They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons

by Jacob Heilbrunn

The neocons have become at once the most feared and reviled intellectual movement in American history. Critics on left and right describe them as a tight-knit cabal that ensnared the Bush administration in an unwinnable foreign war.

Who are the neoconservatives? How did an obscure band of policy intellectuals, left for dead in the 1990s, suddenly rise to influence the Bush administration and revolutionize American foreign policy?

Jacob Heilbrunn wittily and pungently depicts the government officials, pundits, and think-tank denizens who make up this controversial movement, bringing them to life against a background rich in historical detail and political insight. Setting the movement in the larger context of the decades-long battle between liberals and conservatives, first over communism, now over the war on terrorism, he shows that they have always been intellectual mavericks, with a fiery prophetic temperament (and a rhetoric to match) that sets them apart from both liberals and traditional conservatives.

Neoconservatism grew out of a split in the 1930s between Stalinists and followers of Trotsky. These obscure ideological battles between warring Marxist factions were transported to the larger canvas of the Cold War, as over time the neocons moved steadily to the right, abandoning the Democratic party after 1972 when it shunned intervention abroad, and completing their journey in 1980 when they embraced Ronald Reagan and the Republican party. There they supplied the ideological glue that held the Reagan coalition together, combining the agenda of “family values” with a crusading foreign policy.

Out of favor with the first President Bush, and reduced to gadflies in the Clinton years, they suddenly found themselves in George W. Bush’s administration in a position of unprecendented influence. For the first time in their long history, they had their hands on the levers of power. Prompted by 9/11, they used that power to advance what they believed to be America’s strategic interest in spreading democracy throughout the Arab world.

Their critics charge that the neo-conservatives were doing the bidding of the Israeli government -- a charge that the neoconservatives rightfully reject. But Heilbrunn shows that the story of the neocons is inseparable from the great historical drama of Jewish assimilation. Decisively shaped by the immigrant exerience and the trauma of the Holocaust, they rose from the margins of political life to become an insurgent counter-establishment that challenged the old WASP foreign policy elite.

Far from being chastened by the Iraq debacle, the neocons continue to guide foreign policy. They are advisors to each of the major GOP presidential candidates. Repeatedly declared dead in the past, like Old Testament prophets they thrive on adversity. This book shows where they came from -- and why they remain a potent and permanent force in American politics.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, History, American History

336 pages, Hardcover

First published January 15, 2007

Reviews

[Dan Sasi · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Neocons have single handedly been the most destructive intellectual and political movement in the modern United States. We all think of them as a tight knit cabal who jumped headfirst into Iraq and all the disastrous foreign policy escapades that came next. With his wit and engaging prose, Jacob Heilbrunn offers a highly engaging narrative depicting how this small circle of radical intellectuals meaningfully reshaped American politics and foreign policy in the 20th century, up through to today. While nobody self identifies as a neocon anymore, it’s indisputable that our foreign policy to this day can be traced directly back to this cabal of Marxist radicals.

Neoconservatism grew out of a split between the Marxist stalinists and trotskyites in the 1930s. The ideological battles between the warring factions of Marxists were first exported to the Democratic Party and the Cold War, and then to the war on terror and the Republican Party. They were hoping to export a revolution to American politics and American foreign policy, overthrowing the realists and isolationists they held responsible for letting Hitler conquer Europe before the liberals handed Eastern Europe to Stalin.

The neocons had a fiery and almost prophetic temperament, it was primarily a group of and Jewish New York radicals and intellectuals. Born in the shadow of the holocaust, much of their world view was derived out of the US not doing enough to defeat the third reich and they blamed the isolationists for their slain ancestors. Their views first emerged in magazines, news articles and in universities. They called all the realists appeasers while describing every single enemy, Hitler or a fascist.

After the 1967 Arab Israeli war, they went all in on their support of Israel. They deemed any and all minor criticisms of Israel as antisemitic. We’ve never heard that one before. Since then, it’s hard to argue they weren’t foreign agents.

Heilbrunn excels at his deep biographical portraits of the movements varying leaders across generations. Kristol emerges as the “godfather” of the movement, Podhoretz as the fierce cultural warrior, Perle as the backroom operator, and Wolfowitz as the true believer who saw the projection of American power as synonymous with the spread of democracy. In each case, Heilbrunn highlights how personal rivalries, intellectual feuds, and identity shaped the trajectory of ideas. The movement was never monolithic. It was a coalition of personalities as much as principles, but the through line was a deep suspicion of both left-wing liberalism at home and realist caution abroad.

Heilbrunn emphasizes how neoconservatives carried themselves with a certainty bordering on zeal. They believed that history vindicated them, whether in standing firm against communism, promoting American values abroad, or warning against appeasement. That sense of righteousness propelled them into positions of power, but it also blinded them to practical limits, leading to overreach in Iraq and Afghanistan. The tragedy of the neocons, Heilbrunn suggests, is that they could never doubt themselves, even when the world around them made doubt necessary.

