Under Consideration: Defending Identity: Its Indispensable Role in Protecting Democracy, Natan Sharansky (with Shira Wolosky Weiss), PublicAffairs (2008), 259 pages.

After Jesus Christ, Natan Sharansky is George Bush’s favorite philosopher. In early 2005, around the time of his second inaugural, the president praised Sharansky—ex-prisoner of the Soviet Gulag, former Israeli cabinet minister, and crusader for human rights—in effusive terms.  Sharansky’s book The Case For Democracy was, in Bush’s words, part of his “presidential DNA,” a work which the leader of the free world recommended as required reading for anyone who desired to make sense of his foreign policy. While Bush did not mention Sharansky by name in his second inaugural address, his rhetorical commitment to ending tyranny and spreading democratic ideals all over the world echoed the main thesis of Sharansky’s tome.

Since those heady days, Sharansky has not changed his mind on the need for the most powerful nation in the world to put tyrannies on the historic defensive. He is still convinced that the way to peace is through the encouragement of democracies, since these regimes, as the story goes, do not go to war against each other—free and open societies are not fearful or belligerent. Nor has he abandoned the most ambitious thesis in the pages of The Case For Democracy: that most human beings thirst for a democratic regime.

It is well-nigh impossible to take this rhetoric seriously anymore, particularly in light of the failure to build democracy in nations like Iraq or Afghanistan, where undemocratic traditions so far seem to have won the battle against liberal universalism. Yet Sharansky is undaunted by these failures. In his new book, Defending Identity, he does not abandon his position, in light of these fiascos. Rather, he believes that democracies fail because they do not take account the necessity of identity. 

In Sharansky’s view, western democracies have given up trying to preserve their identities (whether historic, religious, or cultural), while fledging democracies in the Third World (including Iraq) have not allowed sufficient freedom to their peoples to express identity. Democracies have become too hostile to identity altogether. Without a strong sense of place and tradition, no democracy can survive. This lesson, Sharansky believes, is best understood in Israel, whose state preserves the Jewish heritage and democracy, without forcing painful and needless trade-offs on its citizenry. As he puts it, “Identity without democracy can become fundamentalist and totalitarian. Democracy without identity can become superficial and meaningless.” 

Defending Identity is hard to put down, for two reasons. Sharansky brings to the discussion poignant accounts of his painful experience as a prisoner of the Gulag, and his attempts to raise awareness of human rights violations in the USSR. It is also refreshing to read a favorite author of neoconservatives who takes identity seriously. For the neocons, Sharansky included, have traditionally dismissed concerns that identities (particularly those based on traditional xenophobia or religious fundamentalism) must be insurmountable barriers to universalistic principles of liberty and equality. In The Case For Democracy, Sharansky holds up the democratization of postwar Japan and India as clear examples that identity did not stand in the way of democracy. No culture, western or eastern, is intrinsically anti-democratic. (Of course, these examples ignore the degree to which Indian and Japanese democracies were subject to western influences.) In Defending Identity, however, Sharansky insists that identity matters. Why now?

Sharansky is genuinely worried that western liberal democracies are abandoning their identities in order to embrace a pseudo-universalism which can only benefit its enemies.  In terms that any paleoconservative would immediately welcome, Sharansky diagnoses the cause of the suicide of the West: a leftist-inspired double-standard which, in the name of transcending identity altogether, repudiates “bad” European identities while it embraces “good” Third World identities. The elites of Europe, in his view, are rejecting the decency of their own traditions while they appease the tyrannical impulses of anti-European immigrants on the spurious grounds that the Europeans must feel shame for their “oppressive” past to make way for the allegedly liberating passions of immigrants from their former colonies:

“Along with other post-identity ideologies, multiculturalism calls on European societies to weaken their own national uniqueness and recognize that European cultural tradition should not be defining and determinative. In effect, these ideologies deny the right of a national culture to sustain itself and, by refusing to make value judgments about cultural forms, call into question the supremacy of the very democratic culture that has enabled different groups to coexist in mutual respect or tolerance.  As these post-identity ideologies have systematically hollowed out Europe’s unique national identities and cultural forms in the name of peace, equality, and justice, groups without democratic experience or traditions have flooded into Europe. And these groups do not have the slightest qualms about the supremacy of their identities.”

In faulting the leaders of the EU for surrendering to guilt about their oppressive histories, Sharansky is not echoing Enoch Powell. Rather, he is advising that Europe could learn from its enemy across the Atlantic. The American melting pot, in his view, finds the right balance between identity and democracy. Unlike Europe, Americans have both identity and democracy. Instead of feeling guilt over past expressions of imperialism, America expects its immigrants to embrace her republican ideals first, their parochial identities second. In short, identity will flourish in America as long as it does not enter the public square. This is a fine description of America before the 1960s; perhaps Sharansky is stuck in a time-warp?

In a book devoted to identity, the crowning irony is that it is never clear which identity Sharansky believes is most compatible with the preconditions of successful democracy-building. Although he praises the American example of “identity-rich diversity,” Sharansky fails to recognize the paradox that America’s status as a propositional nation still rests on a historically specific foundation. It is hard to imagine Jefferson defending “self-evident truths” of liberty and equality unless these words were able to resonate with a Protestant culture already wedded to bourgeois individualism and the rule of law in the 18th century Enlightenment.

It is equally hard to imagine notions of human rights and universal liberty emerging outside of a western framework.  Sharansky, however, refuses to acknowledge troubling issues of historical dependence, since these would cut into his argument for the universal love of democracy.

Questions of historic specificity also smack of “relativism,” which is the ideological scourge of modernity in the eyes of neoconservatives, and Sharansky is no exception.  Relativists are nasty people who deny that there any true universal credos in morality or politics, and who end up seeing no distinction between democracy and tyranny as a result. 

Sharansky, who admires the anti-relativism of Allan Bloom and other neoconservatives, has no time for explaining what is relative or unique to the West.  Presumably, the values of the West are universalistic, and thus suitable for all peoples.  Not only can all peoples be taught the universalism of liberal democratic values; it is the mission, the identity, of the West to do so. In short, the real threat to the West is a denial of universalism, not cultures outside of the West. The West’s enemies are within its borders, or more specifically, the halls of leftist academia. Leftist relativists who dismiss individualism and the rule of law as simply western constructs are to blame for the suicide of the West. 

