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Title: Critiques of Neoconservatism Author: Kevin Carson Date: January 2002 Language: en Topics: conservatism, critique, noam chomsky Source: Retrieved on 3rd September 2021 from http://www.mutualist.org/id8.html
Noam Chomsky is one of the latest on the Left to fall under David
Horowitz’s guns. Horowitz’s “The Sick Mind of Noam Chomsky” appeared
last fall, in two parts, in FrontPage Magazine. In a lot of ways,
Chomsky deserves it. He has plenty of weaknesses and failings that
Horowitz could have exploited mercilessly, had he so wished.
For one thing, he has a tendency to play fast and loose with his
sources. He often seems to be making it as hard as possible to look up
his source for some assertion. In the past, I have read a paragraph in
Deterring Democracy or the like, containing several statements about,
say, U.S. ties to death squads in Central America. But instead of
providing a separate citation for each item of fact, he footnotes the
entire paragraph once, and then lists a dozen sources (or two) in the
note. So unless the titles themselves provide sufficient contextual
clues, it’s necessary to look up all of them (several hours’ work at the
library) just to find out which source refers to which assertion. On top
of that, many of his references are not to the primary source, but to
some other work by Chomsky in which he cites the primary source. Worse
yet, he sometimes cites his work like this: “See chapters three, five,
and seven, in...” And if that were not bad enough, in some cases (albeit
far from a majority), the original source doesn’t explicitly say what
Chomsky extracted as its import. It turns out that the statement
footnoted in Chomsky’s writing is not an actual fact from the original
source, but Chomsky’s characterization of the meaning of the original
fact (which he doesn’t actually quote). I think this last failing, in
all fairness, reflects not so much intellectual dishonesty as sloppiness
in distinguishing the bare facts from his reading of their significance;
but it surely makes it a chore to check his work.
Chomsky is often referred to as a “prolific writer”--it’s almost a
Homeric epithet. Unfortunately, his prolific writing is in part due to
his tendency to recycle the same stock paragraphs in every new piece he
writes (I’m afraid to say too much on this count, since I have the same
failing). Chomsky has repeatedly referred to Bakunin’s fears that Marx’s
state socialism would degenerate into a “Red Bureaucracy.” The only
source Chomsky ever cites is a letter from Bakunin to Ogareff and
Herzen, quoted in a work in French by Daniel Guerin--not exactly
accessible to the average reader who wants to find out more (see above
paragraph). So I did a word search of “Bakunin” and “red bureaucracy.”
Guess what? 104 references, about two-thirds of them from Chomsky. And
in each of them, he referred to the stock Bakunin quote in almost
exactly the same words, and gave the same inaccessible reference (if he
gave a source at all). Another reason for Chomsky’s literary fecundity
is the number of collected interviews from Z Magazine, or by his
Boswell, David Barsamian.
Far from the least of his shortcomings is intellectual inconsistency. He
regularly comes under attack from anarchists and others on the
libertarian left for his claims to be an anarchist, and the peculiarly
statist nature of his “anarchism.” In the past he has referred to the
difference between his “goals” and “visions.” His long-term vision is to
abolish the state and devolve power to a federation of direct
democracies. But since our society is dominated by concentrations of
private power, it is necessary first of all to strengthen the power of
the state to dismantle corporate power. So his immediate goal is to
vastly increase federal power, under the control of “progressive”
forces, to break the power of corporate tyrannies before the state can
be allowed to wither away. I’m pretty sure another “anarchist” named
Lenin had the same “vision” and “goals.”
But a central theme in Chomsky’s work is the extent to which existing
corporate capitalism depends on the state as a source of subsidies and
cartelizing regulations; so it stands to reason that the cure for
capitalism is not to strengthen the state, but to abolish it and let the
free market destroy corporate power. Engels pretty aptly summed up the
difference between anarchists and state socialists over a century ago:
“They say abolish the state and capital will go to the devil. We propose
the reverse.” By this standard, Chomsky sounds a lot closer to Engels
than to Bakunin.
But Horowitz didn’t attack any of these things. He preferred to attack a
straw man. Although he made repeated reference to Chomsky’s statements
about the role of ruling class interests in U.S. policy, Horowitz didn’t
answer them. He simply characterized them. His method was to quote them
outside of any context, in a “can you believe he actually said this?”
tone, and then to denounce them as “unAmerican.” The heretical
statements, judged a priori to be outrageous, need not be refuted--just
denounced. In Part Two of “Sick Mind,” he responded to reader complaints
that he hadn’t actually answered Chomsky’s arguments by dissecting a
carefully selected handful of assertions. But almost every reference was
to a Chomsky pronouncement in one of the Barsamian collections, What
Uncle Sam Really Wants. The Barsamian interviews are not where you’d go
if you wanted to see Chomsky’s arguments fully developed, with
documentation provided.
