Stop Letting Neocons Live Rent Free in Your Head
Stop Letting Neocons Live Rent Free in Your Head
In politics, strange bedfellows are an asset, and old grudges are a hindrance.
My politically formative years were shaped by the height of the War on Terror. It began when the Twin Towers fell, and continued through the Afghanistan War, the Iraq War, the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, the color-coded terror warnings, the right-wing cancel culture of dissenting voices, and the Snowden revelations of unconstitutional surveillance on the American people. I was 15 on 9/11, and not yet 27 when The Guardian began publishing selections from the Snowden trove.
America during the George W. Bush years was a landscape inundated with Evangelical Christianity and supersized McPatriotism. The air was thick with the musk of knuckle-draggers — a stifling, choking atmosphere that relentlessly cast anyone who wasn’t A-OK with theocracy and war crimes as a traitorous, cowardly, (often homosexual) communist. America was number one, and we were going to free the shit out of the world. When Uncle Sam’s star-spangled pelvic thrusts collided with your face, that thwack was the sound of freedom — and anyone who had a problem with it was halfway to being a terrorist themselves.
Presiding over this era were the neoconservatives. Understandably, many left-oriented Millennials who cut their political teeth between 2001 and 2013 developed an abiding loathing for neocons that remains to this day. Over time, this antipathy calcified into a sort of political identity. Neoconservatism stood for everything that was wrong with America, and opposing it was the just crusade of our adolescence and young adulthood. The world, however, has moved on. The old grudges from yesteryear are no longer useful in today’s political environment, and clinging to them will only cloud our minds.
Politics have shifted in profound ways from the Bush Years. Perhaps the single biggest change has occurred within the Republican Party, whose current iteration would have been unrecognizable just a decade ago. No longer the party of institutions, law and order, the establishment, and neoconservatism, the GOP is now an anti-democratic, conspiracy-mongering populist cult of personality. Gone are the bow-tied intellectuals, the DC chicken hawks, and anyone with real and consistent small-c conservative principles. To be sure, such people were never the majority of the party, not even close, but they were the brains of the operation. Now, the GOP is flying blind, ruled by the whims of Donald Trump and his 100 million strong mob.
Over the course of this transition from Bush-Republicanism to Trumpism, the neocons were purged. Some left of their own volition, while others were ousted by voters or audiences. But they haven’t gone away. They may no longer be Republicans, but they have joined the commentariat as harsh critics of Trumpism and freshly minted Democrats. Most of the people who led the charge for the Iraq War are now Biden voters. To many folks in my milieu, this development broke their minds. They flip on MSNBC to see “Axis of Evil” Bush speechwriter David Frum now employed as a respected blue-team commentator. They log onto social media to see perpetual deployment fan Max Boot writing about how Trump has shown him that white privilege is real. They observe the entire liberal media establishment hailing John Bolton, the product of blending any other three neocons and simmering them for hours to reduce the water content, as a #Resistance hero. They see the villains from their youth, whom their sense of self has become oriented around opposing, welcomed into the fold as good guys, and they conclude that they simply cannot be party to any of it.
The great neocon migration has given rise to a vocal faction of folks within the populist left. They congregate around independent media circles, and while they remain left-of-center on most issues, they nevertheless spend their days almost exclusively criticizing Democrats, while staying largely silent on, or in some cases even soft-pedaling the GOP and the right. Every misstep of the left is excoriated, while every blunder of the right is an occasion to explain why the left is overstepping.1 Goodness knows there’s ample fodder to criticize on the left these days, but to be left-of-center oneself and to find nothing worth criticizing on the Trumpist right speaks to thought patterns that have gone quite awry.
Much of this contrarianism one sees from leftish 30-50-somethings is fueled by a categorical imperative to never, ever, ever be on the same side of an issue with someone who, in 2003, thought the Iraq War was a good idea. This is not rational. It’s not even real contrarianism, either. It’s the lingering ghost of 2000’s anti-Bush outrage that has ossified into a kind of identity politics. One gets the impression that if Bill Kristol, James Clapper, or Dick Cheney endorsed oxygen, the Michael Tracey wing of the left would collectively asphyxiate.
One fear seems to be that if neocons are given any quarter, they’ll teleport the US right back to Operation Iraqi Freedom and it’ll be Bush all over again. Except that ship has sailed. Sure, many neocons would love to return to Bush-era nation building and forever wars. Their worldview is as unworkable and utopian as any other radical ideology, but the dynamics have fundamentally changed. The Republicans are mostly isolationists now, and large swaths of the Dems are as anti-war as they ever were. Neocons are now just Blue Dog Democrats whose votes, influence, and donor cash are an asset in the fight against Trumpism and right-populism. To spurn such support is misguided, but to react to it by selectively taking potshots only at the left is downright foolish.
Neocons caused enormous harm, far outstripping Trumpists in terms of body count. Their policies are dangerous, but their principles are predictable. Trumpists want to tear down institutions. Neocons are ardently pro-institution. Trumpists reject democracy, sometimes violently, when they do not win elections. Neocons love democracy so much they’ll try to force it on other countries at gunpoint. In the unlikely event that neoconservatism once again becomes ascendant, they should be opposed. They are not fit to lead the country, but as coalition members, they have a constructive role to play in opposing Trumpism. Additionally, many neocons, despite their views on foreign policy, have evolved and moderated on various issues such as healthcare, guns, abortion, marriage equality, and others. This would have been unthinkable 15 years ago. That’s not nothing.
Bush was a terrible president, but it’s time to stop living in the past. In a rapidly shifting high-stakes political arena that sometimes demands strange bedfellows, holding onto old grudges is an albatross around your neck. You don’t have to vote for neocons. You don’t even have to like them. Enjoy your hatred in good health, I say. The fact remains that neocons are, perhaps for the first time in their public lives, doing some actual good. Let them. Join them. Or, at the very least, don’t leave the party just because they walked into the room. Allowing the neocons to continue living rent free in your head, a decade and a half past their prime, is not punishing them, only yourself.
This is the problem with leaning on politics as a source of meaning and identity. The moment something gets jumbled up with your identity, it becomes tribal. Your defenses go up, your mind closes down, and your functional IQ swan dives into an empty pool. The politics of purity and guilt by association are a losing project, because they hamstring the coalition-building needed to ever get anything done. Politics are the art of compromise, the process of sausage-making. If you’re not conflicted and sometimes uncomfortable, you’re not doing politics. If you feel a swelling sense of community, connection, and moral righteousness, you’re doing religion.
See also: “The Great Realignment That Wasn’t”
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A very small sampling of some more notable exemplars: Michael Tracey, Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, Krystal Ball, Tulsi Gabbard, and Jimmy Dore. These handful of figures alone have an eight digit combined following. (Note that this is a loose collection of people who do not necessarily agree on everything.)
I agree with your overall idea that neo-conservatism is becoming more and more outdated, already essentially replaced with Trumpism. I still hope to see an end to operations in the handful of Middle Eastern countries that the U.S. remains tangled up in, though exiting Afghanistan was a sign of an end to our commitment to nation-building around the world.
A clearer focus on domestic concerns is needed right now and partly drove the shift, it makes little sense for us to be spending as much as we do on questionable wars when we are struggling to take care of our own population.