Few conservatives could disagree with Sharansky’s view that the anti-western Left has wreaked untold damage on the identity of western cultures. Yet Sharansky poses a stark alternative to political correctness:  that democratic values are absolute and reproducible across all cultures. Due to his naïve embrace of democratic universalism, Sharansky cannot explain why some cultures are simply more inclined towards democracy than others.  While he praises John Locke for teaching in his Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) the wrongheadedness of imposing one “religion” over all others, he conveniently ignores that Locke (along with all other social contract theorists) assumed that their respective regimes were intended for a Christian majority (with differing beliefs on revelation). Never did the social contractarians opt for religious or ideological pluralism, if that meant the disappearance of a majority Christian tradition. Because of the primacy of Christian charity, Locke was confident that a Christian democracy would be more tolerant than others. “Tolerance,” however, did not mean the disappearance of Christianity’s primary influence over the polity in question.

The reader will look vainly for a defense of Christian identity as indispensable to the survival of the West in Sharansky’s book. While he occasionally acknowledges that the Christian tradition in America might have fostered more tolerance for minorities than is the case in Europe (as the gay activist Bruce Brawer discovered when he left evangelical America for Holland some years ago, only to face hateful enclaves of Islamic extremism ), the persistence of this essential religious identity seems unnecessary to Sharansky.  Echoing the themes of his first book, Sharansky reiterates his faith in Defending Identity in an ideological program of teaching democratic ideals to Moslem immigrants who may otherwise be suspicious of the West. As long as these immigrants are allowed to preserve their own identity at the same time—for example, Moslem women can still be allowed to wear the niqab—they will be more receptive of democracy. Once again, identity poses no threat to democracy if identity is allowed free expression. 

Although Sharansky has no time or patience for academic leftists who decry the persistence of European or western identity as imperialistic and colonialist, and has no illusions about the tolerance of immigrants to the Western world, the disturbing naiveté of Democracy persists in Indentity. In opposing leftists (including many of his fellow Jews) for trying to displace western traditions with newly constructed identities based on communism or political correctness, Sharansky leaves the reader with a haunting question: is he creating a new “western” identity of his own which is not suitable for any society? 

While Sharansky praises both the West and Israel for maintaining liberal democratic traditions, it is not clear that he would advocate for Israel what he advocates for the West.  Although he teaches that the West could learn from Israel on the need to embrace both identity and democracy, it is unlikely that he would want western nations to adopt restrictive immigration policies akin to those in Israel. For if the West is to be an open society, Sharansky believes it must fight against the post-identity leftists who romanticize Third World revolutionaries, while it teaches immigrant populations about the verities of democracy. Indeed, there is nothing to fear from “a formerly repressed identity” coming to the surface as long as democracy “is taking root at the same time.” In short, there is nothing wrong with generous immigration policies, even if this means allowing hostile identitarians into one’s nation, for eventually they will embrace democracy.  It is hard to imagine any politician in Israel today teaching its citizenry not to worry about “formerly repressed” identities.

And if there is no cause for such worry, why not allow the Palestinians the right of return?

What will likely worry his readers on the traditional Right is his optimistic view that western democracy will win over people of all nations and cultures in time.  The fact that Sharansky recognizes the strength of some identities over others makes it all the more surprising that he believes that democracy is compatible with any identity. 

Once we clear western democracies of the suicidal leftists, Sharansky thinks all will be well. What is missing in this narrative is the recognition that there will always be cultures hostile to the West, even if they receive no encouragement from the heirs of the Frankfurt School. While radical Islamists have often joined forces with leftists (Lenin’s “useful idiots” comes to mind), defenders of Shari’a law probably don’t need inspiration from Herbert Marcuse to justify their hatred of their old “crusader” enemy.

The fact that many immigrants to Europe “have values and self-definitions that seem alien to—or perhaps even incompatible with—European democratic traditions” ultimately does not bother Sharansky, as long as Europeans maintain their own identities.  Like most neoconservatives, however, Sharansky believes that the identity of the West is democratic universalism. Anything that denies the universality of western democracy for all human beings is relativistic and supportive of tyranny. For this reason, Sharansky praises the melting pot for imposing universalism on traditional identity of its 19th century immigrants. 

This misreading of the American melting pot parallels his misreading of the West itself.  Despite his admirable respect for the superiority of western democracy over its rivals, it is simply not the case that all cultures have a burning desire for Jeffersonian individualism or even the Magna Carta. No amount of exposure to the ideology of democratic universalism is likely to change this fact.

Dr. Grant Havers teaches philosophy and politics at Trinity Western University (Canada).

We look at the present through a rear-view mirror.  We march backwards into the future. 
                                                            -Marshall McLuhan

Dan Larison’s recent praise of George Grant reminds me of the reason that originally attracted me, as an undergraduate reader, to this Tory philosopher of the modern age.  Grant persuasively associated the power of the United States in the twentieth-century with its relentless use of modern technology.  America did not simply celebrate the employment of technology to address the problems of poverty, injustice, and inequality.  The republic embraced the metaphysical assumptions of modern techne itself:   the will to control, master, and reinvent nature to suit the changing and immoderate interests of man’s estate.  The fact that Grant was also one of the few conservative political philosophers worth reading in Canada made his ideas even more attractive to me.

That said, I have often sensed that Grant’s critique of modernity, which underpins his critique of technology’s usage in the American imperium, is not the most promising way of advancing the cause of conservatism today.  While readers can learn from Grant’s ideas on the defects of both liberalism and its correlative idea of progress, these seem secondary in importance to the real difficulty facing the western world at the moment—the tyranny of the leftist managerial state.  Grant never seriously tackled this danger in his writings.  Sadly, this is a shortcoming all too common in many conservative writers. 

As readers of Grant well know, liberalism was the great menace in his eyes, not leftism.  Liberalism advanced the idea of progress with greater sophistication than the crude economic determinism of its most serious rival, Marxism.  The success of liberalism, particularly as the reigning ideology of the American elites, made it all the more difficult to expose and resist as a danger to traditional views of absolute truth and virtue, verities which only ancient authors like Plato truly understood, according to Grant.  Liberalism threatened to demolish this ancient wisdom in favor of technocratic rationalism. 

Liberalism was worse than Marxism because its more efficient practitioners did nothing to slow down the progress of technology.  Indeed, liberals idealized technological progress as moral progress, when in fact technology was creating the tyranny of the universal homogeneous state. (One wonders what Grant would have thought of on-line essays which discuss his views on technology!)  This understanding of modernity underpins the pessimism of his most famous book, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (1965), in which he predicted not only the death of his nation but the demise of conservatism as well.  In his view, conservatism did not have a prayer in the changeable currents of the modern age.  To conserve tradition against a relentless revolution of philosophical, social, and technical proportions was worthy of King Canute’s attempt to hold back the ocean’s waves.  Conservatism could no more survive modernity than the autonomy of Canada could withstand the engulfing pressures of the American imperium.

