by John Gray
Bush’s view of American opinion should not be accepted at face value. According to a Newsweek poll in 2002, 45 per cent of Americans viewed the United States as ‘a secular nation’, 29 per cent as ‘a Christian nation’ and only 16 per cent as a ‘biblical nation, defined by the Judaeo-Christian tradition’.20 None the less, America is unique among advanced countries in having a Christian majority and a large fundamentalist minority, and no other western leader could have spoken in such terms. In Britain, Blair’s statement that his decision to go to war in Iraq will be judged by God deepened his unpopularity, and any claim that a policy has divine backing exacts a penalty from voters. With the partial exception of Poland, the same is true throughout Europe and all other English-speaking countries: any confession of strong religious belief, especially the claim to have a direct line to divine intentions, is dangerous and damaging to politicians. This is not so in the United States, where changes in society have enhanced the power of religion. The declining role of the old East Coast elites and the increasing ascendancy of the South in American politics; the mass mobilization of evangelical Christians, who were in the past often politically inactive, in support of a militant politics of ‘traditional values’; and the increasing role of the Christian Right as a core constituency of the Republican party – without these shifts, which have gathered pace over the past thirty years, the Christian Right could not have achieved the political power it has exercised during the Bush administration. Bush embodies a type of religious belief that goes back to the first Puritan settlers, but without the changes in society of the last few decades he could not have used it to promote a faith-based politics.
Equally it is difficult to see how Bush could have mobilized American opinion behind the war in Iraq without the traumatic events of 9/11. Before the terrorist attacks, Bush’s foreign policy reflected a number of influences. The US was already beginning its withdrawal from foreign treaties that were seen as limiting its capacity for unilateral action, but Bush’s tone was not stridently assertive. Though they occupied important positions in government, neo-conservatives were not calling the shots. After 9/11 this changed. Apocalyptic myths that had been dormant re-emerged, and it was not difficult for neo-conservatives in the administration to link the ‘war on terror’ with their geo-political objectives. By 2004 a Homeland Security Planning Scenario Document was describing the terrorist threat facing the United States as being perpetrated by the Universal Adversary. National security was understood in terms of concepts derived from demonology.21
This demonological perception of the terrorist threat was a byproduct of the alliance between neo-conservatives and the Christian Right. The origins of this alliance are in the end of the Cold War, which left America without a defining enemy. Though neo-conservatives overrated it, Soviet power posed a real threat, and one might think its collapse might permit a less adversarial American stance towards the world. But an enemy was indispensable, and one soon appeared in the shape of Saddam Hussein. In strategic terms the Gulf War of 1990–91 was a success – Saddam was pushed back into Iraq where he could no longer threaten his neighbours or global oil supplies. For neo-conservatives the war was a failure because it left Saddam in power. Throughout the Clinton era they were vociferous in their view that American forces should have marched on Baghdad. When they joined the administration of George W. Bush it was with Iraq on their minds. As Richard A. Clarke, who served as a senior advisor on terrorism under four US presidents, has commented:
The administration of the second George Bush did begin with Iraq on its agenda. So many of those who had made the decisions in the first Iraq war were back: Cheney, Powell, Wolfowitz. Some of them had made clear in writings and speeches that the United States should unseat Saddam, finish what they had failed to do the first time. In the new administration’s discussions of terrorism, Paul Wolfowitz had urged a focus on Iraqi-sponsored terrorism against the US even though there was no such thing.22
By allying with the Christian Right, neo-conservatives were able to mobilize millions of Americans in support of renewed military action against Iraq. Many Christian fundamentalists are influenced by the theory of dispensationalism that was developed by John Nelson Darby (1800–1882), a minister in the Church of Ireland who resigned to join a sect called the Brethren, and ended up leader of a group that split off in the 1840s to form the Plymouth Brethren. Believing that God revealed his will in a succession of events, or dispensations, Darby introduced two of the most important ideas of American pre-millennialism – the idea of the Rapture, when believers will ascend into the heavens to meet Christ, and the idea that the final battle between Christ and the hosts of Antichrist will occur on the plain of Armageddon in modern Israel. The latter is a belief held by many of those who are now called Christian Zionists – ardent supporters of Israel who believe its destruction is to be welcomed as a sign of the millennium. Fundamentalists who accepted Darby’s prophecies were far from being a marginal group. As Michael Lind has written, ‘To dismiss these Americans as members of the lunatic fringe was mistaken. They were the political base of the Bush administration and the contemporary, Southernized Republican party.’23
The alliance with the Christian Right has had many advantages for neo-conservatives. It leveraged their influence in the Republican party – for which the Christian Right was increasingly important as a source of funding and votes – and enabled them to transmit their ideas to very large numbers of people. Along with Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News it gave neo-conservatives a voice in national politics that could not be ignored. In the 1980s neo-conservatives were a few dozen ideologues, mostly in Washington think tanks. They had some impact in the area of national defence and several joined the Reagan administration, but they were nothing like a dominant force. By allying themselves with Southern fundamentalism they linked themselves with the single most important constituency in American politics. Only around a quarter of American voters are born-again Christians, but over three quarters of them voted for Bush in 2004. Though Bush won only by a hair’s breadth, it was the Christian Right that ensured his victory.