Horowitz comes across, to me anyway, as at least as disingenuous as
Chomsky. I suspect the reason he failed to answer Chomsky on grounds of
fact was that he knew he couldn’t. For all the cloud of obfuscation that
surrounds Chomsky’s use of sources, a great deal of what he says about
U.S. policy in the Third World--its support of death squads and
right-wing dictators, and the role of corporate interests in formulating
such policies--is heavily documented and hard to refute. It’s one thing
to answer a general pronouncement about the iniquity of U.S. power with
an equally general counter-assertion about the virtue and altruism of
U.S. policy. It’s another to answer documentation on ties between the
Atlacatl Battalion and the School of the Americas, or on United Fruit
Company activities in 1954. To argue the facts with Chomsky might well
undermine his simplistic Snidely Whiplash picture of U.S. motivation;
but it would also risk, to a much greater extent, exposing as hogwash a
centerpiece of neoconservative ideology--the benevolence of American
empire.
Which is an inelegant segue to my next point. Horowitz’s faults are,
more generally, the faults of the neoconservative movement as a whole.
Neoconservatism’s central defining characteristic is its repugnance to
the genuine American conservative tradition. The views of Horowitz would
not only be unrecognizable as conservatism to anyone born before 1914,
but (with the possible exception of authoritarian centralists like
Hamilton) would have been repudiated with disgust by the leading figures
in the first two generations of American history. The American tradition
from the revolutionary period to the present has been fixated on the
dangers of power, and on the tendency of power to corrupt. And it has
been quite explicit on the kind of corruption it feared. Either the
state apparatus would become an aristocracy in its own right, from the
love of power and privilege, or it would function in the interests of an
aristocracy of corporations and moneyed interests. Empire, to the
revolutionary generation and the American mainstream up until 1941, was
inconsistent witht the survival of American constitutional traditions.
Its concomitants, a large permanent military establishment and a
powerful executive, were themselves great threats to liberty.
Horowitz and the neocons, in contrast, positively worship power. Their
literature is full of nostalgia over past total wars, and the spirit of
wartime sacrifice on behalf of the State. Their heroes are wartime
dictators like Lincoln, Wilson and FDR. They insist on referring to the
Cold War as WWIII, and the “war on terrorism” as WWIV. They are the most
strident advocates of turning the latter into a total war against the
whole Islamic world. And nearly every day we see the necons, in the
journals of opinion, defending the abrogation of still more of the
Fourth Amendment by the USA Patriot Act, the suspension of habeas corpus
for Jose Padilla, etc., as necessary sacrifices “for the
duration”--which could be decades. They are enthusiastic on the
potentials for global welfare of “benevolent empire,” and they support
presidential “national security” prerogatives reminiscent of a Stuart
monarch.
Although they make much of the social pathologies resulting from the
Great Society, they are generally fairly accomodating to the New Deal
form of state capitalism. The reason, perhaps, is that many neocons are
former Cold War liberals who didn’t move left with McGovern. Despite the
neoconservatives’ professed horror at the “statism” and
“authoritarianism” of the left, their only real problem with big
government is apparently that it isn’t being used to beat the right
values into people.
Of all the Neocons’ manglings of “American” values, the worst example is
their close association with the Straussians. Straussians have a very
odd interpretation, to say the least, of the U. S. Constitution. The
nature of Straussian constitutionalism was made pretty clear in debates
between the Straussian Harry Jaffa and the traditionalist M. E.
Bradford. The proper way to interpret legal and historical documents (at
least outside the Straussian priesthood) is in the context of the time
they were written, according to the understanding of their
contemporaries; in the case of the Constitution, this means according to
the understanding of the ratifiers. The method of the Straussians,
however, is to take a handful of documents--the Declaration of
Independence, the Preamble, the Gettysburg Address--as Sacred Texts. One
interprets them by looking up “Common Defence and General Welfare” in
Mortimer Adler’s Syntopicon to see what Aristotle and Aquinas had to say
on the subject, and then importing these ideas into the text of the
Constitution itself.