Liberalism also threatened to kill Christianity.  Grant predicted in Philosophy in the Mass Age (1959) the devolution of Protestantism into a secularized form of progress.  By the end of World War 2, the Protestant elites of North America were losing interest in traditional Christian orthodoxy even as they were eagerly embracing technocratic rationalism, with only a hint of the old puritan work ethic that had historically initiated the rise of capitalism—all this Grant surmised long before the term “Protestant Deformation” was coined.  In short, Protestantism may well have paved the way for the end of conservatism.

Finally, liberal establishments knew how to fight back against ignorant interlopers and outcasts from the hinterland.  After witnessing the defeats of Diefenbaker in 1963 and Goldwater in 1964, Grant realized that conservative populism was the last thing which the beneficiaries of big government and big business desired.  The business class which had opposed the New Deal in the 1930s had been replaced by large corporations whose elites were quite content to receive the largesse of statism.  The voters themselves had no more interest in conservative causes than the elites; everybody had become a liberal, it seemed.  The liberal ruling class had sold Canada out to American interests, and the people had cheered.

All of these insights have merit, and the study of these back in the 1960s might have saved many conservative populists from either underestimating the anti-conservative nature of big business or overestimating the people’s conservative instincts.  In offering all of these valid insights, however, it seems that Grant missed the forest for the trees.  Under the influence of Leo Strauss, Grant believed that liberalism was still the dominant ideology of the twentieth-century.  Strauss in particular taught that liberalism was the foundation of relativism.  The belief that morality was relative to history and tradition was the great scourge of modernity, and Grant sought to do battle with its liberal defenders.

What Grant missed, like so many other Tory writers, is that a new regime had emerged in the 1930s, which effectively displaced liberalism and bourgeois values as a whole.  This new managerial state, in the famous terms of James Burnham, threatened the liberal traditions of responsible government, individual freedom, separation of church and state, and respect for bourgeois Christianity.  This regime promised egalitarian leveling, a warfare/welfare state, and the centralization of political power in the hands of intolerant leftist mandarins.  By the 1960s, the New Left, whose main representatives were the sons and daughters of the old New Dealers, was threatening to finish the revolution, armed with the toxically illiberal ideology of cultural Marxism.  19th century liberals like Goldwin Smith would have been aghast at these developments. 

Grant, however,  wrote nothing about these changes.  Instead, in following Strauss, Grant blamed the defects of the political class in Canada and the United States on their commitment to liberalism.  What Grant missed was the entire historical devolution of this political philosophy.  He wrote about the liberalism of his time as if one could draw a straight line between Thomas Jefferson and Lyndon Johnson, without paying attention to the titanic changes that replaced laissez-faire individualism with the leftist collectivism of the Great Society.  LBJ was simply on the leftist side of liberalism, while Goldwater was on the rightist side.   It was liberalism, one way or the other.  

Like many conservatives, Grant saw in “value conservatism” (not a precise term which he used) the only path of resistance to what he thought was the liberal hegemony.  Judging from his essays on Nietzsche, John Rawls, and abortion in the 1970s, Grant was preoccupied with a crisis of values.  Liberalism had allowed everything to be permitted; license had overtaken virtue.  Even though the old Tory conservatism was as dead as the dodo, Grant in his post-Lament writings contended that opponents of the idea of progress could invoke Platonic political philosophy as the means to resist the relativism of the liberal regime.   Somehow the reading of the classical works of western political philosophy could help shake the masses from their dogmatically relativistic slumber.  

The irony of Grant’s embrace of value conservatism is that his suspicion of America did not deter him from embracing a late twentieth-century fashion on the American Right.  Unfortunately, value conservatism never made a dent in the structure of the managerial state. As Paul Gottfried has persuasively documented in Conservatism In America: Making Sense of the American Right (2007), value-conservatives may have won elections but they didn’t change anything in the process.  The VC movement (consisting mainly of neoconservatives) showed little interest in eradicating the managerial regime, at least beyond rhetorical flourishes about the evils of “big government” around election time.
It remains a mystery to me that an astute critic of the way ruling classes work could show no interest in the way the managerial state operates.  For this regime is not an open society of license and relativism.  Most ideas from the Right receive no fair hearing under this regime.  As anybody who is familiar with anti-hate speech laws knows, leftists are not exactly paragons of easy tolerance and true intellectual diversity.  The disappointing thing about Grant, along with most Tory writers (like Russell Kirk), is that he was caught in the time-warped assumption of believing that liberalism still existed, long past its prime.  The leftists who run the Canadian and American managerial states today are committed to the eradication of bourgeois Christianity.  Their rhetoric of sensitivity and tolerance does not require the old bourgeois idea of progress (which they likely see as chauvinistically western anyway).  Nowhere in Grant’s writings is there any awareness of the new regime and its techniques of control. 
As a rear-view mirror conservative, Grant was so preoccupied with the bourgeois liberal forces which had swept away his ancestral Tory ruling class that he had missed the true revolution which was unfolding before his eyes from the 1930s until his death in 1988.  It is little wonder that Grant has so many admirers on the Left, otherwise known as “Red Tories.”  Grant offered to the establishment a conservatism which poses no threat.  Let us hope that conservatives, armed with a good dose of elite theory, can do better against their ideological enemies.     

Anyone who has read the history of the debates over Lincoln’s legacy—I recommend Merrill D. Peterson’s Lincoln In American Memory—knows that there is nothing new about the attempts of various ideologues to project revisionist meanings upon his name and historical record. As David Donald once observed, Lincoln is “everybody’s grandfather.” Almost immediately after the president’s assassination, Americans have been scrambling to join the president’s burgeoning family of descendants. William Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner and biographer, alienated many a pastor in America with his suggestion that the president had never sincerely accepted the tenets of Christianity. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, “robber baron” capitalists and socialistic populists predictably clashed over which side Lincoln might have taken in their class war: the business elite represented Abe as a devotee of laissez-faire while the leftist progressives enlisted the president in their struggle against the new “slavery” of child labor and low wages. While the radical abolitionist Frederick Douglas was confident, at least in his old age, that Lincoln had been a supporter of racial equality, the white supremacist Thomas Dixon (whose novel The Clansman inspired D. W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation”) was equally convinced that the president was an enemy of racial mixing. 

