Rush Limbaugh, Key Figure in Republican Information Machine

Conservative talk radio has had an even greater impact than conservative television. Rush Limbaugh, a benefactor of Scaife’s largess, began his radio broadcast in 1988 on WABC in New York. By 1998 he was reaching 20,000,000 listeners a week on 643 radio stations. Back in the Nixon days, Vice President Spiro Agnew had talked about a biased, liberal, media, but it was Limbaugh who made this an important national issue. He harps on this theme in every broadcast, thus fanning dissatisfaction with the mainstream media and improving the market for his product. With this argument he created a standard around which cultural embattled cultural conservatives could rally. They were encouraged to believe they were a put-upon minority even after they had won the control of the national government and a majority of the states. This approach was most appealing to white males, who became the largest part of conservative talk radio’s audience. They were attracted by the rudeness and crudeness of these commentators. Even Gordon Liddy’s urging followers to kill ATF agents was acceptable; “Head shots, head shots...kill the sons of bitches.”
California’s John Zeigler’s locker room talk seems to satisfy some basic male needs, and his claim that Gray Davis was human waste that needed to flushed resonated with his audience. The right wing hosts are popular because they push people’s buttons and stimulate primal impulses such as fear of the “Other” and play to intense my- country- right- or- wrong nationalism. They encourage an intense comradeship, similar to that found in an army barracks. People who telephone these hosts fall all over themselves about being honored to talk to these shock jocks. Limbaugh’s followers call themselves “ditto heads.” Much grumbling and whining marks the comradeship of the right wing radio broadcast. Appeals are made to fairly primitive mass feelings., and the same simplistic arguments are repeated over and over again. Any idea that could disturb their collective self-satisfaction was belittled.
Limbaugh’s chief mission seemed to be the demonization of Democrats and liberals, and he repeatedly warns listeners that the evil liberals are plotting to destroy American culture and undermine the nation’s strength. He appeared unable to differentiate between liberals and Democrats. Though seldom mentioning God, he embraces the agenda of the Christian Right, and constantly attacks feminists, environmentalists, and homosexuals. His attacks upon Bill Clinton’s personal life were unceasing. Even Clinton’s daughter Chelsea was not spared Limbaugh’s nasty comments, as he called her “the White House dog.” Another major theme was his contempt for the poor and his belief that the nation could not afford the money spent on welfare. His willingness to air unsubstantiated charges and clear falsehoods have spawned a number of web sites devoted to correcting his statements.

He has been praised for playing a central role in giving Republicans control of both houses of Congress in 1995, and Speaker Newt Gingrich said they shared the same goal: to “make Bill Clinton the enemy of normal Americans.” To a significant extent they succeeded. Limbaugh did so by constant discussion of Clinton’s personal life, but the broadcaster had almost nothing to say about revelations about the personal lives of Gingrich, Henry Hyde, and other Clinton tormentors. Limbaugh has a brother who is also in the anti-liberal information industry and who claimed in Prosecution “liberals are waging war against Christianity.”

Even after the Republican victory of 2002, Rush found it necessary to refer to the NAACP as “the enemy” and warn listeners about how successful liberals are at launching personal attacks against Republican leaders. He suggested that though the liberals had sustained a defeat, they might launch a counter-attack as the Nazis did in the Battle of the Bulge. When Clinton Commerce Secretary Ron Brown’s plane crashed, Grant said he thought Brown might have survived “because at heart I’m a pessimist.” Brown was an African American, a race Bob Grant called “subhumanoids” and “screaming savages.” It was also about race. He once asked his audience of “dittoheads” why composites of criminals often look like Jesse Jackson and was heard to tell a caller, “Take that bone out of your nose and call me back.” Limbaugh is anti-gay and anti- environmentalist, often using the term “environmental wackos.” Limbaugh also mined the theme that “bleeding-heart” liberal judges were responsible for a perceived increase in crime

Limbaugh began broadcasting nationally in 1988 and had at least 14.5 million listeners per week by December 2002. He captured the hearts and minds of millions with a mix “of mirth with a radio preacher’s urgency and a demagogue’s viciousness.” His great success has inspired many imitators. Together, Rush and Rush wannabes, have had a great impact upon the American political landscape and have done much to make the Republican base larger, angrier, and less inclined to civil dialogue.” Arousing anger was an important function of the right-wing talk shows, but creating a sense of belonging and association with successful, productive people was also important. Limbaugh’s “ditto heads” come to see themselves as part of a noble and enlightened fraternity battling the unspeakable evil of liberalism. Theirs is a noble cause, they believe, because they are fighting to remove government restrictions from capable and productive people like themselves. From Limbaugh, Mike Gallagher, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Gordon Liddy, Oliver North, and others they learn that they are superior in every way to those who expect help from government or are working to expand it and defile traditional values. Rush and the other conservative radio commentators were unable to turn away even briefly from generating anger and paranoia after their election triumph in 2002. They almost immediately took to creating anger against and fear of Nancy Pelosi, the new leader of the diminished Democratic minority in the House of Representative. Even if she led a cohesive party, the fact is that minority leaders have very little clout in today’s House. In a news conference on November 20, 2002, Democratic Senate leader Tom Daschle acknowledged that Rush Limbaugh and the many other right-wing talk show hosts give the GOP a great edge in elections, and he attributed the Democratic defeat in 2002 partly to their influence. He noted that their shrill rhetoric generates an extraordinary emotional fervor that energizes many people and gets them to work hard in elections.

The same rhetoric results in making life much more difficult for Democratic politicians because they are often confronted and threatened by people who believe all the charges made on talk shows. Limbaugh’s attacks were supplemented by newspaper advertisements calling Daschle an ally of Saddam Hussein because the senator opposed drilling oil wells in the Anwar reserve. American Renewal, a Christian Right organization, funded the advertisements. Daschle noted that when he was being attacked as an obstructionist he and his family had to face many more unpleasant confrontations and threats than under normal conditions. He twice used the word “pray” in relation to his concern that this kind of rhetoric could eventually do long term damage to American political institutions. Limbaugh responded to this complaint by running a skit that mocked Daschle for complaining that his family was receiving telephoned death threats, claiming Daschle was lying and making the charge for political reasons. Democratic criticism of Limbaugh led the mainstream press to grant him extended interviews on television, thus elevating him to respectable status among political commentators. He was given long and respectful interview on Tim Russert’s CNBC program and on CNN’s “Reliable Sources.”

Matt Drudge’s web page was also very effective cog in the Republican attack machine, and many GOP publicists like to draw material from it. On August 10, 1997, Drudge found it necessary to retract a story he circulated that White House aid Sid Blumenthal was a wife-beater. The admission did not reduce Drudge’s star/hero status among the New Right one iota. Perhaps they assumed that all Clinton assistants must be deeply depraved people. Not satisfied with the retraction, the Blumenthals went to court for satisfaction. It developed that the story began at a 1994 dinner where a Wall Street Journal publicist bragged that the paper had legal documents proving that Blumenthal regularly beat his wife. Blumenthal denied feeding Drudge the information. Drudge, financed indirectly by Richard Mellon Scaife, refused to name his source. It turned out there were no police reports or documents. The press largely ignored Blumenthal’s litigation. It was covered by the Austin Chronicle and the Arkansas Democrat Gazette. By 2004, the Drudge web site was getting 6.5 million hits a day. Among those consulting this site are radio hosts--not all of them conservative- who are looking for material to discuss on the air.

A New York Times/CBS poll in 1988 demonstrated the success of the Republican information machine. It revealed that 20% of Americans thought Republicans were fair to all classes and 64% believed the GOP was mainly concerned with helping the rich. Despite these beliefs, the GOP had succeeded by then in selling itself as the party of the disaffected. This was done through effective manipulation of cultural issues and directing random anger toward liberals. In that year, George H.W. Bush successfully identified Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis with Willie Horton, a black convicted murder who raped a white woman on a weekend furlough. Bush also denounced the Massachusetts governor as a “card-carrying member” of the American Civil Liberties Union. By 2003, conservatives dominated political discussion and frequently set the tone of political reporting. They accomplished this by aggressively marketing their ideas through a large and well-financed network of foundations. Many of their newspapers and political pundits make no pretense of doing anything more than propagandizing their side of political issues, and in this way they play an important role in setting the agenda for political discussion.

Mainline journalists, who are essentially committed to fairness and evenhandedness, must take into account the spin the conservative journalists place on the news. Likewise, in an effort to avoid charges of media bias, they have given space to unproven and outrageous charges developed by some of the conservative media’s less respectable members. The clearly biased Fox News has captured a large share of the cable news audience and has forced the other cable operations to hire a large stable of one-sided commentators, thus making cable news, particularly in the evenings, a vast echo chamber for right wing views. Finally, a large array of right wing national talk show hosts, together with their innumerable local counterparts, daily fill the airwaves with political propaganda and anger against liberals. Their influence will grow as the market share of the three main networks decreases and as smaller numbers of people read newspapers. Fewer than 20% of young adults read the news. If this tendency continues, what little an ever-growing proportion of American voters know about current events will come from the right-wing information network, which includes a multitude of well-done right-wing blogs.


So long as the shock of rapid social and economic change buffet
s American culture, the conservative information machine is likely to be successful in recruiting and retaining a substantial base for the Republican Party. Despite the many economic insecurities facing voters who were not college educated, 77% of those earning between $30,000 and $40,000 a year think they are doing well and do not seem very worried about their futures. For the future, many seem to “put their trust in the state lottery system.” They have learned that they cannot and should not “look to the federal government or labor unions to throw them a lifeline.” They are more concerned about how the sexual come-ons and violence of contemporary culture threaten their families, and they identify Democrats with the libertine values that menace their families. Even demographic tendencies cooperate with the conservative information machine. In the Europe and the United States, progressive secularists are much likely to have childless or small families than cultural conservatives. The fact that cultural conservatives are considerably more fertile helps “explain the gradual drift of American culture toward religious fundamentalism and social conservatism.” The states carried by George W. Bush in 2004 had 11% higher fertility rates than those carried by Democrat John Kerry. Some fear this will eventually spell the “death of the [influence of the] Enlightenment.” This is probably an exaggerated fear, but it does not bode well for progressives.


