Surely you must remember where you were when you first heard about the secret neoconservative plan to take over the world. Remember how someone mentioned a Jewish professor from the University of Chicago named Leo Strauss and then someone else might have chimed in with the name Paul Wolfowitz (current president of the World Bank) or Robert Kagan (author and academic), or Irving and William Kristol (father-son tandem associated with The Public Interest and The National Interest among other neoconservative publications)?
For me, it happened at a bar in central London in the winter of 2004. The recent presidential election was the topic of conversation when an undergrad from Brown University I had just met explained the basis for the Republican victory. According to him, it was false religiosity. False religiosity is the tactical use of religious-based lies to keep the impressionable masses in line. He advised me to read Leo Strauss's writings.
Though I never did find time to follow that student's advice and actually read Strauss's work, I have spent countless hours contemplating (and discussing with whoever was interested) the now popular notion that a long deceased political philosophy professor has been behind the recent conservative successes as well as the War in Iraq.
The basic gist behind Strauss's approach to politics is a newfound appreciation for the ancient and medieval thinkers who dedicated themselves to determining how to live a good life. More important to Strauss is how a political regime (possibly coupled with a religious element) could achieve a society full of good citizens. Relativism, or inability to make moral judgments on political issues, has pervaded western thought since Machiavelli and has frustrated Strauss to no end.
Beyond this, I admit that everything gets a bit hazy. However, this is part of the allure of the neoconservative mythology. Strauss was a strong believer in esotericism, or the idea that the true messages of great thinkers are purposefully shrouded by the literal translation of their work. This allows only the most careful and intelligent readers to fully understand. I find the notion of secret, coded messages being passed down among elite intellectual circles over hundreds of years pretty intriguing (seems ripe for a Dan Brown novel).
How all of this has come to be associated with the "neoconservative movement" is equally hazy. The key link is surely former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who studied under Strauss, as well as Strauss' prot?©g?© Allan Bloom. The lineage continues, it seems, in the person of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, one of Wolfowitz's top students at Yale in the 1970s and, more recently, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff before he was indicted on obstruction of justice and perjury charges late last year.
Wolfowitz was perhaps the most ardent supporter throughout the 1990s and early 2000s of militarily confronting Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Wolfowitz's hawkish foreign policy stance has come to define the neoconservative doctrine that if the United States is to remain the preeminent world power, unilateral interventionism may very well be necessary. Though Strauss, who escaped from Nazi Germany as a child, could be critical of democracies which lacked virtue, his real concern is said to have been "evil" tyranny - an idea which we have all heard a lot of recently.
This same moralistic tone has also seemed to infuse this country's discourse on domestic policy. This is particularly exemplified by the "social conservative" agenda to ban gay marriages and abortions. Indeed, that Brown student in London is not alone among political thinkers (Thomas Frank comes to mind) who attribute Republican electoral success, especially in 2004, to the trumping of moral issues over economic and other more basic policy concerns.
But how much, I often ask myself, can all of this be interrelated? Neoconservatives themselves argue over the word's definition, and the shorthand "neocons" has become something of an epithet used by liberals to attack the cadre of administration officials who supported the War in Iraq. I have even read that neoconservative thought had already run its course by the end of the Cold War, and that today's version is a distortion of its original form. In its original form, the adherents were liberally-minded intellectuals sympathetic to the welfare state but in favor of a muscular stance against the Soviet Union. Just last month, Kagan, author of the hugely influential book Paradise and Power, took time out of his busy schedule to write in The Weekly Standard that he is not in fact a "Straussian" as many have implied. He wrote that he has "never understood a word the political philosopher [Strauss] wrote."
Our fascination with this political and intellectual movement, however, has never been greater. Here at Tufts, a political science seminar is being taught on neoconservatives and foreign policy. Each week I read new angles to the neoconservative story - conspiracy theories that link neo-conservatism with Zionism or accounts of a clueless president being fooled into accepting a radical neo-conservative world view.
To be honest, I have come to find it all a bit pathetic. For those of us who were disappointed to see Bush win re-election in 2004 and disillusioned by an elusive objective in Iraq, blaming a nebulous group of fairly obscure intellectuals is an easy, misguided, reaction.
What bothers me about the neoconservative influence in both this administration and in academia is how seemingly unrivaled it is. Maybe I have not been looking in the right places, but it seems that the left has been unable to mount an intellectual counter-attack of any kind. Though criticism of the Iraq War is high, I have yet to hear a truly cogent proposal for what to do with that war-torn nation. I have also not read anywhere of a counter-strategy for dealing with the region as a whole.
It is this same frustration that has provoked Francis Fukuyama's new book America at the Crossroads, which (according to the adapted essay that ran in last week's New York Times Magazine) scolds neoconservatives for "overreaching" and relying too heavily on military might. Interestingly, it also applauds their belief in the universality of human rights. Fukuyama argues that "new ideas, neither realist [think Taliaferro] nor neoconservative [think Mufti]," are needed now. Perhaps what is needed is a more diplomatic and economic approach to bridging the cultural divide and winning hearts and minds.
Of course, calling for new ideas is much easier than actually coming up with them. I am guilty here of this shortcoming (though the chance to attach my name to a new school of thought - say, "Mitchellism"-means that I won't stop thinking about these issues any time soon). I am optimistic that once we stop obsessing over neoconservative influence, our generation is capable of leading American foreign policy onto a new, more effective path.
David Mitchell is a senior who is majoring in political science.