It was only with the American decision to enter World War One, however, that we see the first steps towards the refashioning of Lincoln as an enemy of global tyranny.  (Even the architects of the Spanish-American War almost twenty years earlier had not invoked Lincoln’s memory with such intensity.)  As Richard Gamble has documented in The War for Righteousness, millions of Protestant progressives justified President’s Wilson war on behalf of democracy on the grounds that the struggle against Wilhelmine Germany was simply a global version of the fight against Dixie slavery. They called upon the spirit of Honest Abe to lead American Christians into triumph over the German “pagans” (apparently Lutherans qualified for such a title.)  Yet this first attempt to portray Lincoln as a global democrat bogged down in the face of disillusionment over the heavy loss of American lives and Wilson’s failure to apply his own principles of democracy in the aftermath of the disastrous Versailles Treaty, which set the stage for World War Two. Irving Babbitt, that well-respected conservative, refused to accept any parallel between the statesmanlike presidency of Lincoln and the imperial presidency of Wilson.
Even attempts to invoke Lincoln during the war against Nazi Germany did not fully crystallize into his image as a global democrat. While Carl Sandburg, the famous biographer of Lincoln, persuaded FDR to invoke the image of Lincoln, Roosevelt prudently avoided excessive analogies between the Civil War and the war against Hitler, which could have cost the Democrats millions of votes in Dixie. It is only in the Cold War period that we find the successful re-creation of Lincoln as a democratic universalist—an image so successful that even Lincoln’s enemies have bought into it.

With the publication of Harry Jaffa’s Crisis Of The House Divided: An Interpretation Of The Issues In The Lincoln-Douglas Debates in 1959, the stage was set for a bold attempt to represent the president as a dedicated builder of democracy everywhere. Jaffa, a brilliant student of the political philosopher Leo Strauss, has argued for over forty years that Lincoln’s aims were universal in nature. (The sequel to this book, A New Birth Of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln And The Coming Of The Civil War, was published in 2000.) For Lincoln was the first president to understand that the great American experiment would not survive unless the republic spread democracy far and wide. Jaffa conflated the self-interest of the nation with this ideological experiment, which he unabashedly admitted was a “messianic” one. The American South, in Jaffa’s view, was simply a home-grown version of Nazism. Of course, prominent neoconservatives (like Robert Kagan and Richard Brookhiser) make similar claims that Lincoln stood for “universal human equality,” anytime, anywhere. Indeed, it is now a neoconservative credo that Lincoln would support an “end” to tyranny everywhere, as President Bush’s Second Inaugural Address made clear. Yet Jaffa has been the most determined fashioner of a Lincoln who looked forward to the day when the American eagle would spread its wings to liberate the darkest tyrannies of the world, just as it once did on the fields of Gettysburg. A “new birth of freedom” would now echo throughout the world, since America’s values are the world’s values. The Lincoln biographer Allen Guelzo has praised Jaffa’s Crisis as the greatest book ever written on Lincoln in the twentieth century. Undoubtedly, cosmopolitan elites who favor a more globalist role for America desire an image of Lincoln as the “last and greatest founding father” (in David Gelernter’s term) who would support endless expansionism in the cause of liberty.

Conservatives from the late 1950s onwards, who opposed Lincoln as a tyrannical enemy of Southern self-determination and a creator of the “Imperial” presidency, have not necessarily disputed all the details of Jaffa’s portrayal of Lincoln. They obviously never shared Jaffa’s idolatrous view that Abe was a “god-like” statesman who needed to crush the South in order to advance the cause of liberty, but they have never questioned his more serious view that Lincoln was a democratic imperialist. In the days when National Review still represented traditional American conservatism, two stalwart contributors to the magazine in the 1950s and 1960s, Willmoore Kendall and Frank Meyer, accepted the basic accuracy of Jaffa’s portrayal while they hotly disputed the benefits of this legacy. Although Kendall and Meyer blamed Lincoln for creating a “Caesarist” dictatorship over the republic, they did not challenge Jaffa’s view that the president had a global ambition to spread equality across all of creation. (Among the early contributors to National Review, only Richard Weaver praised Lincoln as a true statesman.) Mel Bradford, who often debated with Jaffa, agreed with his longtime opponent that Lincoln’s “gnostic” love of equality logically leads to endless revolutions at home and interventions abroad. Richard Gamble, in critiquing the logic of Irving Babbitt’s praise of Lincoln as a prudent statesman, apparently agrees with Jaffa that Lincoln fully intended to impose the Declaration of Independence on the rest of the world, just as he had upon the Confederacy. With the exceptions of Sam Francis and Paul Gottfried (neither of whom is a fan of Lincoln), I can’t think of other paleos in recent memory who resist this Jaffaite portrait of the “globalizing democrat” Abe. 

Perhaps most famously, the paleoconservative historian Thomas DiLorenzo has eagerly accepted Jaffa’s terms of discourse while disputing its moral implications. DiLorenzo draws a straight line between Lincoln’s “imperial” presidency and every single intervention in the name of “democracy” that followed the Civil War. (Ron Paul got in hot water with the neocons in late 2007 for admitting on “Meet the Press” that he sympathized with DiLorenzo’s portrait of Lincoln.) In his most recent work, Lincoln Unmasked, DiLorenzo asserts that the president’s unprecedented suppression of antiwar dissent during his presidency has rightly inspired his neoconservative admirers to clamp down on civil liberties during the “war on terror.” This image of Lincoln is useful to DiLorenzo, for it allows him to put the responsibility for all American empire-building on Abe’s shoulders alone. Yet pre-Lincoln America was not utterly devoid of tendencies towards centralized power. DiLorenzo’s hero, Thomas Jefferson, was not particularly shy about suppressing dissent during his presidency (as Leonard Levy has shown ). If Barry Shain is correct, a “conservative” founder like Madison was not loath to justify the growth of the federal government at the expense of the states.  In short, Lincoln was not the first architect of Leviathan in America; indeed, special war-time presidential powers quickly expired after the end of hostilities and it took a whole half century to restore these (during the Wilson presidency), as Irving Babbitt observed in his Democracy and Leadership.

