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ORIGINAL RESEARCHEric Alterman Neoconning the MediaA Very Short History of NeoconservatismWithin the past month or so the political/cultural group known as the Neoconservatives (Neocons) have lost two of their central magazines. The first, The But save your tears for the Neocons, because they can afford to lose a magazine or two. Neoconservatives have never lacked for publications from which to pontificate. In fact, for much of the movement's three and a half decades observers have quipped that it has enjoyed more magazines than members. At least until Francis Fukuyama completes his plans to replace The National Interest with a new Neocon foreign policy journal, to be called, "The American Interest," the neocons will have to make do with the following media and governmental institutions:
How did this happen? How did a few renegade New York intellectuals associated with a few tiny publications who converted from liberalism to conservatism back in the late sixties and early seventies give birth to a movement that conquered the focal points of US political debate and convinced the Congress and the president to launch an ill-considered and deeply counterproductive war? Influential intellectuals of both the Right and Left in Western Europe hold the rather oversimplified and unsophisticated view that the entire rightward drift of American liberalism during the sixties and seventies can be viewed as a result of the change in Israel's geopolitical status from the spirited socialist David of its early years to the pro-American empire, post-1967 military Goliath. (The Six-Day war important to the birth of Neoconservatism, but so were other factors such as a lengthy New York city teachers' strike, and the blatantly anti-Semitic rhetoric of some of Black America's most vocal leadership.) Neoconservative thinking originally grew out of Norman Podhoretz's editorships of Commentary (website), published by the American Jewish Committee, and, to a lesser degree, The Public Interest published by National Affairs. While Neocon proponents like to argue that their political transformation reflected the views of a "liberal, mugged by reality," the movement's genesis was actually far more complex, deriving in part from the psychology of its founders -- Podhoretz had written previously of how scary he had always found Black people -- and a combination of New Left rhetoric, civil rights politics, and the changing geo-politics of Israel's position in the world vis-vis American power. All together the combination sent lifelong liberals into the arms of their former adversaries. In any case all of these distinctions tend to miss the point. The conservative's ideological attack on 'liberal elite culture' in the early seventies arose from what they considered uncomfortable changes the country was undergoing. Like the vulgar Marxists a number of them had once been, the Right-Wingers saw an unspoken conspiracy ruling American political and cultural life in which everyone and everything was connected to everyone and everything else. It was a kind of bargain-basement Hegelianism: The entire of American culture was moved as if guided by a single dialectical spirit. Harvard and Yale, feminism and taxes, school prayer and Soviet power, abortion and pornography, Communist revolution and gay rights: All of these social ills and more stemmed from the same source of political/cultural malaise, namely the post-Vietnam victory of the "New Class" and the "permissive" culture it had foisted upon the nation. The New Class, according to Neoconservative godfather Irving Kristol, was made up of "scientists, teachers, and educational administrators, journalists and others." They had somehow manipulated Americans to believe that they were an evil people who rained death and destruction on Vietnam to feed their own sick compulsions. As for Watergate, where the Liberal press had carried out a successful "coup d'etat" (in Norman Podhoretz's judgment) to please its own vanity, it succeeded only in increasing its own appetite. In the aftermath of Vietnam and the Establishment's failure of will, the New Class radicals had swallowed the entire establishment -- the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, Harvard, and the like -- and annexed the Supreme Court. Among the most dangerous aspects of the tactics of these people, moreover, was the stealth with which they went about their ideological mission. While they spoke of social justice, what the New Class was really after was the Triumph of Socialism. The ranks of the Neoconservatives were largely composed of former sectarian Marxists of mostly Jewish academic origin, who transferred their intellectual allegiance to capitalism and American military power but retained their obsession with theological disputation and political purity. The impresario at the center of this attack was Irving Beginning with the early days of the Nixon administration this is just what they began to do. Spreading the Word was a costly proposition in America, however. There were think-tanks to be started, journals to be founded, scholarships to be offered, and university chairs to be endowed. Like Willie Sutton, Kristol had to go where the money was...i.e. corporate America. The money tree did