US Neoconning the Media; Short History of Neoconservatism

US Neoconning the Media
A Very Short History of Neoconservatism
by Eric Alterman for MediaTransparency.org
APRIL 5, 2005

Within the past month or so the political/cultural group known as the Neoconservatives (Neocons) have lost two of their central magazines. The first, The Public Interest, a journal of domestic affairs edited by Irving Kristol and Nathan Glazer, announced that it would be folding. Almost simultaneously 10 members of the editorial board of The National Interest, a foreign policy journal also founded by Kristol, resigned in protest over the 'realist' direction taken by the magazine under its new owners at the Nixon Center.

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:

Commentary
The Weekly Standard
Most of National Review
Half The New Republic
City Journal
The New Criterion
The Washington Times
Insight
The New York Post
The New York Sun
The editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal
60 or so percent of the Washington Post op-ed page
A twice-a-week appearance on the New York Times op-ed page
All of Fox News
Much of MSNBC
A bit of CNN
More and more of PBS
The American Enterprise Institute
The Heritage Foundation
The Hoover Institution
The Project for the New American Century
The US National Security Council
The Department of Defense
Parts of the World Bank and the UN Ambassador's office
A healthy chunk of the State Department
The Vice-President's office

And an unknown percentage of what is politely referred to as "the president's mind."

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 Kristol, a onetime Trotskyist who had since become a passionate defender of capitalism. The job of the Neoconservative intellectual, Kristol once remarked, was "to explain to the American people why they are right and to the intellectuals why they are wrong."

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. The Journal 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.
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Eric Alterman is Professor of English at the City University of New York, "The Liberal Media" columnist for The Nation, "Altercation" weblogger for MSNBC.com and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and the World Policy Institute. The most recent of his six books is When Presidents Lie: A History of Deception and Its Consequences.