Sherman has written African American Baseball: A brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum

How Conservative Foundations Shape Public Opinion

As newspapers attempted to cut the cost of gathering news, conservative public policy foundations worked harder to provide the newspapers with information by way of position papers, briefings and books. The conservative foundations were well funded and were able to take the lead in doing this. The Heritage Foundation developed a program computerized program called Database 101 and provided short seminars to teach journalists how to use it. Heritage essentially offered to become the research department for newspapers. While much of the data it provided was necessarily neutral of any ideology, the more complex the information became, the more important the manner of interpretation became. Reporters learned how to use the database and how best to interpret the data. This aggressive conservative foundation insisted it was only helping reporters replace fact-based reporting for anecdote-based reporting, but it is fair to wonder if the data and analysis it provided ever led to conclusions that undermined conservative policies. Heritage spends a million dollars a year on this project.

Electronic and print news outlets are businesses, and many seek to maximize profits by relying more upon free research services provided by conservative outlets.. Funding less investigative journalism, especially, can also cut costs that which might produce information that would anger advertisers or conservative readers. To maximize audiences, many of them have overreacted to the ever-present complaint that the media has a liberal bias. Of courses there had always been many conservative newspapers, and their influence increased over time. By 2003, their flagship publications included the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, and Commentary, The New Republic, and the Weekly Standard. The New York Sun, founded in 2007, was intended to influence opinion first and make money, possibly second. As late as 2007, it was losing $1 million a month, but it attracted the attention of conservative opinion leaders throughout the country. Conservatives also write many syndicated columns and contribute to many magazines. The editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, under Robert Bartley became a central cog in the Republican attack machine in the 1990s, lending respectability to all sorts of stories ginned out by Clinton haters. Bartley was particularly proud of the piece he printed which probably drove Vincent Foster to commit suicide. George W. Bush later honored Bartley as a great journalist, but David Kennedy of the Boston Phoenix was more accurate in calling him a “notorious scandalmonger” who did much to elevate sleazy journalism to respectability.

The efforts of Neo Conservative writers and activists most probably account for the decision of more voters to identify with conservative outlooks rather than liberal one’s. To the New Right, the Neo Conservatives were suspect because they were highly educated, eastern urban dwellers and intellectuals. Nevertheless, the NeoCons served the New Right well by exploiting religious and cultural issues and helping to bring the Christian Right into the conservative coalition. Rich Republicans also employed skilled writers who lacked the credentials of the Neo Conservatives but who cranked out effective attack literature that was circulated by the conservative press and usually found a place in the mainstream media. These attacks were frequently laced with hearsay, speculation, fabrications, and slander. Their effectiveness and that of the conservative media infrastructure was repeatedly demonstrated during the effort to remove Bill Clinton from office. It is estimated that Richard Mellon Scaife spent over $200,000,000 over twenty years in efforts to damage liberals and strengthen the right wing. Some suggest that over a lifetime he has spent $600,000,000 on right wing causes





Sherman has written African American Baseball: A brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum

Planting Conservatism on Campuses

Conservatives and their foundations invested large amounts of money building a conservative constituency on the college campuses. William Buckley played a key role in founding the Intercollegiate Institute, the first and best of the organizations devoted to encouraging conservatism on campus. It developed an impressive array of publications and seminars and encourages a scholarly approach to conservatism. Among other campus programs were the Leadership Institute, Young Americans for Freedom, the Collegiate Network, and Young America’s Foundation. They subsidized conservative student newspapers and provided funding of speakers’ series. In the eighties, their efforts nurtured activists Denish D’ Souza, Ann Coulter, and David Brock. These and other campus conservatives thought it necessary to breach decorum or what they thought was the “etiquette of liberalism” to subvert liberal campus culture by gay-baiting and very aggressive attacks upon affirmative action that liberals considered racist attacks. By the nineties, their tone became somewhat more polite, and they were more open to gay marriage and members who supported abortion rights. They sharply denounced political correctness and their claims that professors were set upon liberal indoctrination may result in closing some minds to new or different ideas.

Long before the term “political correctness” was coined, there were complaints about there being too many liberal professors. In God and Man at Yale (1951), a young William F. Buckley Jr. suggested that no freedom would be violated if socialist professors were given their walking papers as they would remain free to “seek employment at a college that was interested in propagating socialism.” In the McCarty era, there were many cries to fire communist and socialist professors. By the late 1990s, the unreliable professors were Democrats. Among the groups monitoring professors and sending observers into certain classes were Academic Bias and Students for Academic Freedom and Campus Watch. Students for Academic Freedom was founded by David Horowitz, a former leftist and brilliant sociologist, who has played a central role in designing the cultural assault on liberals. In the mid-nineties, conservatives founded the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, an organization designed to exert pressure upon liberal professors whose views stray significantly from mainstream American opinion. It was founded by Lynne Cheney, but was also supported by New Democrat Joseph Lieberman. There were other conservative organizations dedicated to monitoring what was said on campus and harassing those who were critical of Israeli policies: Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, Campus Watch, the David Project, Stand With US, and the Israel on Campus Coalition.

As the Republicans took control of both houses of Congress, most state governments, and the presidency, it became necessary to find new arguments to recharge their followers’ fear and sense of persecution, both functioning as catnip for their political instincts. Attacks on the alleged abuses of liberal academics filled this gap. Although conservative groups turned out numerous studies showing that there were many more registered Democrats than Republicans on college faculties, they were unable to demonstrate that the professors used their positions to unfairly proselytize. Often the “abuses” and “controversial material” they complained about were facts or alternate points of view that the conservatives believed should have been omitted. The attacks of 9-11 gave ACTA the excuse to go after professors who did not embrace Bush’s approach to dealing with terrorism. ACTA complained that some professors thought that respect for diversity and tolerance would be useful in combating terrorism. It singled out 115 unpatriotic comments that it deplored. University of New Mexico history professor Richard Berthold was forced to retire because of eleven words in which he joked about blowing up the Pentagon. At UCLA, a librarian was suspended for writing an e-mail note criticizing the invasion of Iraq; while at Johns Hopkins, a director was demoted after criticizing administration policy on Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan. The list of this rich harvest of censorship cases is too long to provide here.

These successes set the scene for 17 state legislatures to consider enacting an Academic Bill of Rights, essentially a program that would mandate hiring conservative professors and justifying continual probes to identify and punish the expression of liberal opinion on campuses. In 2002, Daniel Pipes of Middle East Forum formed Campus Watch and immediately targeted campuses and professors who had the “wrong” views on Israel, and in 2003 Senator Richard Santorum introduced legislation to defund universities who permitted professors or students to criticize Israel. In 2003, when Drake University held a conference on the roots of terrorism, the federal government subpoenaed the records of the conference, and a judge issued a gag order forbidding Drake officials from discussing the subpoena.

The hysteria fanned by groups like ACTA created an atmosphere that encouraged witch-hunts. In 2005, there was a concerted effort to suppress “anti-American” dissent among Middle East scholars at Columbia University, where three professors were accused of mistreating Jewish students. An official inquiry found that one of the professors was testy when an Israeli student reminded him that the government of Israel sometimes gave warning before bombing residential areas and that he was also was discourteous to another Israeli in an off-campus situation. The professors received death threats and hate mail, and hecklers and surreptitious monitors infiltrated their classes. By the early Twenty-First Century, conservatives borrowed a page from the civil rights movement in demanding that colleges hire more conservative professors to insure that their viewpoint received equal representation.

The campus conservatives who emerged in the nineties and after had the advantage of dealing with student bodies that were becoming more conservative. They revered Ronald Reagan as a serious thinker and a shining symbol of better times. Their sponsors were making serious efforts to reach female students by sponsoring speeches by Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Katherine Harris, Phyllis Schlafley, Ann Coulter, and Christiana Hoff Sommers, who wrote The War Against Boys and Who Stole Feminism.

Conservative foundations have also financed many right-wing campus newspapers, the well-known being the Dartmouth Review. The Collegiate Network, one of the organizations that fund and coordinate these journalistic ventures, spent $1,000,000 in 2002 alone. There are no comparable efforts on the other side partly because there is so little money for progressive causes. One of the Dartmouth Review’s accomplishments was outing a number of campus homosexuals without their permission.

Over more than two decades, the conservative think tanks have sponsored many important books and have honed “very big Republican ideas and many small one’s--school choice, welfare reform, enterprise zone’s, Social Security privatization.” A number of conservative foundations have aided that cause through litigation. The Washington Legal Foundation has played a leading role in defending George W. Bush’s rights to curtail civil liberties in times of crisis.

Conservative foundations funded a network of small journals, newsletters, and influential books. In addition, they provided start-up money for radio broadcasts that strongly influenced the opinions of millions of listeners. The Olin Foundation and Smith Richardson Foundation funded Charles Murray’s Losing Ground. Other non-profit foundations that fund conservative publications were Scaife Foundation, the Lilly Endowment, Bradley Foundation Other influential books produced by the conservative foundations were Milton Freidman, Free to Choose, Richard John Neuhaus, , The Naked Public Square, and Myron Magnet, The Dream and the Nightmare., Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations, Dinesh D’Souza, , John E. Chubb aid Terry M. Moe, Politics, Markets, and American Schools, and Marvin Olasky, The Tragedy of American Compassion

The Federalist Society
Some of the most important conservative ideas have been developed and promulgated by the Federalist Society, an organization founded in 1982 for right-wing lawyers dedicated to filling the bench with conservatives. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, justices Scalia and Clarence Thomas, and Federalist Society lawyers accepted the theory of Gary Lawson of Northwestern University that the “the post-New Deal administrative state is unconstitutional.” In placing their people on the bench, they were not seeking to simply create a “balance” between liberals and conservatives or appoint “strict constructionists.” They sought to sharply reduce the power of the federal government, particularly in interventions in the economy and efforts to redress injustices or provide social services. Many members believed that the constitution had been bent out of shape after the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and they were determined to restore the “constitution in exile” to its rightful place. Above all, they reject the idea that the constitution is an instrument for promoting democratic self-government.

