British neoconservatism

In the June issue of the American Commentary magazine there is a letter from me in response to Daniel Johnson's review of my book Anti-Totalitarianism in the March issue. The magazine is behind a subscription barrier, but I'll reproduce my letter, along with that part of Johnson's reply (there is another letter in the magazine on the same subject) that deals with it.

Here's my letter:

In “Britain’s Neoconservative Moment” [March], Daniel Johnson’s comments about my book, Anti-Totalitarianism: The Left-Wing Case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy, are so generous that I feel churlish in taking issue with the main point of his article. But I do not believe there is any serious prospect of a neoconservative movement in Great Britain comparable to the one that energised the Reagan administration or the post-9/11 foreign policies of the Bush administration. Nor do I believe it would necessarily be a good thing if there were.

My own advocacy of the neoconservative stance is, as Mr. Johnson notes, limited to its foreign-policy critique—that is, to its recognition of the weaknesses of a rules-based system of international norms against autocratic states that refuse to be bound by those norms. “Neoconservatism” is scarcely the ideal label for a liberal-democratic internationalism tempered by this view, but it is the term of abuse continually leveled at supporters of Tony Blair’s interventionist policies. We might as well accept a derogatory name and make a virtue of it, much as the early Methodists (or indeed the original neoconservatives) did. As Charles Krauthammer has noted in Commentary, neoconservative foreign policy “is no longer tethered to its own ideological history and paternity.”

Krauthammer had in mind specifically those foreign-policy realists who have come to see the intimate connection between national security and the overthrow of tyranny. But the point applies also to those on the Left who rue the indifference of cold-war realpolitik to the plight of small nations like East Timor and Tibet, deprecate the willingness of conservative governments in the 1990s to acquiesce in Serbian aggression in the Balkans, and welcome America’s current stress, in President Bush’s words, on “defend[ing] the peace by fighting terrorists and tyrants” and “extend[ing] the peace by encouraging free and open societies on every continent.”

The problem in Great Britain, however, is that these principles have become a political liability for Tony Blair. This is unwarranted and worrying. The weakness in Blair’s foreign policy—a lack of a sense of priorities, comparable to his neglect of the fact that in domestic policy not all desirable goals are compatible—is less important than the central point the prime minister has got right. When the U.S. was attacked on 9/11, the proper response was to treat it not as a problem of law enforcement but as an act of war perpetrated by an aggressive totalitarianism with recognisable antecedents in 20th-century Europe.

If, despite the mismanagement and unpopularity of the Iraq war, the anti-totalitarian impulse is to remain central to British policy, it will need to be advanced by a political coalition as extensive and heterogeneous as the one that opposed Soviet Communism. That will not happen if (as with the American brand of neoconservatism) anti-totalitarianism in foreign policy is yoked to a critique of cultural relativism and the welfare state at home.

There are independent grounds for believing that the permissive society has been a net gain for civilised values, and that shrinking public services is neither possible nor desirable. But there is also an important pragmatic consideration for staying clear of American-style domestic neoconservatism: as the Conservative party has belatedly realised, political debate in the United Kingdom will marginalise those arguments.

The fundamental distinction in foreign policy today is between the advocates of openness—with the implication that we cannot overlook aggressive threats to liberal values from our declared enemies—and realists who advance an impossibly narrow conception of the national interest in informal alliance with an isolationist Left. Neoconservatism has a role in that debate, but also a limitation.

Here's Johnson's reply:

I am grateful to Oliver Kamm ... for [his] measured criticisms. I agree with Mr. Kamm that the likelihood is small that a powerful British neoconservative movement is about to emerge. But thereafter we part company. He thinks that such a movement would not necessarily be a good thing, because its domestic critique of cultural relativism and the welfare state might hinder the emergence of a broad, heterogeneous coalition like that of anti-Communism. I believe, to the contrary, that in order to re-create such a broad coalition we need to reaffirm the values of our Judeo-Christian civilization. It was this civilization that resisted and defeated the Nazis and that survived and eventually overcame Soviet Communism. Without it, I do not see how Europe can hope to resist that new form of political religion we call Islamism.

There is no reason, at least in principle, why a politician of the Left should not espouse Judeo-Christian values as vigorously as one of the Right. Nor have Conservatives historically enjoyed a monopoly on the kind of interventionist foreign policy that now goes under the banner of neoconservatism. But there is undoubtedly a tendency at present for the active promotion of democracy abroad to be associated with conservative politics. This was also true during the cold war, despite the undoubted significance of liberal anti-Communism in its early phase.

What Mr. Kamm rather quaintly calls the “permissive society” created a moral and intellectual crisis of relativism from which Western liberalism has still not recovered, and which has left it ill-equipped to resist the latest, Islamist manifestation of totalitarianism. One might almost say that a neoconservative today is a liberal who has been bombed. Mr. Kamm believes that the arguments of neoconservatives have been marginalized in Britain. I would say, rather, that they have never been properly tried. But this is an issue on which supporters of an interventionist, “neoconservative” foreign policy can agree to disagree.

I'm not sure why it is quaint to refer to the permissive society. I would for preference refer, like Roy Jenkins, to the civilised society, but as it is obviously question-begging to say a civilised society has been a net gain for civilised values, I'll stick with the old-fashioned term. There is a virtue in cleaving to tradition.

While on the subject of Commentary magazine, I'll point to a recent article charting its changing fortunes by Nathan Abrams, a historian at Aberdeen University, in the Jewish Quarterly. Abrams is highly critical of the editorship of Norman Podhoretz, long regarded as one of the founding figures in US neoconservatism:

Podhoretz suffered from what he himself had diagnosed in 1967 as ‘the intellectual rigidity to which the human mind is prone in politics’. The unprecedented attention and success of the Reaganites belied the stark poverty of Commentary’s thought, which became all too clear once Reagan had gone. Post-Reagan, Commentary continued pedalling a neo-Reaganite agenda that no longer seemed relevant because, once the Cold War was over, it had lost its motivating force.

Over the years, Podhoretz had been responsible for driving away many promising contributors, much to the magazine’s and neo-conservatism’s detriment. He closed his magazine to unwelcome guests, even those who had once been his closest comrades. The long list includes Hannah Arendt, Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, the Trillings. Podhoretz had severely disabled Commentary. Its circulation figures dropped from a peak of 60,000 in the mid-1960s to 25,000 in 2004.

I'm afraid this is right. I refer in my book specifically to my incredulity at the magazine's unyielding positions on homosexual rights and - astonishingly for the 21st century - Darwinism.

Podhoretz dissects all these feuds with Hannah Arendt and others in his book Ex-Friends. If you have Christopher Hitchens's collection of essays on writers Unacknowledged Legislation, see his enjoyably acerbic review of Podhoretz's volume.