Straussians commonly assert that the values of the Declaration were
somehow mystically incorporated in the Constitution, and are legally
enforceable as such even when no warrant can be found on the face of the
Constitution. This Straussian methodology resurrects many of the
idiosyncracies of the “antislavery Constitutionalism” of the pre-Civil
War period--or what I like to call “Shiite Constitutionalism.” The idea
of substantive due process comes from that cultural milieu. So does the
Howard Phillips (U.S. Taxpayers’ Party) dogma that the Fifth Amendment
is not just a prohibition against the federal government, but actually
empowers the President to enforce the rights of citizens against the
states. And so does the idea that “Common Defense and General Welfare”
in Article I Section 8, far from being a qualification of the fiscal
power, is a general grant of power that renders the subsequent
delegation of powers moot.
In the Straussian ideology, Liberty and Equality (always capitalized)
are central values; but somehow the plain old right just to be left
alone, or to control the things that affect your life, isn’t. And these
grand abstractions of Straussian/ Neoconservative “Liberty” and
“Equality” somehow always seem to require a massive imperial commitment,
with associated national security state, for their survival. The old
fashioned kind of (small l) liberty was obtained by old-fashioned,
hell-raising American anti-authoritarianism--the kind that actually
distrusted the benevolence of American power. In their willingness to
augment the Leviathan state, and sacrifice real liberty on the altar of
grand abstractions like “Liberty” and “Equality,” the neoconservatives
sound a lot like the left-wing statists Horowitz holds in such contempt.
Besides his ignorance of the genuine American conservative tradition,
Horowitz is amazingly fuzzy in his conception of “the Left.” First, he
ignores the fact that traditional American conservatism is historically
on “the Left”--in the sense that they would have sat with the Third
Estate in the Estates-General or the Whigs in Parliament. Even the
founding father of traditionalist conservatism, Edmund Burke, was a Whig
who supported the Glorious Revolution and denounced the corruption (and
decided non-benevolence) of British empire. If Mr. Horowitz had been
alive then, he would probably have defended Warren Hastings against
Burke’s “unBritishism.”
And second, he ignores the existence of a genuine anti-statist left. The
Left has just as many nuances, complexities and subcurrents as the
Right; but Horowitz’s motivation is less a desire to understand things
on their own terms, than to grab “whatever comes to hand in a fight.”
Horowitz delights in using the terms progressive, socialist and
communist interchangeably. In quoting Chomsky’s doubts on the genuine
left-wing credentials of Lenin, Horowitz crows, “You have to pinch
yourself when reading sentences like that.” Now I would suspect that
Horowitz, as a former member of the Left himself, knows quite well that
there are more varieties of anti-Leninist Marxism than there are of
Leninism. A whole current of libertarian-communist and council communist
types from Luxembourg and Liebknecht to Pannekoek and Mattick denounced
the Soviet regime as a new form of bureaucratic class society.
If Horowitz considers their pretensions of hating Leninist/Stalinist
authoritarianism to be false, he can examine Lenin’s strident
denunciation of left-wing communism as an “infantile disorder.” When
Lenin sent the Workers’ Opposition and the Kronstadt mutineers to the
gulag, or broke the power of the workers’ committees in the factories
(calling for Taylorist state managers in their place), he seemed to take
their opposition pretty seriously. I cannot imagine an editor of
Ramparts not being aware of these currents. He may genuinely believe
that “libertarian communism” eventually leads down the same totalitarian
road as Leninsim. But that is an assertion to be argued, not a question
to be begged. In fact he doesn’t even acknowledge that the question
exists. Another reason I suspect Horowitz of disingenuous demagogy,
pretending to know less than he really does.
Despite his wilfull disregard of subtle distinctions on the left in
regard to other people, Horowitz becomes an expert on all the shades of
difference when his own leftist past is questioned. In response to
Chomsky’s dismissal, “I didn’t used to read him when he was a Stalinist,
and I don’t read him now,” Horowitz responded:
As a college freshman in 1956, I declared my own political identity as
an anti-Stalinist “new leftist.” I strenuously opposed the Soviet
invasion of Hungary, at great filial cost within the household. Ever
since that time that is for my entire writing career in the left until
my last piece was submitted to The Nation twenty years later in 1979, I
was a vocal anti-Stalinist.
Horowitz is admirably charitable toward himself, considering one of his
favorite epithets in characterizing any leftist movement on campus is
“Stalinist.”