not bear immediate fruit. Historically, as Kristol observed, business wanted "intellectuals to go out and justify profits and explain to people why corporations make a lot of money." Kristol had a far more ambitious agenda in mind, but first he needed to convince the businessmen that they needed him. In this effort he could not conceivably have cultivated a more valuable ally than Robert Bartley, the editorial-page editor of the Wall Street Journal. Both men were already fierce Cold Warriors, but Bartley, tutored by Kristol, soon enlisted in the New Class war as well. The ideology of the New Class, according to Bartley, was fomenting "something that looks suspiciously like a concerted attack on business." In order to thrive and prosper in the upcoming battle for control of the American economy, businessmen and their allies needed to publish or perish. TheJournal editorial pages soon became a hotbed of Neocon counterrevolution, with Kristol a regular contributor. Once business began to pony up the kind of cash necessary to fight a media class war, the terms of Washington's insider debate began to change. With tens of millions of dollars solicited from conservative corporations, foundations, and zillionaire ideologues like Nelson and Bunker Hunt, Richard Mellon Scaife, Joseph Coors, and the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, the new Conservative Counter-Establishment (so-named by journalist Sidney Blumenthal) did a masterly job at aping the institutions of the Establishment's Washington and replacing them with its own. Unable to transform (or blow up) the liberal think-tank, the Brookings Institution, the Conservatives created the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the Heritage Foundation, and a host of smaller ideological shops to drown out the Liberals and moderates with their own analyses. In need of a newspaper to run its second-string pundits and give jobs to its wives and children, they embraced the Moonie-financed Washington Times, which has come to serve as a daily crib sheet through which Right-Wing insiders can keep tabs on their ideological stock exchange. Having made insufficient progress colonizing the Council on Foreign Relations, the Conservatives founded the Committee on the Present Danger, a Cold War-obsessed cadre of disaffected hawkish Wise Men and newly respectable Neoconservative intellectuals. The group, which would eventually furnish 59 members of the Reagan national security team including the president himself, dedicated itself to the notion that "the principal threat to our nation, to world peace, and to the cause of human freedom is the Soviet drive for dominance" and its "long-held goal of a world dominated from a single center -- Moscow." With all this money sloshing around the Neocons were able to create an ideological/media echo-chamber composed of a network of publications to praise the works of their writers, the better to inject them into the bloodstream of mainstream media debate. One foundation alone, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, included among its subsidized authors Charles Murray, Terry Eastland, Norman Podhoretz, David Horowitz, John DiIulio, and Amity Shlaes. It also helped fund the publications that reviewed their books ensuring a kind of ideological circle-jerk that protected these alleged capitalists from any interference from real life market forces. These media products included such Bradley (together with Scaife and the Olin Foundation) funded organs as The National Interest, The Public Interest (both overseen by Irving Kristol), Commentary (funded by Rupert Murdoch and the Bradley, Olin and Scaife foundations among others), The New Criterion (funded with Scaife and Olin), Reason (funded by Scaife, among others), The American Spectator (funded with Scaife, Olin and Bradley money), The Manhattan Institute's "City Journal," the Heritage Foundation's "Policy Review," and AEI's "American Enterprise," -- all of which are generously funded by the same foundations. This ideological/media universe also includes William Buckley's National Review, Steve Forbes' Forbes, Robert Bartley's Wall Street Journal editorial pages, and Rupert Murdoch's Weekly Standard, New York Post, and Fox News Channel and network. On PBS these ideas are often taken up on the program, "Think Tank," hosted by AEI's Neoconservative political scientist, Ben Wattenberg and funded in large measure by the Bradley, Olin, and Smith Richardson foundations. Taken together, these publications and outlets pack a powerful cultural wallop. Add them to the numerous and well-respected right-wing pundits working in mainstream newspapers and television stations and you have the makings of a media-tsunami for which liberals literally have only the most tepid means of response. The distance between their conquest of the media to their conquest of US foreign policy was only a short step. Despite the disappearance of the Soviet Union -- and the fact that most Neocons bet wrong on the 2000 presidential election -- excitedly preferring John McCain to George W. Bush -- and despite the fact that the collapse of the Soviet Union had demonstrated just how fundamentally wrong had been their analysis of the relative power of both superpowers for most of their existence -- they, nevertheless, were