When in 2002 the Federalist Society held a four-day conference after an election victory, there was far less rejoicing than rehashing old battles and venting anger against liberals. The 2002 election victory should have been particularly important to the Federalists, because it meant that President Bush would have little difficulty in appointing many conservative judges. Bush had already used the society to recommend candidates for the bench and had demonstrated intent to appoint their choices. Delegates were treated to the satirical song “Brennan, Marx, and Lenin” about a Supreme Court justice who had been dead five years. Young members were instructed in the details of “Travelgate” as though it represented a serious abuse of power and Bill Clinton were still in the White House. Federal appeals Judge Lawrence Silberman spoke about a Supreme Court plot to end the death penalty even though the high court had just upheld the constitutionality of the death penalty, even when a 16 year old was the one condemned. Speakers ranted against James Jeffords, Bill Clinton, Barbara Streisand, James Carville, and Lanny Davis. It was as though they fed on anger and needed powerful enemies to sustain their political commitments. They did not seem to notice that most of their enemies had been vanquished, and that they were now firmly in the driver’s seat.

Its long-term strategy of shifting the courts to the right finally triumphed with the seating of Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito in George W. Bush’s second term. Ronald Reagan had begun the process of appointing conservatives to the lower courts, and the Federalist Society, through branches in law schools, educational activities, and conferences had built up a substantial network of right-wing judges. It also developed means to steer young conservatives to prestigious clerkships. In February 2005, the Society began organizing to support the confirmation of conservative justices by briefing a network of lawyers on talking points, marshaling support --especially among Christian groups, preparing to put pressure on Democratic senators in the Bush states, and developing materials to flood the media with conservative arguments in favor of the nominees.

These efforts have led to many legislative hearings into the influence of liberals in colleges and universities. The hearings have produced no new legislation but have contributed to an atmosphere of fear on campuses. This is particularly true in respect to discussion of the Middle East and Israel. Critics of Israel have been fired in several leading universities, and the head of one institute has been removed.

Sherman has written African American Baseball: A brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum

Conservatives as Victims

Victimhood and the “ New Class” Argument
The New Right claims that the glue that holds them together is a deep attachment to moral values. Yet, these people have yet to shun Republican politicians whose personal lives have been revealed to be characterized by immorality and degenerate practices. It is far more likely that the main defining characteristic of the New Right is a sense of victimhood, epitomized by the so-called New Class argument. A consistent, overarching indictment of the so-called liberal cultural elite first appeared in the form of an attack on what was called the” New Class.” This attack on a so-called liberal elite had a particular appeal to the New Right, but it was also attractive to other elements in the party and had the effect of cementing ties between the various elements in the new conservative coalition. It also provided a framework in which the old charges of communism, socialism, and treason could be blended with those of immorality and, by the eighties, political correctness-- a term being used to describe what they considered to be excessive efforts to enforce racial and cultural sensitivity, especially in the universities.

Many members of the New Right felt as though they were cultural outsiders and were very receptive to the argument that there was a “New Class” that had gained too much power and which was destroying American culture. It was argued that liberal members of the New Class were elitists who had contempt for ordinary folks and hated America. This attack on a supposed elite had great populist appeal. In selling neoliberal economics and cultural conservatism, the New Right waged cultural war against what they called “the New Class,” academicians, media people, and intellectuals who were supposed to be deeply committed to uprooting traditional American values. They were bureaucrats, “verbalists,” “elitists,” and “pointy heads” -- a term they borrowed from George Wallace. Peggy Noonan lamented that “our great universities [are controlled by people] who seem to hold little intellectual or emotional attachment to the Constitution.” The New Class included some eastern “bluestocking Republicans” who frequented cocktail parties and polluted the Republican Party with their moderate views.

What was conveniently forgotten was that many of the conservatives own pundits and theorists had the benefit of elite educations. William Rusher and M. Stanton Evans attended Yale, and Pat Buchanan was a graduate of Georgetown. Kevin Phillips attended Harvard and the London School of Economics, and Howard Phillips went to Harvard. The right-wing cultural warriors succeeded in persuading many that this was the “elite” to be feared. In time, all liberals were portrayed as sharing the attributes of the New Class. John Mc Cain, a maverick Arizona Republican senator, expressed disdain for this approach to partisanship “which considers political opponents as inferior moral characters.” He thought such characterizations banished civility from debate and damaged the political process.

The concept of the New Class was a badly flawed sociological portrait of liberals , designed to include electronic media and motion picture people, intellectuals, academicians, journalists, government professionals, authors, and speech writers. Its roots were in Senator Joseph McCarthy’s right-wing populist indictments of diplomats in striped pants, their over-educated supports, and the eastern establishment that dominated the Republican Party. Even though the New Class included right-wing intellectuals, speech writers, and journalists, it was portrayed as a left-leaning, malevolent, and power hungry, unproductive elite with inordinate power. Their patriotism was in question because they backed Jimmy Carter’s Panama Canal treaty. The morality of the New Class was considered clearly beyond the pale of acceptability because it was responsible for electing liberal judges and supporting permissiveness in schools and elsewhere. The charge of permissiveness was meant to associate the New Class with drugs, abortion, promiscuity, obscenity, and homosexuality. The New Class was also associated with forced busing in the schools, gun control, gay rights, abortion, and reverse discrimination.

Long after the term “New Class” was no longer employed, this argument provided the basis for very effective attacks on “Hollywood liberals,” “eastern establishment liberals,” “liberal eggheads,” and limousine liberals.” Vice President Spiro T. Agnew’s highly effective, though misleading, denunciations of this elite were very effective in fueling resentment of the New Class. Denunciation of the New Class and Agnew’s denunciation of a liberal elite were designed to drive a wedge between blue-collar workers and their traditional allies among intellectuals and academicians. Nixon and Agnew experimented with this cultural populism to good effect. At the time of Nixon’s resignation in 1974, about a third of American voters still remained committed to him.

This rhetoric was intended to remind people of their distaste for the lifestyles associated with liberalism. In fact, more than a few conservative politicians and publicists were homosexual, and many liberals rejected the excesses of the 1960s. Few in the New Right recalled that the liberals of those years usually did not endorse the lifestyles of the New Left . It was simply assumed that almost all liberals opposed family values and could be considered degenerates. At the 1992 Republican National Convention, columnist Pat Buchanan gave a speech entitled “The election is about Who We Are: Taking Back the Country,” a classic presentation of the New Right’s cultural argument. Claiming that the cultural war was as important as the Cold War, he complained that the Democrats were pro-lesbian, pro-gay, and soft on crime. Nixon’s former speech-writer insisted that “we must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country.”

These claims against the Democrats were excessive, but the Democrats injured themselves in the early seventies with frequent calls for guaranteed incomes and what seemed to be a tendency toward fiscal profligacy. The internal party reforms of that era alienated old line Democrats and disarmed some of the party’s most effective activists. The party mechanism itself had been badly damaged when President Lyndon Johnson stripped it of operating funds because he feared the staff was allied with the Kennedys. Some saw proposed family assistance and income distribution plans as a sign the party was more concerned with helping minorities than with assisting its traditional white, blue collar base. By 1974, the party’s ”liberal hour” was over, and many of the new people entering Congress were more interested in a new moralistic agenda than in defending and extending the New Deal and the Fair Deal.
The New Left radicals constantly ridiculed the political thought and moderation of many of their professors, liberal politicians, and the so-called Old Left. Many liberal academicians and professors expressed grave concerns about the deterioration of values for which they were now denounced. Economic permissiveness that was expressed in unrestrained consumerism contributed to deteriorating values, and the New Right’s political philosophy endorsed the economic philosophy that created reckless competition, a materialistic approach to life, and advertising excesses that threatened traditional values.

Conservatives were right in identifying many motion picture people as being liberals whose works assaulted conventional values. Ironically, these cinema people detested the results of unrestrained capitalism but could not admit that their work often added to the damage. It is also true that some liberals gave conservatives ammunition with which to buttress their arguments. Some were outspoken in their defense of pornography, drugs, and abortion under any circumstances. Reverend Jesse Jackson once admitted as much. They allowed liberalism to be identified with an irresponsible freedom: “It became free speech turned into license for obscenity, pornography, abortion, smoking pot. The liberal movement got trapped with all the decadent fallout and [the appearance of] no values.” Liberals also helped their critics by seeming to redefine “common people” to mean only the most disadvantaged. By appearing to lose interest in the concerns of white working people, they allowed their critics to masquerade as populists defending ordinary people
Conservatives did not use the term “New Class” for very long, but the concept became the core of right wing populism, in which many came to believe they were being assaulted by a treacherous class comprised of tenured radicals, know-everything bureaucrats, an allegedly liberal media, and pro-criminal judges. The term did not reappear after the seventies, but the theme was continued and remained effective. These denunciations of a cultural elite with its commitment to political correctness and permissiveness, served as “the populist battering-ram behind which the Right made the case for tax cuts for the wealthy and welfare minimalism for the poor. “ By ridiculing liberalism's 'politically correct' nostrums, conservatives were able to ridicule the whole liberal enterprise.”

New Right thinkers eventually stopped talking about the New Class, but the same argument was used in other terms. Republican propagandists framed it in terms of elitists (and sometimes traitors) arrayed against Real Americans. . The objects of their attacks became “liberals,” essentially anyone who was to the left of them. Even after the turn of the century, when neoliberalism had become the dominant American political ideology, conservatives wrote as though they were a beleaguered minority, faced with the task of battling entrenched liberalism. William Bennett argued that the liberals constituted an “adversary culture” comprised of various Leftists, multiculturalists, moral relativists, and postmodernists who allegedly had an iron grip on the nation’s cultural and educational institutions. In the colleges, liberals taught students that wrong was right and that the United States was responsible for most of the world’s problems. He suggested that a “vast relearning” was needed, and that people subjected to liberal influence must learn how to recover the American ideal or the American vision. Of course the American vision was synonymous with neoliberalism and antithetical to liberalism.