The parallels to today’s Zionist consensus in American politics are striking. Much like the neocons, today’s defenders of Israel operate with a moral absolutism that renders debate suspect, especially if Israel is at all involved.

There’s so much more, it was a great book. The one silver lining is that the old right, Pat Buchanan’s Republican Party appears to be making a come back. After Bush’s disastrous 8 years, it appeared that the neocons had won and the paleocons and realists were long gone. While the neocon world view is strongly represented in the halls of power today, the base is moving and quickly. It’s the only hope of our country surviving. At $37 trillion in debt, military bases stretching the globe, zero industrial base, never ending wars all over the world, we must sacrifice the empire to save the republic.

[Leslie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jacob Heilbrunn tells the story of the neoconservative movement in the United States. I found many aspects of this history of interest, especially their roots in radical politics of the twenties and thirties (the progenitors of the neocons were Trotskyites! who knew?). Heilbrunn tells his story by focussing on personalities, names, connections, and lines of influence. That's useful, but I would have liked more about the ideas that have driven them. I can see how Trotskyism would shade into anti-Stalinism and from there into fervent anti-communism; anti-communism then morphs into anti-leftism, anti-liberalism, anti-progressivism, anti-everything-that-isn't-us-ism. But on an intellectual and ideological level, the process still isn't quite clear to me. How, for example, do neocons reconcile their positions with those of the radical Christian right? Are such alliances driven merely by political opportunism and utility, or is there any kind of ideological connection here, overt or covert? By the end of the book, neoconservatism as a political philosophy still seems to me quite incoherent, and I would have liked more help in sorting it out. The book is useful and interesting, but not as useful as it might have been had it been approached with more intellectual rigour and inquisitiveness. Since the author is a former neocon himself, perhaps these sorts of ideological concerns seem obvious to him. Or perhaps his point is that neoconservatism is not as ideological as people think; if that's his position, it needs to be articulated more clearly. One thing, though, does become crystal clear, in case it wasn't before: neocons aren't conservatives at all. They're radicals.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an interesting "inside baseball" account of the extended families of New York Jewish intellectuals (perhaps pseudo-), who become, and remain, so influential in our disastrous foreign policy.

It could have been an excellent book, but it didn't make it. It dwells too much on the mini-biographies of the participants in the movement, and not enough on their ideas. He's valuable in discussing, without rancor or exaggeration, the "Jewish angle," the extent to which neoconservatism was both delayed and motivated by Jewish ressentiment of the élite and its formerly exclusionary policies, and the obsession of assimilating Jews with the state of Israel.

The more I read of what these people write, what they believe, and what they have done (go to Commentary's "contentions" blog), the more their maniacal obsessions creep me out. There isn't a war they don't want our soldiers to fight, no matter how far-flung, impractical, expensive and unnecessary.

[Joseph Stieb · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of the better histories of the neocons that I've come across. Heilbrunn is not exactly going for objectivity, but he's a great writer and he provides a vivid sense of the neoconservative persuasion's evolution. He's also right about a lot of things. For instance, he's right to say that the neocons are an especially Jewish movement. This, of course, is not a conspiratorial or anti-Semitic argument. There's nothing essentially Jewish about neoconservatism, but it did stem largely from the concerns and experiences of American Jews in the mid 20th century. It stemmed from their resentment of the WASPs who dominated elite universities and the State Department, who pursued realpolitik and excluded Jews from power and influence. It stemmed from their strong fear of appeasing evil, the loss of family members in the Holocaust, and their reaction against Communist movements in the 40's and 50's. It stemmed from their hopes and connections to Israel and their desire for American foreign policy to favor Israel over the Arab states, whom they saw as new versions of Hitler (WWII was the dominant frame of reference for neocons for the entire second half of the 20th century). Not all neocons were Jewish, but these and other examples show that neoconservatism can't be understood without understanding the Jewish experience in the US. I thought this was the most persuasive aspect of this book.

Heilbrunn is also appropriately wary of treating neoconservatism as a coherent ideology. Instead, he calls it a mindset. It's a mindset that liberals are naive in the face of evil, that America's foes can't be reasoned with, that only the US stands in the way of global disorder, that the US should embrace an imperial role, and that the Western tradition must be defended against. It's hard to call many, if any, of the neocons truly great thinkers (I might be persuaded on Irving Kristol and Fukuyama). They are much closer to being ideological combatants. They are more focused on victories in debates and shaming their opponents. This mindset doesn't seem to be susceptible to much evidence, which has led the neocons to disaster after disaster.

