Perhaps the absolutely fundamental neoconservative idea was the need to reassert American
    nationalism or patriotism or "Americanism" or "American exceptionalism": the idea that American
    society, however flawed, is not only essentially good but somehow morally superior to other
    societies.

    [This idea] is especially associated with immigration.  The future neoconservatives mostly came
    from relatively recent immigrant stock.  It is arguable, though certainly unproven, that such people
    in America feel a stronger need  than those of longer American lineage to display their credentials
    as Americans; or rather, that those whose families came over on the Mayflower feel that there is
    nothing incompatible between deep patriotism and a propensity to shout about what needs to be
    changed.
            -The World Turned Right Side Up : A History of the Conservative Ascendancy in America (1996)  (Godfrey Hodgson)
 

Boy, Godfrey Hodgson really hits the nail on the head there.  Norman Podhoretz's book, My Love Affair With America, is basically a protracted attempt to suggest that he loves America more than any of his former rivals on the Left, or current rivals on the Right.  Podhoretz famously broke ranks with the intellectual New York set in the 1970's, having determined that their anti-Americanism, most ostentatiously displayed during the Vietnam War, neither jibed with his own life experiences--the meteoric rise of a poor Jewish child of immigrants to respected writer status--nor was compatible with the need to maintain a militarily strong and assertive America, to stand as a final guarantor of an embattled Israel's continued existence.  He has an easy time rewinning his old battle with the radical counterculture (though he's unable to resist the compulsion to claim credit for having created that counterculture in the first place).  Their anti-Americanism is a result of their genuine opposition to freedom, which is America's organizing principle.  They do not wish to perfect America, but to destroy it and remake it in an image of their utopian (or dystopian) fantasies.  Podhoretz gives them yet another well-deserved drubbing.

But then he takes on the modern Right, and here he founders badly :

    In the mid-1990s there unexpectedly came an outburst of anti-Americanism even among some of
    the very conservatives I thought had been permanently immunized against itÖI was already pushing
    seventy, and it made me a little tired to think of going back into combat over a phenomenon that I
    had fondly imagined I would never have to deal with again, and certainly not on the Right

The anti-Americanism he's talking about is the harsh, but loving, cultural criticism of Bill Bennett and Robert Bork, and the tentative suggestions on the Religious Right that the Supreme Court may have so far departed from the Constitution in its decisions on social issues, specifically abortion and Church/State issues, that it is no longer a legitimate institution.  Podhoretz is horrified by these trends and seeks to read them out of the Conservative movement, but they were there long before him and will remain long after.

The problem for Podhoretz, and for neoconservatism in general, is the absence of a core political philosophy.  The Left believes that the central duty of government is to guarantee equality of outcomes among the citizenry and that government is capable of solving social problems and effectively running the economy.  Classic Conservatism is structured around a countervailing belief in freedom, which necessitates a very limited government, but strong social institutions, and, though it requires equality of opportunity, accepts that the resulting outcomes will be very different.  Neoconservatism is really only interested in supporting Israel and opposing quotas, it's largely agnostic on the other issues and has no firm view of the proper role of government generally.  On social issues, a natural distrust of Christian conservatism and the fact that neoconservatism arose in the urban milieu, combine to create a willingness to countenance big government, and the need for a massive military requires big government. On the other hand, if equality is enforced by the state, it will work to the detriment of groups, like Jews, who are disproportionately successful, so there's a reluctance to trust government too far.  This naked self-interest is certainly legitimate, but it's hardly a coherent political philosophy.

That Podhoretz is only marginally conservative becomes clear from the fact that he almost completely ignores the question of the size and role of government, from his dismissal of objections to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, from his failure to discuss, except in passing, the free market economic philosophy of folks like Milton Friedman and F. A. Hayek, and from his failure to comprehend why abortion is such a salient issue on the Right.  Even more revealing is his thinly disguised contempt for the conservative intellectuals of the first half of the century, who either go unmentioned (Albert Jay Nock, for example) or are dismissed as cranks (like the Agrarians--Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, etc.).   He seems to think that conservatism was born in the 1950s, only became a significant political movement in the post Vietnam era (not coincidentally, just after he joined it) and consists of little more than nationalism.

Were that true, were conservatism nothing more than a blind patriotism, of recent vintage, then he would be right to criticize cultural conservatives for questioning the moral climate of the country and the direction in which it is heading.  But conservatism, even American conservatism, antedates America.  And conservatism has endured precisely because it offers such a powerful critique of America.  In Albert Jay Nock's great book, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, he says the following :

    Burke touches [the] matter of patriotism with a searching phrase.  'For us to love our country,' he
    said, 'our country ought to be lovely.'  I have sometimes thought that here may be the rock on
    which Western civilization will finally shatter itself.  Economism can build a society which is rich,
    prosperous, powerful, even one which has a reasonably wide diffusion of material well-being.  It
    can not build one which is lovely, one which has savour and depth, and which exercises the
    irresistible attraction that loveliness wields.  Perhaps by the time economism has run its course the
    society it has built may be tired of itself, bored by its own hideousness, and may despairingly
    consent to annihilation, aware that it is too ugly to be let live any longer.

By economism, Nock means a kind of unfettered materialism or consumerism.  These lines, prophetic anyway, seem even more prescient in light of the events of September 11th.  There is a palpable sense in America's continuing discussion of the events that the America that died on September 11th deserved to die (though the victims certainly did not), that it was too self-centered, too trivial, too degenerate.  People have now judged the America of the 1990s, which Podhoretz is here defending against conservative critics, and, as W. H. Auden said of an earlier time, they have determined it to be "a low dishonest decade."

In the final pages of the book Podhoretz offers a dayyenu, a list of each of the things that would have been sufficient for us to owe America a debt of gratitude.  After a brief, and platitudinous, generic list, including such things as "domestic tranquillity" (which one is tempted to point out that China too enjoys), he gets to his real reasons for feeling patriotic, and they are all about the success he's made of himself : "...America...sent me to a great university..."; "...America handed me a magazine of my own to run..."; "...America saw to it that I would live in an apartment in Manhattan...";  "...America arranged for me to build a country house...".  It's utterly vacuous and truly appalling.

Freedom is vital to everything that America stands for.  It makes possible the kind of rags to riches story that Podhoretz has lived.  But it is not enough.  Conservatives demand freedom, but also believe that our country "ought to be lovely."  This loveliness consists mostly of an adherence to the eternal values of the Judeo-Christian tradition, of which, as Nock says, we are unworthy inheritors.  And right there is another key element, humility.  Conservatives realize that our inheritance is too precious to experiment with willy-nilly and so seek to conserve as much as can possibly be conserved of that tradition.  Paraphrasing Nock (one last time, I promise), who borrowed a phrase from Lord Falkland :

    What it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.

It is this very basic premise of conservatism--that it actually seeks to conserve something--that Podhoretz seemingly can not comprehend.  More's the pity.

(Reviewed:18-Oct-01)

Grade: (C) Orrin C. Judd

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