Anybody who reads Lincoln carefully will find it very difficult to tease out of his many speeches a consistent message of democratic universalism. As a child of the Second Great Awakening, Lincoln was profoundly influenced by faith traditions that emphasized the intractable depravity of man. To be sure, Lincoln occasionally entertained hopes that Americans could put aside their differences over slavery in a peaceful manner. As a Calvinist, however, who understood God as an impersonal taskmaster, Lincoln could not believe that all human beings desire freedom and just leave it at that. For the president also recognized (famously, in his Peoria speech of 1854) that it is just as likely that humanity loves slavery, too. If we human beings desire freedom, it tends to be for ourselves alone. In disputing the “self-evident” nature of the Declaration, Lincoln was expressing the view (again, borne of Calvinist realism) that it is all too human to doubt the equality of all human beings. (This skepticism on the president’s part probably explains why he thought mass colonization of the freed slaves to Africa or Central America was the only way to prevent the racial violence which would characterize the Reconstruction period.) There is nothing particularly rational about Christian love, despite the lip-service which both the Yanks and the Rebs paid to this credo. In short, Lincoln’s realistic view about human nature hardly qualifies him as a democratic globalist who wants to liberate the republican lurking in the hearts of people around the world. Perhaps only Straussians who portray Lincoln as “Christian” simply in a Machiavellian sense could have missed the sincerely felt Calvinism in this president’s thought. 

In accepting the neocon image of Lincoln as a democratic universalist, paleos have made the task of their enemies that much easier. For the president has now been baptized as their hero, whom they can call upon when the circumstances demand it. Why have so few paleoconservative historians at least defended Lincoln’s “realistic” actions in the arena of foreign policy? I am not suggesting that paleos indulge in the occultist art of presidential hagiography. Nevertheless, every time a neocon commentator repeats mantras about “new births of freedom” which in reality call for new wars in the name of Lincoln, it is easy to cite situations when he was prepared to live with political arrangements which fell short of republican standards. In his First Inaugural Address, the president offered the South promises to enforce the Fugitive Slave laws and protect existing slavery with a constitutional amendment (obviously these proposals were rebuffed). After the Trent affair of 1861 provoked angry calls, particularly from most of his cabinet, for a war with Britain, Lincoln wisely refused to give into these forces, especially the pressure to invade Canada. (John A. MacDonald, a good Burkean Tory who later became Canada’s first prime minister, was very grateful to the president for his prudence and restraint in this matter.) When the Poles rebelled against Czarist Russia in 1863, Secretary of State William Seward, acting on the president’s wishes, assured the Russians that America would not interfere in this conflict (funny how neocons today omit this fact as they extend NATO’s influence ever closer to Russia’s borders). 
  
I don’t doubt that neos and paleos will always play politics with Lincoln’s legacy. It may not be very dramatic or glamorous to portray Lincoln as a tough-minded realist, instead of a proto-Bush Republican, but perhaps America could enjoy a little less excitement after five long years of failed democracy-building.    

Christians on the right are used to witnessing attacks on their faith from atheistic leftists. Ever since the highly influential “cultural Marxists” of the Frankfurt School emigrated to America and proceeded to spew their venom onto bourgeois Christianity from the 1950s onwards (as Paul Gottfried has documented in The Strange Death Of Marxism), it has become de rigeur for the chattering classes in the media and academe to tear down the historic faith of Western civilization. What often goes unnoticed among conservative Christians is that large elements of the Right often despises Christianity as well. Protestant Christianity in particular has far too often been the flavor of the month for many decades.

The right-wing attack on Christianity has become a cultural phenomenon on its own, and a lucrative one at that. One need only visit a New Age bookstore in a major North American city to find rightist polemics against the faith. “Paganism,” which was traditionally understood to refer to a person who lived in the countryside (paganus), is now marketed as the last, best hope of the West against Christianity. While most new ageist ideology is warmed over mush at the best of times, the anti-Christian overtones of this movement are not always benign. The self-styled “neo-pagans” of the movement—who presumably desire a return to pre-biblical civilization—fault Christians for destroying nature, emptying the sacred groves of the gods, wiping out indigenous earth-friendly cultures, and depriving cows of the power to produce milk. This brand of polemicizing often has a leftist bent—in Facing West, for instance, Left academic Richard Drinnon celebrates the peaceable Amerindians who lovingly occupied the Americas before the genocidal palefaces appeared—but many rightists, too, eat up such accusations.

Since the late 1960s, the movement known as GRECE (Groupement de Recherche et d’Etudes pour la Civilisation Européenne) has called for the overthrow of Christian civilization in Europe. Its founder, Alain de Benoist, a well-known French journalist and author, and his largely intellectual following have blasted Christianity as an anti-European atrocity which has extirpated the indigenously pagan cultures of the continent in favor of a coldly instrumentalist and bourgeois faith.  Amoral individualism has replaced virtuous community.  The age of the noble hero of Valhalla has yielded to the time of the cowardly consumer of Wal-Mart.  Christianity, particularly in its Protestant and American forms, has presumably encouraged the primary forces of modernity—capitalism and technological progress—which have led to the near death of the West, although Benoist and his followers dream of replanting the sacred groves one day.  With the spirit of Nietzsche at their side, they look forward to waging war against the slavish Christian masses.

One can easily dismiss the posturing of GRECE.  Its impact on Europe’s elites has been absolutely nil. It also has no major following in America (one exception was the far rightist Revilo Oliver who once wrote respectable essays for Modern Age and National Review but later turned violently against Christianity in favor of a pagan revival.)  Moreover, the romanticism of the Gréciste ideology is too laughable to take seriously.  Their image of Nietzsche as an anti-Christian thinker is bad enough since, as Karl Jaspers has argued, Nietzsche’s “anti-Christ” posturing is thoroughly dependent on Christian ideas of creation, will, and history.  Their stereotyping of Christianity is flagrantly defiant of all historical evidence, as Michael O’Meara persuasively argues in his history of right-wing neo-paganism, New Culture, New Right. In portraying Christianity as an oppressively monotheistic and anti-intellectual force, Benoist and other neo-pagans (like the Italian political mystic and fascist fellow traveler Julius Evola) have had to portray by contrast Greco-Roman civilization as a tolerant, polytheistic, and enlightened period, a time when philosophers and poets freely exchanged ideas in bountiful gardens of letters. This romanticism—which has deep roots in the anti-Enlightenment of the early 1800s in Germany—ignores the authoritarian elements of the glory that was Greece and Rome. It’s hard to believe that the Grécistes have learned much from the fate of Socrates, who was put to death by the freest regime of the ancient pagan world for speaking against the gods of the state.  And if Socratic Athens was the highpoint of antiquity in the West, what can one say about the brutality of Sparta or Caesarist Rome?  As Fustel de Coulanges famously argued over 150 years ago, pagan societies were closed regimes with little time or patience for subversives of any kind.