Denish D’Souza saw “the Starbucks guy” as the personification of the new American created by the liberals. This Starbucks guy has a nose ring and a Mohawk haircut and thinks that Judge Robert Bork and Bennett are “self-righteous mullah[s],” “fascists,” and “enemies of freedom.” However, D’Souza is that rare conservative who thinks it is worthwhile to talk to the Starbucks guy and that a few of his ideas might be worth considering. An associate editor of the conservative Clarendon Review of Books could describe conservatives as the “good guys” or “pro-American Right” which was fighting the Left, “that commands the strategic cultural heights of the Ivory Tower and Hollywood Hills.” The editor of the Rockford Institute’s Chronicles, writing at about the same time, spoke for the Christian Right when he asserted that conservatives had a right to run the country. “We don’t have to be rude or call them names. We can tell them, ever so politely, that ours is the party of Christ and theirs is the party of the Antichrist.”

New Right operative Howard Phillips was on the same wavelength when he called for “a return to Biblical law.” Another variant of the argument appeared early in the Twenty First Century, when American society was seen as divided between the nationalists and the cosmopolitans. The nationalists were seen as down-to-earth, God fearing, plainspoken people like George W. Bush. The cosmopolitans included the mainstream journalistic world that “too often represents the ultimate me, me, me culture of today’s international elite.”

In 1988, George H.W. Bush employed a variant of the New Class argument when he denounced “Harvard boutique” ideas of the people who supported Michael Dukakis. It did not matter that Bush had attended Yale, another Ivy League bastion of privilege. Republicans regularly denounce the “Hollywood elite” and the “intellectual elite,” and George W. Bush condemned Ann Richards in 1994 for going to California to raise campaign money from the “liberal elite.” At the same time, Jeb Bush, running for governor in Florida, claimed that his views were “mainstream ideas, ideas that matter, whether the intellectual elite in this state likes them or not.” Republicans have been able to neutralize much of the criticism of their economic ideas as “class warfare,” but they have used variants of the New Class theme to demonize their opposition and distract attention from economic policies that largely benefit one economic class.




Sherman has written African American Baseball: A brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum

NeoConservative Foreign Policy

Neo Conservatives used the pages of Commentary and The Public Interest to defend the Vietnam War and advance their aggressive anti-communist policies. The Vietnam War began the gradual destruction of foreign policy bipartisanship in the United States. In foreign affairs, the Neo Conservatives tended to take a Manichean viewpoint, seeing only “good” and “evil” and this attitude persisted after the Soviet Union finally collapsed. Even with the collapse of Soviet power, the Neo Conservatives were eventually to convert most of their Republican allies to a unilateralist, assertive, crusading approach to foreign policy. On the other hand, the Neo Conservatives quickly embraced modified laissez faire economics. Indeed, their conversion to conservatism was often related to the appeal of market fundamentalism and their disillusionment with the welfare state. Many of them came to excel as apologists for so-called market fundamentalism, often writing on behalf of conservative think tanks. They eventually succeeded in shifting the “popular focus from workers to entrepreneurs, from income to wealth, from job creation to share-price increases, and from government policy innovation to private-sector autonomy.”

When the US withdrew from Vietnam, the Neo Conservatives knew that battling another menace was necessary to revitalize the martial spirit of the American people. In foreign affairs, the Neo Conservatives were impatient with the gradual, moderate approach of those who pursued containment as the basic strategy for dealing with the Soviet Union. The Neo Conservatives were anxious to confront more directly the Soviets and to deploy American power to reshape the world to conform to American ideals. Neo Conservative intellectuals had contempt for Henry Kissinger, who worked for accommodation with the Soviet Union. They were hawkish, critical of deterrence, and inclined to exaggerate the power of the Soviet Union. They were convinced that theirs’ was a righteous cause and that any means were justified in battling Communism. Though they were highly moralistic, their policies were amoral. Since President Richard Nixon opened relations with China and pursued détente, there was a tendency for politicians and writers to believe the Cold War was on the way to being ended. One reason they so disliked Jimmy Carter and called him an “isolationist” and “appeaser” is that they understood that the Georgian was pursuing Nixon’s policy of defusing the Cold War. It is doubtful that many liberals grasped this. They followed Norman Podhoretz in warning that the United States was about to be “Finlandized” into economic and political subordination to the Soviet Union. In the eighties, they eagerly worked for Ronald Reagan because he harped on the evil of communism. Working for him, they called the right-wing Contra thugs in Nicaragua and Angola’s Jonas Savimbi “freedom fighters.”

The Neo Conservatives eventually developed a core doctrine that held that democratic states were friendly states and that the US should vigorously be promoting democracy around the world. In 1976, some of them formed the Committee on the Present Danger. In addition to Neo Conservatives there were traditional nationalists Elmo Zumwalt, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Nitze, Eugene Rostow, and William Casey. These people also believed that the Soviets were employing terrorism as a major weapon in the Cold War. Under Reagan, the new conservatives and their allies assumed important posts. Jean Kirkpatrick became Ambassador to the United Nations, and Bill Casey led the CIA. Richard Perle became assistant secretary of defense for international security policy, and Elliott Abrams became assistant secretary of state for international relations. He is a strong friend of Israel, having said, “there can be no doubt that Jews..are to stand apart –except for Israel- from the rest of the population.”
Perle has been an important figure in the Republican foreign policy apparatus for a long time. But for some reason he has maintained his political registration as a Democrat. Paul Wolfowitz ran the State Department’s policy planning staff for two years.

For a time Wolfowitz was the leader of a group at the CIA called “Team B,” an assemblage of conservative scholars who were very critical of CIA estimates and developed an alarmist projection of Soviet power that p[roved to be wrong and inaccurate on many counts. Gerald Ford permitted Director George H.W. Bush to put them in high places when Ronald Reagan showed strength in the 1976 primaries. They wanted the CIA to estimate that the Soviet Union was more powerful than it was. Wolfowitz, a former academician, also served as Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to Indonesia, where he was a strong booster of President Haji Suharto, known as “the most corrupt world leader in recent history.” Wolfowitz backed policies that threatened human rights and aspirations for democracy and helped inspire the reckless deregulation of banking there which resulted in the economic collapse of 1997.”

The Neo Conservatives loved Reagan’s belligerent rhetoric but were deeply frustrated because he did not close in to kill off the Soviet Union --the “evil empire.” Yet they eventually concluded that Reagan embraced enough of their new foreign policy fundamentalism to bring down the Soviet empire, and this became the paradigm for the future. Results came from engagement, bold actions, and a potent and threatening military. Paul Berman has noted “Neo Conservative foreign policy thinking has all along indulged a romance of ruthlessness- an expectation that small numbers of people might be able to play a decisive role in world events, if only their ferocity could be released. In the Reagan years they had some opportunities to shape events. Casey ousted and marginalized CIA analysts whose views did not coincide with his. Oliver North and his associates illegally supplied right wing rebels in Nicaragua and protected their drug trade. The unleashed ferocity of these people resulted in the Iran Contra scandal.

Typical of the Jewish NeoCons was Paul D. Wolfowitz, who was to have a strong influence on Republican military and foreign policy in the administrations of the Bushes. While at the University of Chicago, he became the protégé of Albert Wohlstetter, a hawkish geo-military thinker who would later become a bitter critic of détente. Although Wolfowitz used promotion of democracy as a reason for the second Iraq War, some accuse him of having a “passionate hatred of democracy.” This was because he and other Neo Conservatives were strong backers of brutal tactics in the 1980s to quell democratic movements in Latin America. He had been pushing for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein since 1979 and eventually fashioned a doctrine that called for a U.S. war to overthrow Saddam as a first step in remodeling the region to make it safe for Israel. In time he would exert enormous influence.

Because the Neo Conservative were urban and intellectuals, they were not entirely accepted by the New Right. Eliot Abrams, Norman Podhorentz’s son-in-law, was another influential Neo Conservative who served in the Reagan administration and was convicted of lying to Congress. He was to direct White House Middle East policy for George W. Bush. Perhaps the most influential Neo Conservative foreign policy spokesman was Richard Perle who worked with Donald Rumsfeld in the Ford Administration to damage the Salt II Arms Treaty. Known as the “Prince of Darkness,” – a title he shared with Bob Novak-- Richard Perle became another key advisor in the second Bush administration. As Assistant Secretary of Defense, he played a major role in persuading Ronald Reagan to spend vast amounts on defense and to launch the so-called Star Wars defensive missile system. Perle and other Neo Conservatives occupied second and third tier positions in the Reagan administration. James Baker, Bush Sr.’s Secretary of State, was uncomfortable with their foreign policy moralism and grandiose designs and “couldn’t wait to sweep [them] out.” Their moralism would later be called “hard Wilsonianism.”

Perle and other Neo Conservatives believed that the end of the Cold War gave the United States a golden opportunity to reshape the Middle East. While working for the Reagan administration, he was discovered assisting an Israeli arms manufacturer. By the 1990s, he came to oppose the Israel-Palestine peace process, used his influence with Israel to scuttle Bill Clinton’s Camp David Peace Conference, and advised Israel to set aside talks with the Palestinians and concentrate on overthrowing the Iraqi government and reconfigure the political dynamics of the region. Once in power, Wolfowitz urged the administration to give Israel a free hand in dealing with the Palestinians. The Neo Conservatives had worried that the fall of the Soviet Union would mean the loss of “a defining foreign demon,” as Norman Podhoretz put it. For that reason, they welcomed the First Gulf War. Irving Kristol thought it was always an excellent sign when the people wanted to fight a war.