With each book I read about the neocons my opinion of them gets lower and lower. There was some value in the first generation's push against leftist radicalism in the 60's and 70's as well as some decent foreign policy thinking. However, the second generation seemed to possess all of their elders' flaws and none of their virtues. Their biggest problems are be overwhelming certainty in the rightness of their views and refusal to apologize and/or take responsibility for their ideas' consequences. This is why I respect people like Fukuyama and Moynihan more than their fellow neocons: they saw when the movement was veering off course and bailed in order to save their integrity as thinkers. For the others, the lack of self-examination is astounding. For example, they blasted the Bush and Reagan administrations for negotiating and warming to the USSR, seeing it as a ruse, but then triumphally celebrated the victory of the West in the Cold War, as if their inflexible hardline stance had much to do with it. They blasted leaders of both parties for any flexibility they showed on policy matters (Kudos to Reagan and Bush for ignoring them, for the most part). And of course they were fundamentally responsible for the Iraq War and mostly refused to see it as a disaster or take any responsibility for that fiasco. Heilbrunn's account of their denial, dishonesty, and tendency to blame others once Iraq went south is truly gut churning. He doesn't go this far, but I think the neocons by the 1990's became possibly the most egotistic movement in American politics, the group least able to treat opponents as anything but fools or traitors. Only the regressive left today can possibly match their undue certainty and detachment from reality.

So that was more of a rant than a review, but still you should check out this book if you are into US foreign affairs or just want a better sense of this weird but important group.

[Shaun Richman · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author lost me early on when he incorrectly described City College (a bastion of 1930's Trotskyists who went on to become neoconservatives) as being located on the Lower East Side. I guess he just assumed that Jews wouldn't travel far from home to go to school? Well, that's the problem with the book in a nutshell. The author states his opinions as facts and publishes his assumptions without bothering to do enough research to make him question any of his priors.

[Corey Astill · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book presents a fountain on insights. Every other page I had an "aha!" moment. Heilbrunn traces the neocon history of hopping from one political movement and party to another in pursuit of the next buyer for the narrow ideology they've continuously peddled. From Truman to Kennedy/Johnson to Reagan and most recently -- and most destructively -- with George W. Bush. To America's everlasting regret, GWB swallowed whole the neocons' Wilsonian fantasy about spreading democracy around the world through military conquest. Heilbrunn lays bare the motives and means used by these exceptionally intelligent and capable operators. Their intellectual arrogance masked the reality that they were leading the country into the most foolish and costly mistake since Vietnam.

[Ted Tyler · Rating 4 out of 5]

An insightful history of the rise of neoconservatism. Heilbrunn chronicles how a group of leftist, New York Marxists attached themselves to mainstream Democrats and then eventually, the Reagan and Bush 43 Administrations. He shows how their ideas were born, the intellectually-traumatic events that forced political relocations, and how they created powerful media and think tanks outposts.

"For the neoconservatives, it's always imperative to have, somewhere, somehow, an enemy-both at home and abroad. This suits their need to see themselves as lonely prophets standing in the breach between implacable foes on the one hand and weak-kneed liberals (and paper-pushing bureaucrats) on the other."

"The neoconservatives thought of themselves as Reagan's intellectual shock troops, a kind of guerilla army staking out positions that he himself shared, especially in his first term. Three goals animated them: backing anti-communist movements in Central America; ramping up the arms race with the Soviet Union; and pursuing the Strategic Defense Initiative, an antiballistic missile system that was swiftly labeled Star Wars by its critics."

"But the charge, lodged by Francis Fukuyama, that they were indulging in the kind of social engineering that they had repudiated in the 1960s doesn't quite stick. The neoconservatives didn't spend too much time thinking about social engineering; they spent too little. In effect, they weren't Tocquevillian enough. The culprit, in many ways, was Fukuyama himself, who had unleashed the giddy sense of triumphalism among the neoconservatives after the successful conclusion the cold war."

[Eric · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dated, so-so history of the neoconservative movement. I was looking for more in the way of the psychology that made the first generation of neocons move from left to right. This is not that book, although it does cover a few of the interesting personalities in the movement that I was not aware of. Ends during the second term of the George W. Bush administration, with an afterward from 2016, but before Trump.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fairly detailed look at the political group known as the Neoconservatives (just neocons today). The story starts in the US in NYC with Jewish immigrants butting up against the WASP elites. There are details of how they embraced Trotskyism and gradually evolved into militaristic nationalists after WWII. The details of the next generation of neocons and their participation in the Reagon, Bush 41 and Bush 43 regimes is well documented and of particular interest to the political environment of today.

[Thom Dunn · Rating 5 out of 5]

First chapter lists with interactions among, the New York-Jewish-Lower East Side- Trotskyist-Intellectual-(neo-pseudo-Talmudic-exegetical) tradition, with names like Gertrude Himmelfarb, Melvin Lasky, Irving Kristol, Sidney Hook, Saul Bellow, Alfred Kazin, Max Shachtman, Carl Gershman, Joshua Muravchek, and many more. This chapter, "Exodus" would expanded make an excellent book on its own. Perhaps such a book exists, or indeed many such. O brave new world !

[Straw · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was absolutely fascinating.....however, the first half is very dense and quite frankly a whos who of neocons during the first 40 years. I found it tiresome. But, the second half talking about their political ascendancy was absolutely fascinating. Who knew this was a Jewish movement that grew out of Trotskyism...

[Carolyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

fascinating aspect of politics that I really knew nothing about

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Takes one to know one. Heilbrunn had an insider's view and knows where the skeletons are buried.