Since there’s nothing new about moderns using “pagan” ideas for totally modern purposes, as Jennifer Roberts has argued in Athens On Trial, it might be safe to dismiss this romanticist critique of the modern Christian West. Unfortunately, neo-pagan thought in our time can show up closer to home, and enjoy significantly more influence. Leo Strauss and his many students in the United States have argued for over two generations that the truly universalistic tradition of the West is pagan, not Christian. The Straussian hermeneutic (which has often been a subject of debate on takimag) is now famous for teaching that the “natural right” tradition of Greek political philosophy is the quintessential tradition of the West. The choice is between Athens and Jerusalem. Absent in the writings of Allan Bloom, Michael Zuckert, or James Ceaser is any appreciation of the contribution which Christianity has made to American political thought, or the political philosophy of the West in general. The fact that most Americans thought and acted in Protestant terms at the time of the American founding (as Barry Shain has shown) does not bother the “natural rightists” who claim that Greek pagan thought is the most important and liberating tradition of the United States.  Unlike bad old exclusivistic and monotheistic Christianity, presumably Plato and Aristotle taught that the nature of all human beings is to desire liberal democracy (the Greek defense of slavery is conveniently omitted). Even Straussians who are willing to mention Christianity in positive tones, like the Lincoln scholar Harry Jaffa (it is hard to write about Honest Abe without mentioning Christianity, after all), tend to dismiss the New Testament as devoid of real political importance. The fact that pagan regimes were, once again, notoriously cruel towards strangers and subversives—an attitude which Plato counsels as a mark of prudence in his Republic—does not bother the Straussians in the least (except perhaps Strauss, who, being smarter than his acolytes, recognized the “heartless” nature of Greek political thought).

The Straussian dismissal of Christianity as an influence in the American tradition (which Clark Merrill, Frederick Wilhelmsen, and Barry Shain have written about) has become a more serious challenge than anything the Grécistes have ever hoped to accomplish across the pond. Along with their neoconservative allies, Straussians have managed to persuade many Americans in the most prestigious universities that the founding was a purely secular affair. Even if Strauss, a German-Jewish intellectual, did not intend to approve of such a radically secular view of the American regime (Strauss was a critic of Locke, after all), his scores of American students have done their best to read Christianity out of the tradition. Catholic admirers of Strauss often forget that he was dismissive of any claim to a distinctively Christian political thought, Thomism included.  As a result, Catholic Straussians often refrain from opposing the general Straussian marginalization of Christianity in America, since they are confident that the real target is Protestantism, not the entire Christian tradition.

It is not hard to read into this rewriting of history a political agenda which fits well with the thinking of cosmopolitan elites in the post-war era.  It is tricky to justify the idea of a republic with a universal mission to save the world from tyranny if one is always reminded of the parochial religious roots of the nation.  For this reason, the Straussian scholar Clifford Orwin has praised the foreign policy of President Bush for downplaying the Protestant heritage of American democracy, and thus holding out the hope that every Hindu, Moslem, Wiccan, or atheist can become a good republican individualist (of course, Iraq has blown this idea to bits).  However implausible it is to claim that Plato and Aristotle would have called for the democratization of the world, the natural rightists have been extremely successful in getting across their message of universalism to secular elites who govern America.

One irony which is always lost on both neo-pagans and natural rightists, however, is just how dependent they are on Christian thought, especially the Protestantism which they tend to despise. Thomists are also prone to using pagan ideas of “natural hierarchy” to hammer the alleged libertinism of Protestantism, even as they enjoy the freedom which the Protestant separation of church and state made possible. As Thomas Molnar and Eric Voegelin have argued, the “pagan temptation” only makes sense as a reaction to the effects of a long-established Christian civilization. (As I have argued on this site, the neoconservatives are far more dependent on Protestant usages of “chosenness” than they care to admit.) While Benoist and Zuckert portray Protestants as theocratic tyrants, they conveniently ignore that the individual freedom which they employ in order to critique the Reformation is largely the product of that tradition.  Although Luther and Calvin were far from being liberal democrats,  it is undeniable that the Protestant valorization of the individual conscience blazed the trail for the protection of the individual’s liberties from the deadening hand of the state (as the historian Ernst Troeltsch argued). The defeat of Aristotelian scholasticism at the hands of the Reformers was crucial in the struggle to secure religious freedom and equality before the law (neither of which Aristotle supported).  To be sure, there have been Catholics who supported the right to individual conscience—like Blaise Pascal and William of Occam—but, as my Thomistic friends remind me, with Catholics like these you might as well have Protestants.

More than any other faith tradition in Western Christendom, Protestants have fought for individual rights and freedoms, for the separation of church and state, and for the protection of individuals under the law. Protestant thinkers had to invoke the biblical ethic of charity in order to demonstrate the truth of their belief that true Christian love requires the extension of individual liberty to all human beings, an achievement of American Protestantism which impressed Tocqueville. I challenge anyone to find the same notion of love (as charity) in the texts of Plato and Aristotle, for whom love of the stranger or enemy is unthinkable. Yet the Straussians and Thomists, who are far more egalitarian than the Grécistes, give no credit to Protestantism for strengthening the cause of equality before the law in the West.

There will always be factions on the right who yearn for the restoration of the lost golden age Protestant modernity presumably demolished.  One interesting factor which unites an otherwise disparate collection of “neo-pagans”—whether Straussian or Gréciste—is their shared belief that it takes specially enlightened elites to teach virtues to the masses.  The Protestants presumably have unleashed so much freedom onto the West that everybody has become a libertine relativist.  Therefore, despite their love of intellectual freedom—which they correctly believe to be under threat by the modern secularist state—they also seek out a virtuous elite which will govern the ignorant masses back to the age of Delphi, Rome, or Valhalla.  This mixed message, to say the least, will not likely win much political support in our time.

These romanticist tendencies on the neo-pagan right will not put a dent into the leftist managerial state which now dominates all western democracies.  Sadly, Protestants in the West are watching their achievement in the area of church/state separation being steadily eroded by the apparatchiks who have created anti-hate speech laws and human rights tribunals.  Indeed, the Gréciste and neoconservative support for multiculturalism (which at times has favored a stronger Islamic influence in Europe) tends to further the decline of the Protestant West in favor of enforced tolerance and pluralism (which of course excludes Christianity).  Most Protestants, who are all too ignorant of their own civilization, willingly go along with these policies (as Paul Gottfried has documented). If the only thing which right-wing neo-pagans offer as an alternative to a decayed Protestantism is the quixotic hope for a long, lost age of noble heroes and virtuous hierarchies, they are only helping their enemies who run the ministries of truth in leftist managerial states.

Dr. Grant Havers teaches philosophy and politics at Trinity Western University (Canada).