While the political ascendancy of the Christian Right reflects recent changes in American society, it also confirms America’s unrivalled religiosity. The US is a secular regime, but unlike nearly every other long-established democracy America lacks a secular political tradition. Though the separation of church and state is a pillar of the Constitution, this has not prevented religion exercising enormous power in American political life. Like some other European countries Britain has an established Church; but organized religion has far less political influence than in the supposedly secular United States. The contrast is not only with the post-Christian countries of Europe but also with some Muslim countries. Judged by almost any standard the US is a less secular country than Turkey. In no other highly industrialized country is there widespread popular belief in Satan or a powerful movement contesting Darwinian theory. Nowhere else does a large segment of the population believe that the events of 9/11 were predicted in the Bible, as did a quarter of Americans polled in 2002.24 There is no other advanced country of which it could be observed that a theological dispute between pre-millennial and post-millennial Christians has ‘had profound implications for [American] politics’.25
With the ‘Southernization’ of American politics the Christian Right gained in strength. On George W. Bush’s first day in office he restored a gag rule on aid to international organizations that counsel women on abortion, and his withdrawal of federal funding for stem cell research and US aid programmes that involve population control and the use of condoms as the most effective way of countering the spread of AIDS are signs of the Christian Right’s power.26 This power is not unchallenged, and in domestic politics there are limits to the extent to which any administration can advance a fundamentalist agenda. Despite attempts to change it, American law on abortion and gay rights remains similar to that in other democracies. America has not – and will not – turn into a theocracy, and
it is conceivable that the Republican strategy of courting the fundamentalist vote could cease to be productive if it locks the party into policy positions – such as favouring restrictions on immigration from Hispanic countries, for example – that alienate other significant constituencies.
None the less the theo-conservative Right remains a force no administration can ignore, and its impact on American society could grow. The blow to America inflicted by Iraq is profound, and the impact on fundamentalists may be a state of mind not unlike that described by the early twentieth-century sociologist Karl Mannheim, when he wrote:
Chiliasm has always accompanied revolutionary outbursts and given them their spirit. When this spirit ebbs and deserts these movements, there remains behind in the world a naked mass-frenzy and a despiritualized fury.27
If America is exceptional it is in the power of religion. In the last chapter I will consider what this tells us about the Enlightenment tenet that there is an inherent connection between modernization and secularization. At this point it may be worth underlining the paradoxical quality of American modernity. Throughout most of its history America has seen itself as the prototype of a new civilization that will someday be universal. Yet its unique origins and singular religiosity preclude American life being replicated in any other country.
These contradictions appear in neo-conservatism. In neo-conservative thinking America is the supreme modern regime, which all others are bound to emulate. At the same time it is unique and unparalleled. Neo-conservatism is a movement that could only have arisen in America, mobilizing conflicting beliefs that have recurred throughout the country’s history.
THE ORIGINS OF NEO-CONSERVATISM
When we forget, or wilfully choose to ignore, the intractability of human behaviour, the complexity of human institutions, and the probability of unanticipated consequences, we do so at great risk, and often immense human cost.
Jeane Kirkpatrick28
The United States is the last militant Enlightenment regime and the only advanced country that is still unshakably Christian. The two facts are not unrelated and help to explain the peculiar qualities of neo-conservatism and its rise to power in America. Despite its name, neo-conservatism is an ideology that originated on the Left. It has been able to gain power in America by allying itself with the Christian Right and with sections of liberal opinion. By allying itself at once with apocalyptic religion and a secular belief in human progress, the neo-conservative movement mobilized two powerful American traditions.
Like several other political labels, ‘neo-conservative’ was coined as a term of abuse. It seems to have been first used in the 1970s by the American socialist Michael Harrington to describe – and condemn –a small group of former leftists who were adopting stances in foreign policy that had in the past been confined to the Right. As the neo-conservative writer and Catholic theologian Michael Novak has written:
It is worth remembering that the first so-called neocons were a tiny band, indeed, usually quickly named as Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb, the two Daniels, Bell and Moynihan, Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter, and a very few of their intellectual friends. Virtually all of this company had a history as men and women of the left, indeed to the left of the Democratic party, maybe in the most leftward two or three per cent of Americans, in some case socialist in economics, in others social democratic in politics.29
The origins of neo-conservatism on the Left explain some of its persisting qualities. Many of the older generation of neo-conservatives began on the anti-Stalinist far Left – Irving Kristol, the political godfather of the movement, wrote an autobiographical essay called ‘Memoirs of a Trotskyist’30 – and the intellectual style of that sectarian milieu has marked the neo-conservative movement throughout its history. The chief figures who shaped the neo-conservative movement – such as Irving Kristol, the Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell, the editor of Encounter magazine Melvin Lasky, the writer and editor of Public Interest Nathan Glazer, the political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset and the Democratic politician Patrick Moynihan – did not take their intellectual nourishment from conservative thinkers. It is doubtful if they read much of Edmund Burke, the eighteenth-century parliamentarian who first articulated English conservatism, or of Benjamin Disraeli, the British prime minister whose novels contain an elegant statement of a conservative view of the world. If the present generation of neo-conservatives reads Russell Kirk or Michael Oakeshott –twentieth-century conservative thinkers, the first American and the second British, who aimed to deflate ideology in favour of practice –it is likely with distaste. All these conservative thinkers believed the ideological type of politics that emerged from the French Revolution was a destructive force that had wreaked havoc in the twentieth century. In opposition to this view, neo-conservatives believe that politics is a type of warfare in which ideology is an essential weapon.