At the end of the First Gulf War, Neo Conservative Paul Wolfowitz believed that George W. Bush muffed an opportunity to oust Saddam Hussein. In 1992, Paul Wolfowitz and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, working for then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney wrote a paper entitled “Defense Planning Guidance Defense” stating that the United States should pay less attention to the opinions of allies and be more willing to use force to gain its ends in the world. It justified the use of preemptive force when necessary to reshape the world as the US wanted. Zalmay Khalilzad, who was then the Bush administration’s ambassador to Iraq, assisted them. This paper embodied what came to be known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine. Secretary Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, his undersecretary for policy, looked to the day when the US would cash in on its military preeminence to reorder the world along the lines of American democracy and values. They looked forward to a permanent military presence on six continents as a means of preventing “potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.” These views conflicted with the outlook of the senior Bush and the paper was put aside. Their proposals were considered rash and extreme at the time, but these views were to become the nucleus of the Bush Doctrine, which was enunciated in 2002.

Richard Perle was a key architect of Neo Conservative foreign policy. He is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and attends meetings of the editorial board of the Jerusalem Post. Perle is a close friend of David Wurmser, another AEI scholar, known for his hawkish, pro-Israel views. In the administration of the younger Bush, he operated an intelligence and disinformation shop first in the State Department and then in the Pentagon, where his task was to build a case for invading Iraq and to shoot down CIA reports. Other NeoCons to operate out of the AEI were Michael Ledeen and Irving Kristol. As ayoung man, Ledeen was a journalist in Rome where he developed respect for the Italian Fascists. He became a leading NeoCon theorist. Allies Matthew Sculy and John Shattan are well positioned in the White House and I. Lewis Libby is Vice President Cheney’s chief-of-staff. Prize-winning London based journalist John Pilger considered Perle a dangerous person who thought about “total war” in the 1980s against the Soviet Union and later applied the same approach to Iraq. Perle became head of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Council under George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. As the secretary’s chief advisor in the administration of George W. Bush, he is credited with foreshadowing the administration’s new defense doctrine of pre-emptive threats and strikes. Paul Wolfowitz was Deputy Secretary of Defense under George W. Bush and subsequently served two years as president of the World Bank.

In the second Bush administration, Wolfowitz’s unilateral militarism found eager supporters in an administration shaped by traditional deep- southern militarism. The United States started to dismantle test treaties and agreements, question the value of the Oslo Accord, and refused to sign Kyoto Agreement It also did all it could to undermine the International Criminal Court and persuaded one hundred countries to sign treaties exempting U.S. citizens and employees from its jurisdiction Larry Franklin, a Neo Conservative Pentagon analyst, was not a Jew but shared the Neo Conservative view that there was no difference between the foreign policy objectives of the United States and Israel. In January 2006, he was sentenced to twelve years incarceration for passing secret information to the Israeli embassy and two operatives for the IIPAC. The judge noted he was a nice fellow who thought he was helping his country.

Perle and the Neo Conservatives used the claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction to push the United States into invading Iraq in 2003. After no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, Perle brushed aside the questions of weapons of mass destruction ( WMDs) and praised the administration for getting into Iraq in time. Next on his agenda were North Korea and Iran, whom he saw as states that sponsored terrorism.

The Neo Conservative hawks found strong support coming from the New Right, with the exception of Patrick Buchanan and his followers. The Buchananites saw imperialism as unconservative and believed young Bush’s war in Iraq was a massive blunder. In foreign affairs, the Neo Conservatives and Religious Right frequently found common ground. Members of the Christian Right had supported what was had been called foreign policy fundamentalists who were impatient with restraint in the use of force against Communism. It was a somewhat older form of foreign policy fundamentalism than that of the Neo Conservatives. It was less into Wilsonian crusading and more into the use of brute force when necessary variety. Still, it was a very good match. By playing to the cultural and military fundamentalism of the Christian Right, the Neo Conservative had a very good shot at capturing the heart of America. Neo Conservatives worked hard to win over the Religious Right, but they grew uneasy when the Christian Evangelicals started to dominate the party. Charles Krauthammer and Chris Caldwell were heard to complain about “yahoos” who emitted the rebel yell and were most probably racists.

The foreign policy fundamentalists of the 1960s and 1970s were impatient with foreign policy professionals who seemed to be too concerned with complexities, nuances, and desire to avoid a unilateralist foreign policy. Alexander Haig, Ronald Reagan’s first Secretary of State, could be classified as a foreign policy fundamentalist. He once stunned Howard Baker and Michael Deaver by talking about bombing Cuba, saying, “We can make that fucking place look like a parking lot!” Neo Conservative hawks shared this impatience and were idealists who believed that the United States should be more willing to use its power to transform the world to greater proximity to US ideals. Their concerns converged most frequently in the Middle East. The Christian Right had theological reasons to protect Israel, and many of the Neo Conservative hawks were Jews and supportive of the aggressive and militant Likud Party. Overlooking the already greatly deteriorated State of the Soviet Union, they saw the Reagan defense program as a “Hail Mary pass” that worked. They also saw George H. W. Bush’s victory in the 1991 Gulf War as another bold stroke for which they deserved much credit.

These successes reinforced the idea that by just “leaning forward,” in Wolfowitz’s words, the US could make great positive changes in the world. As the Soviet Union imploded, Neo Conservatives saw a golden opportunity for the United States to deal with its remaining enemies. Charles Krauthammer wrote a column entitled ”Universal Dominion: Toward a Unipolar World,” in which he spelled out the Neo Conservative doctrine of “a unipolar world whose center is a confederated West” led by the sole superpower, the United States. The term “unipolar” did not survive, but Neo Conservatives continued to build on their vision of the United States using its power to reshape the world.

Many Neo Conservatives were members of “the Vulcans,” the team Condoleezza Rice assembled to tutor George W. Bush in foreign affairs. Rice was not a Neo Conservative, but NeoCon hardliners managed to make a convert of George W. Bush. Many of their views could be found in an influential policy paper, which would become an outline for Bush foreign policy. In September 2000, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) released “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies, Forces, and Resources for a New Century.” It called for a regime change in Iraq, which would make that country a key American base for effecting other changes in the Middle East, where there was to be a permanent US military presence in several countries. The authors believed that corrupt and undemocratic governments in the Middle East bred terrorism and that in order to combat terrorism it was necessary to replace these regimes with democracies. For this reason, changing regimes in Egypt and Jordan was also desirable. When Joshua Micah Marshall asked Richard Perle about upending the regime in Egypt, Perle responded, “Surely we can do better than Mubarek.”
Both the Neo Conservatives and the Bush family retainers were agreed that the US should invade Iraq, but they had somewhat different reasons for doing so. Almost certainly, George H.W. Bush expected that and family retainers like James Baker III, Brent Scowcroft, and Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia would guide the younger Bush and keep the NeoCons in line. They trusted Dick Cheney to be a faithful trustee, even though he was very close to the elder Bush’s long-time enemy, Donald Rumsfeld. They did not expect old line nationalists Cheney and Rumsfeld to form an alliance with the Neo Cons or for the younger Bush to often ignore the advice of Baker and Scowcroft. In the end, the major voices in policy making became those of Cheney and Rumsfeld. However, Baker and the Big Oil elements did manage to prevail holding down Iraqi oil production to boost gasoline and fuel oil prices.

The occupation of Iraq was to be the first of a series of victories in “multiple, simultaneous major theater wars.” It indicated that getting U.S. troops into the Gulf area “transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.” The PNAC position paper also recommended reviving a biochemical weapons program, the creation of a Star Wars type missile defense system, increased defense spending, and repudiation of the ABM treaty. It was critical of the old policy of deterrence and noted that past Pentagon plans for a war against North Korea did not include force requirements for entering that country and removing an abhorrent regime. The United Nations was portrayed as a potential rival and obstacle. Martin Perez, publisher of The New Republic, and James Woolsey, the former director of the CIA, were connected to this think tank.

I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby and his mentor Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Eliot Abrams, Jeb Bush, and Paul Wolfowitz were also associated with PNAC. The report was rewritten for the National Security Council in 2002. Robert Kagan and William Kristol were among those who founded PNAC in 1997. Kagan, a classical scholar, believes that Americans by nature are warriors and that Europeans are pacifists. Americans are at their moral best when engaged in battle. Bill Kristol, son of a founder of the Neo Conservatives, is sometimes called a “mini-con,” suggesting that the second generation of Neo Conservatives lacked the profundity of their fathers.

PNAC had a staff filled with people who had been with the Committee for the Present Danger, which wanted to win the cold war, and Friends of the Democratic Center, which worked hard to support right-wing elements in Nicaragua and El Salvador. PNAC founded the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which worked with Condoleezza Rice to develop plans to educate Americans about the danger Iraq posed to US security. Perle headed a committee of eighteen that recommended reemphasizing the peace process and looking more toward the eventual democratization of the Middle East as a means for solving Israel’s problems in the region. Douglas Feith, one of the drafters, was to become Under-Secretary for Policy in the Bush Pentagon. The PNAC white paper reflected views expressed in an earlier position paper that was prepared for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netenyahu, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for the Middle East” by a team led by Richard Perle. They wanted Bibi to stop pursuing policies in accordance with the Oslo Accords and focus on weakening Syria and working to overthrow Saddam Hussein. They believed that Turkey and Jordan would work with Israel toward these goals. William Kristol and Robert Kagan also urged pre-emptive action against potential terrorist states in a 1996 Foreign Affairs article. Neo Conservatives in 1998 wrote a letter to President Clinton demanding preemptive action against Iraq. When Clinton bombed Iraq for four days, many Republicans criticized him for taking aggressive action and trying to distract public attention from his sex scandal.