Jacob Heilbrunn, They Knew They Were Right: The Rise Of The Neocons, Double Day, 336 pages.  

It is always risky to write the obituary of neoconservatism, despite the now fashionable view that this is an idea whose time is finally gone. As Jacob Heilbrunn demonstrates in They Knew They Were Right: The Rise Of The Neocons, the neoconservatives have always been a tenacious bunch. Who could have predicted that a small group of ex-Trotskyite intellectuals would not only shape foreign policy for the Republican Party in the last three decades but also reinvent conservatism in America?  Heilbrunn, a former senior editor of The New Republic, wisely prefers to emphasize the past success of the neoconservatives rather than offer ironclad predictions about their future influence, settling for rather safe forecasts such as his claim that American soldiers will be in Iraq for another four years, whoever wins the election in 2008.

The title of the book is Heilbrunn’s essential explanation for the success of the neoconservatives—they knew they were right. Their sheer self-confidence of the neoconservatives, their belief that they have The Answer, is astounding and goes a long way in explaining their stunning victories. For this reason, the author emphasizes the radical origins of the movement.  Heilbrunn offers a readable (though not terribly original) account of how the future leaders of neoconservatism (especially Irving Kristol) got their start as public intellectuals engaged in various fratricidal battles between Trotskyites and Stalinists in the 1930s and 1940s.  Despite this parochial beginning, these former leftist radicals—who eventually became ardent anti-Communists—possessed the will to power necessary to enter and then transform the mainstream of American politics, especially on the right. As they eventually moved from the left to the right in the 1970s, this will to change the world through endless promotion of their ideas never flagged.

Heilbrunn does not find it sufficient, however, to explain the success of the movement solely on the basis of a latent leftist orientation. Ethnicity as much as ideology explains the success of neoconservatism. In claiming that it is “in a decisive respect a Jewish phenomenon,” Heilbrunn is not simply pointing out that most neoconservatives are Jewish. Rather, he portrays the neoconservatives as living out the drama of a modern-day Mosaic narrative. The movement has always been a “prophetic” one, since its avatars began with an “exodus” from the Trotskyite left to the Democratic Party, spent time in the “wilderness” of the breakdown of bipartisan consensus in the 1960s, achieved “redemption” as they moved rightward into the Republican Party, and have now returned to “exile’ after the debacle of the Iraq war.

Although Heilbrunn does not get into the intellectual origins of political theology, historians of ideas will immediately recognize his stage-theory of history as a version of the “secularization hypothesis” famously defended by Max Weber, Karl Löwith, and many other socio-historical theorists in the 20th century. Secularization of biblical ideas is nothing new, of course, if that simply means the process of transforming religious credos into a brazenly political agenda. Practically every major political movement on the left in modernity has “immanentized the eschaton” (to use Eric Voegelin’s memorable phrase) by conflating the Kingdom of God with the Kingdom of Man. This use of secularization is Heilbrunn’s best defense—whether he knows it or not—against the predictable charge that he is anti-Semitic for emphasizing the Jewish origins of neoconservatism. The fact that neoconservatives have thought and acted in terms of secularized Judaism places them in the larger company of many other atheistic ideologues who were more than willing to bring heaven down to earth through political action. In the post-Holocaust age, it is not terribly shocking to discover that even secular Jews are tempted to embrace political messianism. Still, when neoconservatives see themselves as a “chosen people” struggling to break out of their intellectual captivity, this has more to do with leftist adulteration of biblical thought than with any teaching of the Old Testament. (My favorite phrase for describing this misuse of the Bible is the indulgence of believing in “chosenness without God.”)

Anybody who seriously reads neoconservative authors, particularly the writings of the students of the German-Jewish political philosopher Leo Strauss, will not spy anything particularly religious in their thought.  (Strauss taught that true political philosophers were unbelievers.)  Whether neoconservatives consciously understand their indebtedness to secularization is not a point, however, which interests Heilbrunn.  Still, it should be of interest to any religious American who has ever been tempted to support neoconservatism. The lack of success which neoconservatives have had in “delivering” Jewish votes to the Republicans—a fact whose importance Heilbrunn correctly points to—may well reveal concern among American Jews about the neoconservative usage of religious themes.

This aside, the neoconservatives’ winning over the Christian Right in the 1970s is surely one of the greatest political success stories of all time. Secular-minded eastern seaboard intellectuals and evangelical Protestants of the South and Midwest are an odd coupling, to be sure. And at first glance it’s not at all clear what could possibly unite them. It certainly helped that neoconservatives and evangelicals were equally disgusted by the leftist excesses of the 1960s; that has been well-documented. Yet I suspect that a great deal of neoconservative success also lies in tapping into the readiness of Americans—Left or Right—to see themselves as a chosen people who must liberate the world from evil. Even if neoconservatives generally believe in what I call “chosenness without God” (or what David Gelernter calls “American Zionism”), this brazenly secularist theology has not deterred many American Christians from embracing a frankly idolatrous and blasphemous set of beliefs. In any case, this use of chosenness has helped the neoconservatives to redefine conservatism in America, to the point of defeating traditional conservatives—the heirs of Robert Taft—who were less convinced that America should act as an agent of the Almighty in foreign affairs.

One of the most serious limitations of Heilbrunn’s study is his failure to discuss in sufficient detail the neoconservative war against traditional American conservatism.  (There is no mention, for example, of the Bradford controversy of the early 1980s, which represented the first big triumph of neoconservatives over their enemies to their right.)  In emphasizing the neoconservatives’ taking part in intramural squabbles on the left, Heilbrunn shows no interest in explaining why neoconservatives were so successful in easing traditional rightists (we now know them as “paleoconservatives”) out of positions of power. Had he focused on this important period of history, he would have only strengthened his overall thesis that neoconservatives are radicals who have never tolerated opposition—whether in their Trotskyite days or in their takeover of the GOP.

While Heilbrunn’s favorite explanation for neoconservative success on the right is, once again, the sheer power of their will (they never doubted that they were right), let’s not forget that access to money and power helps too. It is simply too easy for the author to claim that “neoconservatism slowly became a self-perpetuating elite, much like the hated WASP establishment, though one that was based not on wealth but on ideas.” While one should not discount the power of secularizing theologies that confuse the Providence of God with a call to democratize the world, the fact is that neoconservatives have been extraordinarily successful in securing the access to media and postwar power elites in order to tell them what they want to hear about America’s true “mission” in the world.