the ones with actionable ideas lying around when it came time to find an appropriately macho-tinged response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The fact that the attacks originated with Arab fundamentalists allowed the Neocons to forge their arguments about Israel and US foreign policy into a seamless, holistic worldview that was quickly adopted by both the president and vice-president of the United States. Decades of planning a war against Iraq and, potentially other Arab and Islamic nations, paid off in the form of a war launched against a country that had nothing to do with the attacks against us. The Neocons have, over the past decades, demonstrated impressive capacities for both adaptation and reproduction. They dropped their support for social programs that distinguished them from old line conservatives and took over the movement's foreign policy, displacing isolationists and leaving Pat Buchanan to sound off like a Nation columnist. They lost Communism but found terrorism and embraced the unashamed promotion of global empire. Irving Kristol grew too old to direct a movement but his son William will be around to do so for decades. Norman Podhoretz cannot fulminate against the evil that lurks in liberal hearts as often as he used to, but now his son John does so twice a week. Their war on Iraq has proven a catastrophe by almost any available measure but they are already planning another adventure in Iran. Every few years, we read of some set of events that imply the "end of Neoconservatism." Don't believe the hype. It would be hard to imagine a more profound rebuke to their world view than the various events that have followed in the wake of the Iraqi invasion. The United States is now less safe, poorer, more hated and more constrained in its ability to fight terrorism than it was before the tragic loss of blood and treasure the war has demanded. And yet the Neocons have admitted almost no mistakes and continue to be rewarded with plum posts in the Bush administration. What doesn't kill them just makes them stronger. In their example lies many lessons for liberals, alas. sign in, or register to email stories or comment on them.
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OTHER LINKS"Neoconservative" at SourceWatch.org
Christian Science Monitor Empire BuildersNeoconservatives and their blueprint for power Michael Link How Neoconservatives Conquered Washington – and Launched a WarAmerica's allies and enemies alike are baffled. What is going on in the United States? Who is making foreign policy? And what are they trying to achieve? MORE ORIGINAL RESEARCHBill Berkowitz PERC receives Templeton Freedom Award for promoting 'enviropreneurs'Right Wing foundation-funded anti-environmental think tank grabbing a wider audience for 'free market environmentalism' On the 15th anniversary of Terry Anderson and Donald Leal's book "Free Market Environmentalism" -- the seminal book on the subject -- Anderson, the Executive Director of the Bozeman, Montana-based Property and Environment Research Center (PERC - formerly known as the Political Economy Research Center) spoke in late-January at an event sponsored by Squaw Valley Institute at the Resort at Squaw Creek in California. While it may have been just another opportunity to speak on "free market environmentalism" and not the kickoff of a "victory tour," nevertheless it comes at a time when PERC's ideas are taking root.
Bill Berkowitz Neil Bush of Saudi ArabiaDuring recent visit, President’s brother describes the country as a 'kind of tribal democracy' In late February, only a few days after Saudi Arabia beheaded four Sri Lankan robbers and then left their headless bodies on public display in the capital of Riyadh, Neil Bush, for the fourth time in the past six years, showed up for the country's Jeddah Economic Forum. The Guardian reported that Human Rights Watch "said the four men had no lawyers during their trial and sentencing, and were denied other basic legal rights." In an interview with Arab News, the Saudi English language paper, Bush described the country as "a kind of tribal democracy."
Bill Berkowitz Newt Gingrich's back door to the White HouseAmerican Enterprise Institute "Scholar" and former House Speaker blames media for poll showing 64 percent of the American people wouldn't vote for him under any circumstances Whatever it is that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has come to represent in American politics, the guy is nothing less than fascinating. One day he's espousing populist rhetoric about the need to cut the costs of college tuition and the next day he's talking World War III. One day he's claiming that the "war on terror" may force the abridgement of fundamental first amendment rights and the next he's advancing a twenty-first century version of his Contract with America. At the same time he's publicly proclaiming how "stupid" it is that the race for the presidency has already started you know that he's trying to figure out how to out finesse Rudy, McCain and Romney for the nomination. And last week, when Fox News' Chris Wallace cited a poll showing that 64 percent of the public would never vote for him, he was quick to blame those results on how unfairly he was treated by the mainstream media back in the day.
