation of neoconservatives ascent from urban poverty to cultural power helped to shape their turn to the right:

Just as they conquered these new realms and achieved the rank of professor in the great WASP universities, the student revolt turned their campuses upside down. The students—most of whom came from the middle and upper classes and had not lived through the depression—repudiated their teachers and proposed radical critiques of the world of knowledge that these Jews, many of them from poor families in Brooklyn, had idealized and worked so hard to conquer.

Allowing for the decay of institutions and the enshrining of adversary culture within them, one sees a broadly similar process with our modern carriers of the neo gene. Ascendant thinkers desire to join the last version of the Officer class.⁷ They reach the halls of power and culture and find them in disrepair, their occupants engaged in efforts to topple or transform the edifice these new officers have worked so hard to access. The system has in some respect worked for them, the dream has succeeded, at least well enough, and yet atop the machinery the dissolute sons, daughters, and others of the elite scheme to dismantle everything in a paroxysm of guilt at their ancestral sins. The only thing left is to turn against them, to break ranks and oppose the culture to save it.

So here at last we get to the obvious part. Why am I writing about this? Why did I write two separate essays enumerating the jargon I was going to use in this one? Reader, you should perhaps know by now that I carry the neo gene myself. I’m not a classic case by any means-ethnically, politically, or in other identity terms-but I have that tendency within my political genome. I began in officer class left-liberalism and swung to fellow-traveling on first the right and then the left, finally emerging on the other side to return to something like a chastened left liberalism, mugged as it were by reality on both sides of the aisle. I’ve written this in part because I am apprehensive of something like a revival of the persuasion oriented around antiwokeness and a return to an earlier model of liberalism, one that I fear would leave many of us in the cold again on the other side of the door. In any case, I’ll delay the sketching of that tendency and leave you with this thought: It would behoove our emerging adherents of the 21st century persuasion to remember that in time their predecessors lost almost all of their differences, lost so much of what had been interesting and promising in their thought, dissolving into the partisan slop of GOP politics. By the end of the 1990s Norman Podhoretz all but argued that the end of literary censorship had been a mistake after all. In the end movement conservatism chewed them up and spat them out. Have heterodox takes, sure-but remember your history, and put not your trust in princes.

1. It is of course of vital importance to note that neoconservatism is not a specifically Jewish phenomenon, although it arose first amongst the predominately Jewish circles of the New York Intellectuals of the midcentury. There are Irish and Italian neoconservatives, with hints in our own time of Asian and cis gay manifestations as well. If one were to speculate irresponsibly it might be said that neoconservatism is a tendency that tends to arise in individuals belonging to specific sorts of minority and generational cohorts included in broad power and culture, but excluded in some vital way from the inner sanctums of American normalcy-as-ideal.

2. This essay was largely written in August and September, and reflects my understanding of the cultural dynamics prior to 10/7-hence my dismissal of prophetic neoconservatism as a problem for the foreign policy guys to work out. Now it seems relevant again given both the migration to the Democratic party of many of its adherents during the Trump era and the “clash of civilizations” tone again in vogue on quarters of the right.

3. One of the classic criticisms of neoconservatism in its Persuasion form is that African Americans are very pointedly excluded from this vision of meritocratic aristocracy, and a certain discomfort and apprehension at the black freedom struggle in most of its manifestations is a fairly consistent characteristic of every stage of the movement from the 60s to disaffected postleft types fulminating on twitter and podcasts in the 2020s. There is something like a black vein of neoconservatism, but it has entirely different preoccupations and took a different side in the shaking out of the post-1960s culture wars than its white and white ethnic counterparts.

4. Lionel Trilling, preface to Beyond Culture. (It will interest some of my readers to note that Trilling traces the lineage of adversary culture primarily to modernist literature, and the assimilation into polite society of certain attitudes found therein.)

5. My answer (inasmuch as I’m comfortable providing one to a dilemma that is probably intractable) would be something along the lines of the Delphic adage: Know thyself. Be aware of limitations, be aware of self interest. You are not a priest-king. Strive to understand where you end and others begin, and that those you seek to help may not want it.

6. It’s worth noting that in the same 1972 Commentary article Kristol blamed the upheavals of postwar America in part on the overproduction of officer class/intellectual/PMC persons as a type, stating:

I use quotation marks around the term “intellectuals” because this category has, in recent decades, acquired a significantly new complexion. The enormous expansion in higher education, and the enormous increase in the college-educated, means that we now have a large class of people in our Western societies who, though lacking intellectual distinction (and frequently lacking even intellectual competence), nevertheless believe themselves to be intellectuals. A recent poll of American college teachers discovered that no fewer than 50 per cent defined themselves as “intellectuals.” That gives us a quarter of a million American intellectuals on our college facilities alone; if one adds all those in government and in the professions who would also lay claim to the title, the figure would easily cross the million mark! And if one also adds the relevant numbers of college students, one might pick up another million or so. We are, then, in a country like America today, talking about a mass of several millions of “intellectuals” who are looking at their society in a highly critical way and are quick to adopt an adversary posture toward it.

He seems, here and elsewhere, to implicitly argue for the reduction of those numbers and the privileges (which he stridently defines against the imagined rigors imposed on the business class) allowed to them. The problem then in our own time would seem to be that this has happened, and it produced not a return to bourgeois morality, but rather a new New Class of downwardly mobile, marauding freelance thinkers of varying political leanings, the intellectual equivalent of bronze-age sea peoples!

7. In the fifties and sixties this might mean someone like Norman Podhoretz aspiring to a Trillingian, Arnoldian or Leavisite model of criticism no longer available in the cultural environs of the changing late 20th century, while in our own time perhaps it means a tenure track in the academy or a position as a dynamic essayist in one of our little magazines.