A good many anarchists and others on the libertarian left repudiate
Chomsky’s statism. And there is a lot more mutual tolerance between the
libertarian left and right than I suspect Horowitz cares for. There are
people on the left like Alexander Cockburn, Sam Smith, and Frank Morales
who have strong sympathies for the libertarian-constitutionalist right
(to the extent that they are denounced as militia dupes by Chip Berlet
and his ilk). And there are many on the right who, far from denouncing
straw men on the “leftover Left,” make common cause with parts of the
left. Old Rightists like Joseph Stromberg, besides preserving the memory
of Taft, Buffet, and Garett, also make favorable reference to the
writings of revisionist historians like Gabriel Kolko, W. A. Williams
and James Weinstein in their analysis of “Corporate Liberalism” and the
“Open Door Empire.” And right-libertarian free marketers like Murray
Rothbard and Karl Hess sought an alliance between the Old Right and the
New Left against the New Right assault on traditional conservatism.
Hess, I believe, for a time even endorsed syndicalist seizure of
industries whose profits depended primarily on state capitalist
intervention. There is a broad ideological overlap where Karl Hess meets
Alexander Cockburn, where there is little room for the shibboleths of
left and right; its motto could be taken from Hess: “We should encourage
the flower of liberty whether its petals be red white and blue, or red
and black.”
But I suspect Horowitz disapproves of “libertarian” anything, left or
right. I find it interesting to compare my attitudes toward my own
ideological evolution over the years, to those of Horowitz. Ten years
ago I was a traditionalist conservative, strongly influenced by the
antifederalists and commonwealthmen, distributists, and agrarians--what
Clyde Wilson called the “Jeffersonian conservative tradition.” In the
intervening time, I gradually migrated leftward, so that I am now a
mutualist, heavily influenced by Proudhon and Tucker. But my only
objection to my old conservative mentors, to the extent that I have any
objections, is that they either missed part of the picture or they
didn’t fully realize the implications of their own premises. My “petty
bourgeois” values of decentralism and localism, community, are still
pretty much the same. I still dislike New Class elitists and parasites
who feed off of others’ labor. I still dislike PC social engineers who
presume to reeducate the rest of us. Although I am in the IWW, I still
read Hilaire Belloc and M.E. Bradford with affection--but didn’t Belloc
have ties to the Guild Socialists? And for that matter, the Nashville
Agrarians weren’t too keen on corporate capitalism, either. The
continued existence of paleoconservatism is an embarassment to the
Neocons, in much the same way Rutherford, Aronson and Jones were to
Ingsoc.
I have a lot of respect for people like Christopher Lasch, who defy easy
categorization according to Left-Right stereotypes, and are willing to
integrate ideas from diverse sources into a new framework. But Horowitz
seems to be temperamentally incapable, in the realm of ideas, of “taking
what he can use and leaving the rest.” He has the air of the
deprogrammed Moonie who immediately constructs a new fanatical cult in
opposition to Moonie-ism. He seems to be obsessed with proving wrong
everything he believed thirty years ago, at any cost--even at the cost
of intellectual honesty. Truth itself is suspect, if it also happens to
be something believed by THOSE PEOPLE. In his authoritarianism, he is
driven, in Orwell’s words, by “a furious desire to track down, denounce,
and vaporize” anyone who agrees with ANYTHING he believed thirty years
ago.
One of the more ludicrous aspects of neoconservatism is its use of the
New Class as a whipping boy--for example, Ann Coulter’s defense of
people in the “red states” against America-hating elitists. But neocons
are not exactly situated to pose as champions of middle America against
the elites. They are predominantly former Trotskyists and other leftist
intellectuals, journalists, Straussian academicians, and former New Deal
Democratic politicians--pretty much the entire spectrum of “rootless
cosmopolitanism,” from A to B. Neoconservative social and political
views, in many ways, are the outgrowth of corporate liberalism--the
chief New Class ideological construct in mid-twentieth century America.
If you take a look at the big intellectual stars in the contemporary
neocon stable, like Huntington and Fukuyama, they are throwbacks to
corporate liberalism. Their work is quite in the tradition of
Schlesinger’s “vital center,” Bell’s “end of ideology,” and the
“interest group pluralism” of Adolph Berle. The neocons, for all their
pretensions of solidarity with the heartland, have shown a visceral
hostility to the genuine American populist tradition. As Paul Gottfried
argued, they are very much the spokesmen of managerial tyranny. Finally,
in their hawkishness and jingoism on foreign policy (e.g. the
chicken-hawk William Kristol’s urge to vicariously “crush Serb skulls”),
today’s neoconservatives are virtual mirror images of the “Progressives”
at The New Republic who whored themselves out to Wilson’s war propaganda
apparatus.