More on What's Left?

There is odd piece in the New Statesman this week by the magazine's editor, John Kampfner, on Nick Cohen's new book. But I'll stick with two points. Kampfner begins:

In writing this furious polemic against the anti-war lobby, Nick Cohen may inadvertently have done it a favour. In May 2003, I wrote a cover piece for the NS in which I sought to explain how a small group of British politicians and journalists, who counted themselves as still of the left, had more in common with the US neoconservatives than they cared to admit. My non-polemical article produced howls of anger, and demands for recantation, from some whom I named. I did not name Cohen, although I could have done.

So far as I recall, Kampfner's argument was more sweeping than that his subjects "had more in common with the US neoconservatives than they cared to admit", and was full of factual errors, as is the statement I've just quoted. Those Kampfner named were an eclectic group, of whom only two - John Lloyd and David Aaronovitch - clearly counted themselves as "still of the left". The others comprised two prominent figures in the Conservative Party (one was the MP Michael Gove, and the other was Daniel Finkelstein, former Director of Research for the party); Stephen Pollard, who does not count himself on the Left at all; and Melanie Phillips, whose views I would categorise as communitarian rather than left-wing or right-wing. Of these, and so far as I know, only Stephen is an identifying neoconservative. (John Lloyd has since said that Kampfner was partly right in his case, but only partly - namely the part that deals with foreign affairs, whereas neoconservatism is a far more ambitious political doctrine that that.)

But more than merely on the personalities, Kampfner's was a shallow and sensationalist piece that showed little grasp of the philosophical roots of American neoconservatism. Neoconservatism is a movement originally of the Left. The term was coined in the 1970s by the American Socialist leader Michael Harrington as a derogatory reference to those on the Left who identified with the Cold War policies of Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson. The term was then popularised in an intellectually chaotic book by the journalist Peter Steinfels, The Neoconservatives: The Men who are Changing America's Politics, 1980. The difficulty with Steinfels's thesis was that it covered so many people of plainly diverse opinions (including the liberal Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and social democrats such as the sociologist Daniel Bell and the philosopher Sidney Hook) that it was useless as a tool of political analysis.

Kampfner's discussion of a supposed British neoconservatism was as vapid as Steinfels's. It encompassed people with little obviously in common other than that all supported the Iraq War, and paid no attention to splits within American neoconservatism itself. The position of Paul Wolfowitz on the spread of democracy is very different from that of the late Jeane Kirkpatrick, as I argued here. The position of Daniel Bell on the Israel-Palestine conflict is far more sympathetic to the Israeli peace movement than is the pro-Likud stance associated with Norman Podhoretz and Commentary magazine. If you're identifying a British strain of neoconservatism, you can't sensibly fail to discuss the ideological fissures within American neoconservatism.

Kampfner makes a further dubious generalisation when he turns to Cohen:

It matters that Cohen, like his fellow pro-war cheerleaders, comes from a far-left background. It was a part of the far left that brooked no dissent. They do not come from the mainstream left, which I would loosely define as social democratic or democratic socialist or liberal. They come from a tradition where politics is about black and white, and where opponents (even those who diverge slightly) are heretics. Polemic comes easily to them.

Nick can well speak for himself, but as I'm sometimes counted among "fellow pro-war cheerleaders" I'll presumptuously assume I'm part of the indictment. My political activism was indeed on the mainstream Left and not the far Left. Through Labour's dismal years of opposition, I identified with the social democratic wing of the party allied to Denis Healey. Somewhere in the archives of the long-defunct Labour Solidarity Campaign, intended to coordinate the fight against the far Left in the constituency parties, is a record of my membership. I support the interventionist policies of Tony Blair - in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Iraq - because I see in them a consistency with Labour's traditions exemplified by Attlee and Bevin's support for the Truman Doctrine and the founding of Nato.

I shall incidentally be interviewing Nick Cohen at an event for the think tank Policy Exchange next Thursday, 15 February. I believe the event is now fully booked, but I shall return to some of these issues during that evening, and report on them here.