Heilbrunn himself provides one powerful example of how influence can trump the intrinsic merits of ideas.  Neoconservatives from Henry “Scoop” Jackson and Albert Wohlstetter in the 1970s to Natan Sharansky and Robert Kagan in the 1990s have succeeded in portraying a foreign policy of “realism” as one devoid of all moral concerns. That great defender of realism, George Kennan, constantly faced criticism for advocating an approach to foreign affairs which privileged matters of self-interest over ideology and ethics. Neoconservatives jumped into the debate over realism after Israel faced the threat of annihilation at the hands of her Arab neighbors in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and out of this context of anxiety over Israel’s very survival came the neoconservative belief that America must never distinguish her self-interest from its moral mission to protect and spread democracy all over the world. Presumably realists (like Henry Kissinger, a favorite target of neoconservatives) were so amoral and calculating that they were more than willing to sacrifice innocent peoples to their enemies (reminiscent of Munich-style appeasement). The neoconservatives successfully persuaded many Americans, especially in the GOP, that realism was a pessimistic and even isolationist abdication of America’s responsibility to embrace the cause of freedom-loving peoples everywhere.

While Heilbrunn provides a fine description of the neoconservative battle to defeat realists in foreign policy circles, he still tends to portray this struggle as a battle of ideas rather than one over access to influence. The neoconservative attack on realism does not bear intellectual scrutiny. Anyone who has studied realism seriously cannot accept the neoconservative stereotype that realists have ice-water running through their veins.  Kennan never claimed that morality had no place in foreign policy: he simply questioned the wisdom of assuming that peoples of the world (especially Russians) should be judged according to American standards. Was it moral, Kennan often asked, to presuppose that all human beings desire democracy, American-style? What critics like Reinhold Niebuhr and his neoconservative admirers ignorantly dismissed as Kennan’s indifference to morality was in fact his subtle blend of realism and ethics in foreign policy. It was simply arrogant and delusional, in Kennan’s view, to believe that within every person lies an inner Thomas Jefferson just waiting to break out. (Sadly, this wisdom was lost on the neoconservatives who pushed for the invasion of Iraq in 2003.)

If the neoconservatives’ case against realism is based on straw-men arguments, then what explains their success on the right? After all, traditional conservatives were not nearly as opposed to realism as the neoconservatives were. I offer two explanations.  First, one must never discount the appeal of political messianism to large voting blocs of the American public.  Twentieth-century evangelical Protestants have always been somewhat enamored with the idea of their nation as the “almost chosen people” (in the words of Lincoln) who must set out to free the world of modern-day Pharaohs (as Richard Gamble has amply documented in his The War for Righteousness).  Norman Podhoretz’s talk of World War IV with “Islamo-fascism” certainly resonates with the most apocalyptically inclined evangelicals.  Second, the money and power which neoconservatives managed to enjoy tilted the debate against realism in their favor. Their success was not total—Ronald Reagan was far too much of a “realist” in foreign policy in the eyes of neoconservatives who despised his attempts to negotiate arms-control agreements with Gorbachev—but the neocons certainly gained access to affluent constituencies with a vested interest in spreading American influence (like big business).

The neoconservatives also grew influencial by capitalizing on the Kulturpessimismus among elites in the 1970s who believed that America’s best days were behind her. The neoconservative success in defending an optimistic view of America’s mission in the world contrasted sharply with Carter’s infamous “malaise” speech of 1979.  It is no surprise that America’s political class, haunted by Vietnam and stung by the Iranian hostage crisis, warmly embraced the neoconservative vision of democracy-building.  Indeed, the neoconservative move out of the “wilderness” and into the light of “redemption” had less to do with the power of their ideas than with anxiety over America’s future as the 1980s approached.

While Heilbrunn at times discusses the battles between neoconservatives and paleoconservatives over the true mission of America, this struggle takes second-place to his overall focus on the pro-Israeli biases of the movement. Although I don’t doubt for a moment that Israel is of great importance to neoconservatives, the success of their movement does not simply lie with their use of the Exodus narrative or their access to the wealth of the Israeli lobby. Like it or not, they were able to displace an attitude of defeatism in America’s elites with a sunny vision for the republic. One reason, I believe, that paleoconservatives have been often unable to defeat the neoconservatives is because of the paleos are not inclination to understate the fact that America’s leaders and citizens desire an optimistic creed. After the defeat in Vietnam, neoconservatives were able to position themselves as the true defenders of the “last, best hope.” After the 9-11 attacks, they were able to legitimize the grim war on terror with the happy promise of a democratic revolution in the Middle East which would end terror once and for all (David Frum and Richard Perle even promised to “end to evil”?) In both cases, the neocons were able to outmaneuver both liberals and conservatives who had doubts about the limits of American power. Rightly or wrongly, optimism (no matter how “boobish,” in the words of Mencken) tends to be lucrative in America. Just look at the Obama campaign.

Even if paleoconservatives are fundamentally correct about the lack of wisdom which neoconservatives often convey when they defend the cause of democracy on a global scale (secularized theology once again!), they can’t doubt that this message of hope resonates with many Americans. I have recently come to the conclusion that paleoconservatives made a mistake in surrendering the interpretation of the legacy of Lincoln to their enemies on the right. Neoconservatives have succeeded in portraying Honest Abe as a global democrat and moral universalist, whose rhetoric calls for an optimistic faith in the cause of liberty. This success is so extensive that even avowed enemies of the president like Thomas DiLorenzo agree with exuberant defenders like Harry Jaffa that Lincoln was indeed a democratic imperialist (they just disagree on the benefits of this legacy). In accepting the neoconservative view that Lincoln would have supported the Iraq War, paleoconservatives have made it easier for their enemies to capture one of the most inspirational figures in the nation’s history as grist for their many mills. (Whatever happened to conservative defenses of Lincoln as a realist in politics?)

Despite the often glaring inattention to detail which Heilbrunn displays towards battles on the right, I agree with the author that it is premature to anticipate the exit of neoconservatives just yet.  The neoconservatives have proven themselves so adept at rewriting the history and symbolism of American politics that there is no reason to imagine the waning of their political theology. Even without the question of Israel’s survival, the neoconservatives can manipulate the messianic hopes of vast swaths of the American electorate. For all the talk about an incipient revival of “realism” in foreign policy, neither Obama nor McCain gives any indication that Kennan-style thinking will be allowed to compete with the politics of “hope,” even if this means more wars down the line.  If the Democrats withdraw from Iraq (I’m not holding my breath) and the country collapses into a state of nature, just watch the neoconservatives launch endless recriminations about who “lost” not only the war but also the true mission of America. Once again, they might just prove to many Americans that they were right.