Bill Berkowitz American Enterprise Institute takes lead in agitating against IranDespite wrongheaded predictions about the war on Iraq, neocons are on the frontlines advocating military conflict with Iran After doing such a bang up job with their advice and predictions about the outcome of the war on Iraq, would it surprise you to learn that America's neoconservatives are still in business? While at this time we are not yet seeing the same intense neocon invasion of our living rooms -- via cable television's news networks -- that we saw during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, nevertheless, a host of policy analysts at conservative think tanks -- most notably the American Enterprise Institute -- are being heeded on Iran by those who count - folks inside the Bush Administration.
Bill Berkowitz After six years, opposition gaining on George W. Bush's Faith Based InitiativeUnmentioned in the president's State of the Union speech, the program nevertheless continues to recruit religious participants and hand out taxpayer money to religious groups With several domestic policy proposals unceremoniously folded into President Bush's recent State of the Union address, two pretty significant items failed to make the cut. Despite the president's egregiously tardy response to the event itself, it was nevertheless surprising that he didn't even mention Hurricane Katrina: He didn't offer up a progress report, words of hope to the victims, or come up with a proposal for moving the sluggish rebuilding effort forward. There were no "armies of compassion" ready to be unleashed, although it should be said that many in the religious community responded to the disaster much quicker than the Bush Administration. In the State of the Union address, however, there was no "compassionate conservatism" for the victims of Hurricane Katrina.
Bill Berkowitz Frank Luntz calls Republican leadership in Washington 'One giant whining windbag'On the outs with the GOP, legendary degrader of discourse is moving to California He doesn't make great art; nothing he does elevates the human spirit; he doesn't illuminate, he bamboozles. He has become expert in subterfuge, hidden meanings, word play and manipulation. Frank Luntz has been so good at what he does that those paying close attention gave it its own name: "Luntzspeak."
Bill Berkowitz Spooked by MoveOn.org, conservative movement seeks to emulate liberal powerhouseFueled with Silicon Valley money, TheVanguard.org will have Richard Poe, former editor of David Horowitz's FrontPage magazine as its editorial and creative director As Paul Weyrich, a founding father of the modern conservative movement and still a prominent actor in it, likes to say, he learned a great deal about movement building by closely observing what liberals were up to in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Bill Berkowitz Ward Connerly's anti-affirmative action jihadFounder and Chair of the American Civil Rights Institute scouting five to nine states for new anti-affirmative action initiatives Fresh from his most recent victory -- in Michigan this past November -- Ward Connerly, the Black California-based maven of anti-affirmative action initiatives, appears to be preparing to take his jihad on the road. According to a mid-December report in the San Francisco Chronicle, Connerly said that he was "exploring moves into nine other states."
Bill Berkowitz Tom Tancredo's missionThe Republican congressman from Colorado will try to woo GOP voters with anti-immigration rhetoric and a boatload of Christian right politics These days, probably the most recognizable name in anti-immigration politics is Colorado Republican Congressman Tom Tancredo. Over the past year, Tancredo has gone from a little known congressman to a highly visible anti-immigration spokesperson. "Tancredo has thoroughly enmeshed himself in the anti-immigration movement and with the help of CNN talk show host Lou Dobbs, he has been given a national megaphone," Devin Burghart, the program director of the Building Democracy Initiative at the Center for New Community, a Chicago-based civil rights group, told Media Transparency.
Bill Berkowitz Institute on Religion and Democracy slams 'Leftist' National Council of ChurchesNew report from conservative foundation-funded IRD charges the NCC with being a political surrogate for MoveOn.org, People for the American Way and other liberal organizations If you prefer your religious battles sprinkled with demagoguery, sanctimoniousness, and simplistic attacks, the Institute on Religion and Democracy's (IRD) latest broadside against the National Council of Churches (NCC) certainly fits the bill.
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