It was this conception of politics rather than any specific doctrines that neo-conservatives carried over from their time on the Left. Few of the leading neo-conservative intellectuals were Trotskyists for any length of time, and the chief political lesson that many of them took from Trotsky was the deeply repressive character of the Soviet regime. Here neo-conservatives did no more than reflect the post-war development of the Left. Marxists like Sidney Hook and Trotskyists such as Max Shachtman developed into anti-communist social democrats not unlike the ex-communists who were among the most intrepid cold warriors in 1950s Europe. Like many others, these thinkers of the Left rejected Marxism during the Cold War. It is too simple to view neo-conservatives as reformulating Trotskyite theories in rightwing terms, but the habits of thought of the far Left have had a formative influence. It is not the content of Leninist theory that has been reproduced but its style of thinking. Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution suggests existing institutions must be demolished in order to create a world without oppression. A type of catastrophic optimism, which animates much of Trotsky’s thinking, underpins the neo-conservative policy of exporting democracy. Both endorse the use of violence as a condition of progress and insist the revolution must be global.
In abandoning Trotskyism, neo-conservatives moved closer to the American mainstream, but at the same time they lost Trotsky’s broad perspective on world events. The callow and parochial ideologues that hijacked US foreign policy lacked Trotsky’s knowledge of history and could only emulate his utopianism and his ruthlessness. Trotsky’s delusion that the European working class longed for socialist revolution in the interwar years is matched by the neo-conservative fantasy that the Arab world yearns for American-style democracy. His contempt for the ‘Quaker-vegetarian chatter’ of those who condemned Bolshevik methods such as hostage taking in the Russian Civil War is mirrored in neo-conservative scorn for those who condemn the use of torture in the ‘war on terror’.
Neo-conservative thinking is a mix of crackpot realism and chiliastic fantasy. The changing views of Francis Fukuyama illustrate the difficulties that arise when this mix becomes a basis for foreign policy. A major influence on Fukuyama’s thinking was the work of Alexandre Kojeve, a Russian émigré philosopher who settled in Paris. Kojeve wrote his doctoral dissertation on the Russian religious philosopher Vladimir Solovyev (1853–1900), who in 1899 published a book entitled War, Progress and the End of History in which he depicted Nietzsche as the precursor of the Antichrist. A version of Solovyev’s idea of the end of history appears in Kojeve’s work and reappears in Fukuyama’s book The End of History and the Last Man. Kojeve presented the end of history in terms derived from Hegel, suggesting the terminus was not communism – as Marx had imagined – but a global capitalist system. Kojeve recognized that Soviet communism was another attempt at the utopian project pursued in the Great Terror in revolutionary France, which could not prevail against the overwhelming dynamism of capitalism. The model for the post-historical world that was coming in to being was the US rather than the USSR.
This view of America was embraced by Fukuyama, who was introdu
ced to Kojeve’s thought by Alan Bloom. Along with the defence analyst Albert Wohlstetter, Bloom – a disciple of Leo Strauss who popularized a version of Strauss’s thought in his best-selling book The Closing of the American Mind (1987) and features as the central protagonist of Saul Bellow’s novel Ravelstein (2000) – forged the neo-conservative network and provided it with the ideas its members took into government. A lifelong friend and admirer of Kojeve, Strauss had for many years sent favoured students to study under him. Bloom was one of them and carried on the Straussian tradition by impressing on Fukuyama the value of Kojeve’s work.
More than Strauss, Kojeve shaped the thinking of Fukuyama and neo-conservatives as a whole. With his background in Solovyev and Hegel, Kojeve took for granted an eschatological view of history. So does Fukuyama, who continues to believe that America is the first post-historical society. Fukuyama has denied he ever believed history had ended in any literal sense. It is true he did not commit himself to the view that all sources of large-scale historical conflict were disappearing – a risible notion, though one he often came close to endorsing. He did assert that conflict about the most legitimate type of government had ceased. In the summer of 1989 he wrote:
What we are witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or a passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.31
This pronouncement contains two elements – the claim that history has reached a final consummation and a more specific proposition to the effect that liberal democracy is now the only legitimate mode of government. The idea that history is moving towards an End is a myth that cannot be supported or refuted by rational argument. In contrast, the claim that liberal democracy is now the only legitimate mode of government has the merit of being demonstrably false.