There were other Republican elements that viewed an attack on Iraq as desirable because it would reduce energy problems. The extent to which a concern for a rapidly growing dependence on Arab-controlled hydrocarbons influenced Neo Conservative policy is unclear. The Baker Institute, which was not a Neo Conservative operation, produced a report for Cheney’s energy task force in April 2001, in which it focused on this energy problem and added that Iraq was “a destabilizing influence to the flow of oil to international markets. The Cheney task force recommended “military intervention” to eliminate this threat to U.S. security. It is possible that Bush was not “duped” by the Neo Conservatives. It may be more likely that traditional conservatives exploited “the Neo Conservatives’ ideological arsenal to advance his preferred set of policies than visa versa.”

The Neo Conservatives were within the mainstream of modern American foreign policy to the extent that they genuinely want material prosperity, democracy, and freedom for other peoples. Even their belief that this is the moment for the United States to move decisively to make the world better is in line with the call for an American Century that was heard after World War II. However, their insistence upon preemptive action is a radical departure, and their unilateralism and scorn for international cooperation are sharp departures from decades of American policy. The hawkish Neo Conservatives were in a position to have a great influence on public opinion. William Safire had a New York Times column, and Krauthammer repeatedly pressed for war in his Washington Post column. Robert Bartley was editor of The Wall Street Journal. A network of Perle friends was well positioned in the think tanks. Meyra Wurmser was at the Hudson Institute and had founded The Middle East Media Research Institute, which turned out to be financed by Israeli military intelligence. Her husband, David Wurmser headed Middle East Studies at AEI.

On September 11, 2001, terrorists launched an horrific attack on the United States, which gave the Neo Conservatives a golden opportunity to implement their policies. Nine days later, Neo Conservative leader Bill Kristol, published an “Open Letter to the President” in the Weekly Standard, a magazine founded with $10 million Rupert Murdock donated for the creation of a Neo Conservative magazine. Kristol demanded that an effort be made to remove Saddam Hussein from power due to his hostility to U.S. interests and possible links to terrorism. By removing him, the U.S. would be establishing a “safe zone” in the Middle East. He also called for retaliation against Iran and Syria because they had backed Hezbollah, a terrorist organization that had repeatedly attacked Israel. Forty-one Neo Conservatives signed the letter, including William Bennett, Francis Fukuyama, Midge Decter and her husband Norman Podhorentz, Deputy Undersecretary of State Richard Armitage, Charles Krauthammer, Richard Perle, Jean Kirkpatrick, Robert Kagan, Frank Gafney, and Assistant Secretary of Defense Peter Rodman. The latter was affiliated with the Center for Strategic Studies, and Kagan wrote for the Weekly Standard.

Tom Donnelly of PNAC joined the chorus of those calling for an attack on Iraq, noting that this time a half million troops would not be necessary. The National Review’s Jonah Goldberg used the so-called “Ledeen Doctrine” to justify an attack on Iraq. Former Pentagon official Michael Ledeen was described as believing that “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show we mean business.” Ledeen had taught at Washington University and also assisted Lt. Colonel Oliver North to sell arms to the Ayatollah. In his book The War Against Terror Masters, Ledeen identified the countries that should be attacked: Iran, Iraq, and Syria. Ledeen revealed a bit of the Neo Conservatives’ Jacobin streak, stating “Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our society and abroad.” It was necessary to destroy enemies “to advance our historic mission” because they “have always hated this whirlwind of energy and creativity which menaces their traditions--and names them for their inability to keep pace.” On September 24,2002, Michael Ledeen wrote in The London Times that “The real foe is Middle Eastern tyranny” and called for regime change in Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Palestinian Authority as well as Iraq. After the Second Gulf War, he put Iran and Syria on the future hit list, saying “No one I know wants to wage war on Iran and Syria, but I believe there is now a clear recognition that we must defend ourselves against them.” The NeoCons saw a successful war against Iraq as the first step in bringing democracy to the Middle East and moving decisively against Israel’s enemies. Ledeen once claimed,” Americans believe that peace is normal, but that’s not true. Life isn’t like that. Peace is abnormal.”
James Woolsey would later tell a UCLA Republican audience that the United States was involved in “World War IV” and said it would last “ considerably longer than World Wars I or II.” He spoke strongly of forcing Syria into line with US policy. At about the same time, Wolfowitz was telling a congressional committee “we need to think about our policy in respect to a country [Syria] that harbors terrorists or harbors war criminals.” When the UN failed to back Bush’s invasion of Iraq, conservative circles began to hum with plans for replacing it.

Perle caused a great stir when he brought Laurent Murawiec to the Pentagon Policy Council on July 10, 2002, and she suggested that the US attack Egypt and Saudi Arabia as well as Iraq. He was a Rand Corporation analyst who had also worked for Lyndon La Rouche. Murawiec identified Saudi Arabia as “the kernel of evil, the prime mover, the most dangerous opponent of the United States”.
The Bush Doctrine

Though most of the leading Neo Conservative hawks had no particular expertise in the Middle East or Islamic affairs, they were behind President Bush’s drive in 2002 and 2003 for war against Iraq. They were brilliant people capable of concocting brilliant schemes that sometimes worked; the problem was their impatience with detail and the opinion of other people and nations. They adhered to a domino-like theory that the dictator’s fall would bring democracy to much of the Middle East. They played a major role in Bush’s successful efforts to transfer fear of Osama bin Laden to Saddam Hussein. A major long-term triumph for these Neo Conservative hawks was the Bush Doctrine, which was unveiled September 20, 2003. The roots of this aggressive foreign policy go back to a position paper Wolfowitz, and his deputy I. Lewis Libby, wrote for Defense Secretary Dick Cheney in 1992. These ideas were more fully fleshed out in a paper issued by the Project for the New American Century in September 2000. The Bush Doctrine envisioned a new American global empire, in which the United States would act as a world policeman and impose its will by force when necessary, and it justified preemptive strikes against enemies who could damage the United States and its interests. In effect, Bush was saying that the rest of the world must accept American judgments about when its interests are so threatened that it must use force preemptively. It later developed that the intelligence claims the US used to invade Iraq in 2003 were so flawed that the administration had squandered much credibility elsewhere in the world. The doctrine’s logic was faulty in that it was argued that other nations must not resort to preemptive war, but it was a noble venture when the US undertook it.

Critics charged that it was fashioned by zealots who saw no limits to U.S. power and were intent on militarizing U.S. Foreign policy. The authors of the doctrine saw no problems in unilateralism and the U.S. throwing its weight around so long as its intentions were good.

National security professionals in the State and Defense Departments were infuriated by the “cowboy tactics” these people recommended. The national security establishment saw force as a last resort, and preferred to use it only in concert with allies. Moreover, they worried about unintended consequences of rash actions and feared that, though getting rid of Saddam Hussein was a good thing, that the aftermath of a war could create great problems. They were of the opinion that Clinton had put Saddam “in a box” and believed that the UN inspections further neutralized the Iraqi dictator. Those who took this position maintained that Saddam would not supply terrorists with weapons because he knew what the consequences would be. Moreover, it was believed unlikely that he would attack a U.S. ally. They note that it was unclear in 1990 whether the U.S. was committed to Kuwait before Saddam invaded.

In 2002, it soon became clear that Bush had made up his mind that the U.S. must go to war with Iraq, but it not quite clear why the matter had become so urgent. At West Point’s spring, 2002 commencement, Bush argued that the war against terrorism made it necessary for new thinking about defense and noted that the U.S. “cannot put our trust in the word of tyrants.” It would soon become clear that he thought it necessary to turn away from deterrence and containment and move toward preemptive action against perceived enemies, among whom was Iraq. In a major address before the American Enterprise Institute in March 2003, the President echoed the PNAC position paper in justifying his call for war. He saw the creation of a democratic Iraq as the solution for the Israeli-Palestinian problem. A democratic Iraq would lead to the transformation of the region and the solution of the Israeli-Palestinian problem.
The enunciation of the Bush Doctrine in September 2002 marked the triumph of Neo Conservative foreign policy. The Bush administration sent a position paper on national security strategy to Congress on September 20, 2002 that Bush Doctrine was enunciated. Law required this submission to Congress, but this was no ordinary paper. This “National Security Strategy for the United States” outlined a bold and somewhat aggressive stance that downplayed the long-standing doctrine of containment and announced that the US must have the right to preemptive strikes and war against its new enemies, terrorist states and terrorist organizations. Because the new foes were able to easily attack the United States with various weapons of mass destruction, the point was that the US must engage in “preemptive deterrence” (“anticipatory self-defense”) before the enemy had developed the capacity to attack the US or its friends. This approach had the obvious advantage of surprise and the use of a smaller force. But this preemptive deterrence was straining long-standing alliances and setting a precedent for other nations to use the same doctrine.

This extraordinary doctrine announced that the United States would never again allow another state to equal it in military power, and claimed the right to use its power to advance the cause of freedom anywhere in the world. The doctrine proclaimed that there was “a single sustainable model for national success,” and it was comprised of democracy, free enterprise, and democracy. The Bush Doctrine left to the United States to define these terms.

It was not completely clear if free enterprise meant unfettered capitalism and opening other countries to the ministrations of the International Monetary fund, World Bank, and World Trade Organization. However, in discussing lower taxes and pro-growth regulatory policies in messianic terms, it left little doubt that the Washington Consensus policies of the IMF and World Bank were to be applied everywhere. Its discussion of economics was couched in the terms of a closed intellectual system; there was no room for doubt or discussion. It is possible that the authors of the document saw 9/11 as a reaction against American economic policies. Around the time of that tragedy, trade representative Robert B. Zoellick suggested there were “intellectual connections” between opponents of US globalism and terrorists. In the same vein, Bush said “the terrorists attacked the World Trade Center, and we will defeat them by expanding and encouraging world trade.”

While the document appeared at a time when the administration was preparing public opinion for a preemptive strike against Iraq, much more was involved. It justified and placed in perspective the unilateral foreign policy the Bush administration had been following since its inception. The foundations for this sharp departure from American was a repudiation of the traditional policy of the first Bush, who was committed to multilateralism and international institutions, and who accepted the view that America was strongest when it was leading international efforts. Wolfowitz and the other designers of the Bush Doctrine may well have been operating out of genuinely utopian instincts, believing others would not react adversely to American unilateralism when they saw that it produced good results.

The Bush Doctrine assumes that lasting peace consisted of a world so ordered as to be friendly to American values and enterprise and preservation of the US position as sole superpower. The US was to assume the roles of “high-noon sheriff and proselytizing missionary.” One observer thought that it was only the logical extension of the general American belief that God gave the US a special role in history and that it had every right to be Number One. He noted that while a few radicals and intellectuals objected, and that the new Bush Doctrine “commands broad assent in virtually all segments of American society.”

The invasion of Iraq provided an opportunity to implement NeoCon doctrines It is difficult to find agreement on the extent to which oil influenced the decision to invade. There is a methodological problem here because no official went on record saying oil was a major consideration. Indeed, several said the exact opposite, but they eventually established records for lacking truthfulness. Many apply strict social science method in this case to accept the default position—that is, lacking airtight proof to the contrary, we accept official statements. Yet few think Bush would have invaded Iraq if it only exported rugs and pottery.

Paul O’Neill, a former Bush Secretary of the Treasury , said as much and talked about how White House officials were studying Iraq oil maps. We know that several energy position papers noted that Saddam Hussein was a “wild card” and a “swing producer” in the words of a Council on Foreign Relations Report. A report by the Baker Institute at Rice portrayed him as an irresponsible player on the international oil market.

Saddam could not be expected to always play by the rules and might sharply raise or lower production, creating an instability that the world’s oil barons deplored. According to OPEC general secretary Ali Rodriguez, Saddam and Libya’s Muammar al-Gaddafi were discussing a sharp reduction of oil exports to the West in April 2002. Those reports probably led to the US backed but unsuccessful coup against Chavez in Venezuela. That country had helped combat the 1973 oil embargo but could not be expected to do so again in 2002 with Chavez in power.

It is known that there were two approaches to moving against Iraq in 2003. The State Department organized a planning meeting at the home of Falah Aljibury, who worked for Regan and the senior Bush on Iraqi affairs. The plan was to insert forces to assist a coup, which would replace Saddam with a Bathist general we could control. There would be no long and costly occupation. Iraq’s oil transactions would b3ecome stable and predictable.

The Neo Conservative had very different ideas, and they had the upper hand in the Bush foreign policy operation. Their views were contained in a document entitled “Moving the Iraqi Economy from Recovery to Sustainable Growth.” In order to privatize Iraqi’s state owned industries—especially oil, a full invasion and occupation were required. The Pentagon supported this effort to create a private enterprise utopia.

The first American pro-consul in Iraq was retired General Jay Garner, a well-trained historian. He understood the Middle East, and promised elections in 90 days. Of course elections would have nullified NeoCon plans, which he read and rejected, but they would have produced friends rather than enemies for the United States in Iraq. He was soon “relocate,” and his replacement was Paul Bremer, III, a NeoCon and former managing director of Kissinger and Associates. He quickly privatized most businesses and banking, but ran into a huge roadblock when it came to oil. The problem was the NeoCon plan was that privatizing oil would weaken OPEC and, by increasing production, lower gas prices. Not the least of the problem, it offered no guaranteed that U.S. producers would control Iraqi oil. Speaking for U.s. big oil, Chevron CEO Philip Carroll, with the strong support of James Baker, III and US-Saudi interests, intervened and vetoed the plan. The Bush Administration accepted Carroll’s intervention, and soon Bremer was gone. The new US dispensation for Iraq oil would be a state controlled monopoly that would be guided and work through big US firms. Historically, Iraqi oil production had been held down to keep prices up, and this pattern was to continue. Now production levels were far below pre-invasion levels. The NeoCons lost their bid to battle OPEC and drive down oil prices, but they were successful in privatizing a great deal of Iraq’s economy.

The NeoCon foreign policy doctrines represented a form of militant foreign policy fundamentalism, and they provided a convenient means for the U.S .to short-circuit international law and the United Nations Charter. The Bush Doctrine reflected the impatience of its framers with international criticism and the gradualism and care required to implement containment policies. At a more fundamental level, it was another aspect of the New Right’s cultural wars to restore the old doctrine of Manifest Destiny and remove the deep shame that had attended the evacuation of Saigon and was a frontal attack on all those who thought America was in danger of doing sometime wrong. It would vanquish moral relativism and restore moral authority and the imperial presidency.

Most attributed the failed George W. Bush adventure in Iraq to the influence of the NeoCons, but they nevertheless retained great influence in his White House. They worked ceaselessly to build a case for attacking Iran appeared to fall short of gathering enough support to accomplish this. Russell Kirk once sadly remarked : “They aspire to bring about a world of uniformity and dull standardization, Americanized, industrialized, democratized, ‘logicalized’, and boring. They are cultural and economic imperialists, many of them.”




Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum

Meet the Neo Conservatives

The new Republican coalition of the late Twentieth Century garnered many highly talented and zealous recruits from the ranks of the Neo Conservatives, people who were once liberal intellectuals and former leftists who joined conservative ranks in the 1970s and after. Many of them became conservative journalists or worked for the emerging network of conservative think tanks. Some who once espoused socialism became its determined critics. They were fiercely anti-communist, supported the Vietnam War, and were put off by the New Left, which opposed the war and took cultural positions, which the Neo Conservatives denounced as destructive. These refugees from the left and liberalism found it comfortable to ally with conservatives who still believed that the Cold War was not over and that the USSR was an enormous threat to the US. They have been described by suspicious conservatives as “ex-liberals, socialists, and Trotskyites, boat people from the McGovern revolution who rafted over to the GOP.”
There was an unsuccessful Neo Conservative effort in 1976 to win the Democratic presidential nomination for hawk, Henry M. Jackson. Thereafter, most Neo Conservatives migrated to the Republican Party. While still liberals of different stripes, the Neo Conservatives moved away from a critique of capitalism and capitalist culture. The vast majority of them would eventually kick off all the traces of liberalism. They decided to privilege individualism and autonomy over the community. With time and the increasing rightward drift of the party, the Republican Neo Conservatives tended to show less and less interest in economic and social justice.

As they became strong advocates of neoliberal economics, they adopted the view that allowing the poor to deal with market forces was preferable to their old New Dealish positions. They had concluded that liberal solution had not worked and described themselves as liberals who had been “mugged” by reality.

Neo Conservatives become outspoken supporters of neoliberal economics and its Social Darwinian views of society and of helping the poor be responsible for themselves. They were not adverse to some state assistance in guiding the poor toward economic independence. However, it took some time for many of them to turn their backs on the New Deal heritage. As late as 1983, Irving Kristol was defending the long-standing liberal position on welfare. It was not long, however, before he too was talking about eliminating the welfare state. In time, less was heard from Neo Conservatives about this; however, there is little evidence that the Neo Conservatives ever got over their distaste for libertarians.

In the 1970s, there was a great upsurge of "backlash populism,” or right-wing populism that swept up many of these former left-wing intellectuals in its wake. They became Neo Conservatives. In the process, some of them accepted an anti-statism, for which some unorthodox forms of Marxism had conditioned them. Others employed anti-statist language while working to enlarge governmental and executive branch power as tools for the implementation of their plans. Neo Conservatives of most stripes would gradually become somewhat less distinguishable from all but the most extreme elements in the New Right. Like the New Right, they believe they are justified in using any hardball techniques to get what they want, including dirty tricks and lies. Unlike many on the New Right, they believe in expanding the federal government, and there is evidence that over time they have converted Republican colleagues on the New Right to this view. Both Neo Conservatives have contempt for libertarians, and both have a tendency to reshape traditional views of the constitution to suit their purposes. While the New Right believes that a godly and moral elite should exercise power, the Neo Conservatives expect power to be in the hands of an elite composed of highly educated individuals who are guided by their ideology.

Neo Conservatives are essentially secularists who want to preserve what is best of the Enlightenment heritage. Most are skeptics but value religion as a guarantor of order and morality. Oddly enough, some prominent Roman Catholics are Neo Conservatives despite the fact that Neo Conservatives have been historically hostile to religion. The New Right had reason to be suspicious of the Neo Conservatives, but over time they have worked well together. In temperament, they are not as different as might be expected, as both groups tend to produce zealots and ideologues.

Many of the Neo Conservatives were followers of the political philosopher Leo Strauss. They seemed to be unscrupulous, manipulative, and perfectly willing to manufacture information to support their goals. They were idealists whose conduct suggested that they believed that great truths needed to be protected by an army of small lies. Unlike their teacher, however, they were optimistic about the future of democracy, especially if the nation’s affairs were in their hands. They were able to use the terrorist attack on the United States to persuade the president and his chief advisors to adopt their positions and proclaim them as the Bush Doctrine. They insisted that 9/11 be exploited as a justification for an attack on Iraq. Liberal critics saw a successful Straussian conspiracy to hijack US foreign policy, but it may have been just as likely that Bush and Rumsfeld used the Neo Conservatives and Straussians for their own ends. It should also be remembered that there was not a great deal of difference between Neo Conservative and Straussian views and the position of foreign policy fundamentalists and unilateralists. Of course, the NeoCons were far more convinced than the foreign policy fundamentalists that aspects of Muslim civilization were antithetical to liberal democracy, social and economic progress, and intellectual freedom.

Dr. Rice described the Bush Doctrine as calling for “anticipatory self-defense,” which sounds less arrogant than preemptive strikes. She is not usually considered a NeoCon, but she certainly had leanings in that direction prior to 2001. She wrote in World Affairs in 2000 condemning “the reflexive appeal … to notions of international law and norms, and the belief that the support of many states –or even better, of institutions like the United Nations—is essential to the legitimate exercise of power.” These were the words of a mainstream American foreign policy expert, who simply carried some long established views farther than most. The fact is that the United States has long exempted itself from parts of the United Nations Charter and has withdrawn from international obligations on a regular basis whenever its interests seemed to demand it. There was a precedent of sorts for the Bush Doctrine in the Clinton Doctrine. The latter reserved for the United States the right to use military force to obtain “uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources.” The Bush Doctrine of the NeoCons went a few steps beyond these precedents, and was, as Henry Kissinger said, “revolutionary.” It simply discarded traditional American homage to international principles, which the US frequently violated in practice. Previous administrations thought it foolish to make such brash assertions of power and to then implement them in a manner that would infuriate even its allies. The NeoCons and Bush claimed a right others assumed existed, but should not be claimed openly and was to be used only as a last resort. As Henry Kissinger noted, anticipatory self-defense was a right that only the United States of America possessed. The NeoCons took this so-called right out of the back pocket and used it as a tool in normal statecraft.

It has been said that the late University of Chicago philosopher Leo Strauss was the spiritual godfather of the Neo Conservatives. He had a profound influence upon Irving Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Norman Podhorentz, William Kristol, and Gary Schmitt, leader of the Project for the New American Century. Strauss was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who taught political philosophy at the University of Chicago for twenty-five years. He never accepted the label of conservative, but his thinking was to have a great appeal to conservatives. It was quite different from what constituted mainstream conservatives in his lifetime and after his death. His outlook was very critical of much in modern culture and was rooted in pre-modern thought. Strauss saw the wreckage of the Weimar Republic and came to distrust democracy, seeing that Weimar’s weakness led to the barbarism of the Nazis. He favored a hierarchal society and saw the need for a populace animated by rabid nationalism and fervent religiosity.

No doubt most Neo Conservatives have not read the works of Leo Strauss, but their thinking has been strongly influenced by him. Staussians seemed to view themselves as superior persons, perhaps because they possess esoteric knowledge and value ancient virtues Neo Conservatives are Straussians to the extent that the fear the masses and democracy, believe in a government by an elite which should enjoy special dignity, accept the notion that the wise lead by telling noble lies, and insist that the worst thing that could befall the United States would be if its people no longer believed in the superiority of the American people.

Straussian thought did not revere tradition, as did conservatives of the stamp of Edmund Burke. Though not religious, Strauss valued religion, along with patriotism, as necessary to hold states and societies together. His basic outlook was that pre-modern philosophers had found it necessary to say what they had to say “between the lines” to protect themselves from the masses and governments. Most of them had concluded that there were no truths, no natural law, and no gods. They saw morality as necessary for order but knew it was only based on customs and prejudices. Straussians shared an esoteric approach to knowledge; knew that their basic beliefs should be shared with only an elite and believed that modern philosophy, in trying to address the common man, eventually exposed ordinary people to knowledge they could not live with comfortably. This led to nihilism and relativism, which Strauss and his followers deplored, and ultimately the wreckage of modern culture and the spawning of the New Left. The Straussians opposed moral relativism, but at root they were philosophical relativists. Strauss and his followers valued authority, heroism, and creativity and believe that democracy threatens these qualities. They placed a premium on truth and justice; some saw them as salutary myths and others thought it possible to almost approximate them.

Professor Strauss and his followers thought their mission was to work to salvage what they could of liberal democracy and the best of Western Culture, but they differed among themselves on accomplish this. He had contempt for the weakness of the German Weimar Republic and taught that masses need strong leadership, which is willing to deceive them when necessary. He believed that perpetual deception was necessary to give the people the leadership they needed, and feared the disorder that could flow from excessive dissent. He noted that the best way to insure a stable political order is to bring about unity through fear of an external threat and said such a threat should be” manufactured if it did not actually exist.”
Strauss’s teachings laid the groundwork for an aggressive foreign policy that was to include unilateralism, preemptive strikes, and frequent warfare. He taught that the “liberal democracies live in constant danger from hostile elements abroad.” Given this situation, “to make the world safe for the Western democracies, one must make the whole globe democratic.” Democracies have a natural right to battle their barbarous opponents and have an obligation, as victors, to teach conquered peoples western democratic values. Strauss had a great influence on Neo Conservative thought, but it would seem that most of them overcame elements of his pessimism. If anything, they were to become very Wilsonian in their optimism over what America could accomplish in the world.

Leo Strauss told his inner circle that religion must be used by “true wise men” to control the masses and lead them in the correct direction. Strauss claimed that religion was false, but its deception must be hidden from the people. Most Neo Conservatives did not crusade against abortion or fight to restore prayer to the schools, but they developed many other themes to ingratiate conservative Christians. The Neo Conservatives found that by exploiting questions of promiscuity, drug use, rising crime, homosexuality, pornography, and assaults on traditional culture, they could activate fundamentalist and evangelical Christians. It did not matter that Strauss, himself, said the drug problem could be handled by handing out free doses on a daily basis.

Reverend Richard John Neuhaus, William Bennett, George Weigel and Michael Novak were representative of Catholic Neo Conservatives. These Catholic intellectuals had once been sympathetic to distributive justice and had worried about how capitalism nurtured materialism and egoism. In time, some like Michael Novak distanced themselves from these social concerns of their church and became apologists for relatively unrestrained capitalism. For example, Fr. Richard Neuhaus seemed to distance himself from Catholic views about private property and held that progressive taxation amounted to theft. His main concern was that strict enforcement of the First Amendment seemed to drive religious considerations from the public square. He seemed willing to embrace market economics of corporate America in return for its support in inserting religion into public discourse. Novak and papal biographer George Weigel reconfigured Catholic teachings on just warfare to justify George W. Bush’s Second Gulf War and rejected John Paul II’s clear position on that conflict because, by the 1970s, so many Catholics had distanced themselves from the natural law thought of their church. The thought of Catholic Neo Conservatives is almost indistinguishable from that of secular Neo Conservatives, except in respect to abortion. However these Catholics maintain that life begins at conception, a view grounded more in natural law than in science. On the broader question of the meaning of the First Amendment, they have coalesced around legal scholar Michael McConnell’s view that a secularist approach to the amendment denies equal consideration of the rights and concerns of religious people.

Many of the NeoCons were Jewish, and their presence in the conservative movement would eventually move it into close alignment with the most militant elements in Israel. They were strongly attached to the Likud Party and its vision of a Greater Israel. In the 1980s, they had considerable influence but did not have their hands directly on the levers of power. They greatly overestimated the Soviet Union’s military power and worked hard to convince the Reagan administration to pursue the Star Wars (the Strategic Defense Initiative) weapons system and vastly increase defense spending. They were convinced that this program brought an end to the Cold War. It may have contributed to the collapse of the USSR, but it is an open question whether the enormous expense and increased tensions were worth it.
The Neo Conservatives were to become analysts for conservative think tanks, cranking out material on foreign policy and economics, and about how the liberals allegedly destroyed traditional American culture. In no time, they appeared to have forgotten that their former friends in the academy and among liberal intellectuals had often been the strongest critics of consumerism, hedonism, and materialistic values. Their new job was to manufacture materials blaming these and other problems on liberals, and they did it well. Although they fit the profile of the hated New Class, NeoCons quickly became proficient in cranking out polemics against the so-called liberal “New Class” of elitist intellectuals who were allegedly out to soften American foreign policy and undermine foreign policy. The gist of their argument was that these people were “elitists” who somehow looked down on the views of ordinary folk. In truth, it was the Straussian Neo Conservatives who were the self-conscious intellectuals who were determined to manipulate the unwashed masses. The new conservative think tanks were established in order to create a “counter-establishment.” Over time they have succeeded in doing this, but they are not places where independent scholars can do their best to serve their country, regardless of party politics. Rather, in the words of Fareed Zakaria, they turn out “lots of predictable polemics and little serious analysis.”

The NeoCons were activists by nature and needed an identifiable enemy. By creating the “New Class” myth, they provided the necessary enemy-- those in the literati, academy, and media who disagreed with them. Later, when even they acknowledged the end of the Cold War, they threw themselves into a war against the remnants of American liberalism. Among their leaders were Michael Novak, James Q. Wilson, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, and William Bennett. Mark Lillan of the University of Chicago noted in 2002 that the Neo Conservatives were animated by “ a purely political passion to challenge the intellectuals.’” Maintaining that liberal intellectuals have abandoned scholarly standards, the Neo Conservatives believe themselves justified in the “cavalier use of sources and quotations” and any kind of charge against liberal intellectuals, including treason, bad faith, and cowardice. The Neo Conservatives generally claimed to believe in fixed, absolute principles -- something they shared with their less sophisticated political allies in the evangelical churches and far right. This tendency toward anger and self-righteousness has spread so widely among conservatives, that very few conservatives were heard to question the inconsistent and clearly political decision of the Supreme Court in 2000 to stop the counting of votes in Florida and effectively give the presidency to George W. Bush. Had the shoe been on the other foot, most Democrats would have let partisanship get the better of them, but it is likely that a significant number of them would question what the high court had done. Conservatives came to possess a certainty that lent itself to zeal, self-righteousness, and passion. The liberal outlook was more pragmatic and nuanced in nature and less given to the anger and passion that fuels winning political campaigns.

Their work, and that of other in the conservative think tanks, enabled Conservatives to present their ideas in a manner that made them appear new and attractive to voters. The triumph of Ronald Reagan in 1980 was partly attributable to their hard work on the ideological front. Very few voters have highly developed ideological perspectives, but there has been an increasing tendency for voters to locate themselves somewhere along the liberal/conservative spectrum. By 2003, their publications included the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, and Commentary, The New Republic, and the Weekly Standard. They also write many syndicated columns and contribute to many magazines. The efforts of Neo Conservative writers and activists most probably account for the decision of more voters to identify with conservative outlooks than liberal one’s. To the New Right, the Neo Conservatives were suspect because they were highly educated, eastern urban dwellers and intellectuals. Nevertheless, the NeoCons served the New Right well by exploiting religious and cultural issues and helping to bring the Christian Right into the conservative coalition.



Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line. http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum/