Today we are lucky to have a guest contribution to WorkingDefinition. In the following essay, Nate describes what makes Neocons tick and what we, as responsible and progressive Democrats, can do to counter their disproportionate influence. Enjoy!

On the Highroad to Irrelevance: Rebuilding the Democratic Party

Introduction

The term neoconservative is often used to describe the Bush administration. To many Democrats the term neoconservative is an insult, and rightfully so, an epithet, thrown as Bush himself throws the term “Massachusetts politician,” meaning a weird mixture of born-again Christianity, a smug self-satisfaction and an almost dangerous confidence that anything America touches will doubtlessly turn to gold. This is not too far off the mark but it fails in the major point that it is unable to uncover or unlock the secret of what makes neoconservatism so attractive to so many Americans.

We would best begin by defining our terms. While neoconservatism is the guiding philosophy of the Republican party, neoconservatism is not Republicanism; in fact I do not believe that it would be stretching the truth to say that neoconservatism is now operating in the burned-out shell of the Republican party the way certain parasites burrow into the brains of caterpillars and then take over their bodies – the caterpillar is no longer in control, but it still looks like a caterpillar. Therefore, as we read research and write, we would do well to understand that while they are currently synonymous, Republican and neoconservative do not mean the same thing.

One of the apostles of the neoconservative doctrine is commentator Irving Kristol. Kristol’s collection of essays: Neoconservatism: an Autobiography of an Idea provides an excellent explanation of this dichotomy. Kristol, whose two primary fears in life seem to be lesbians and African-Americans in that order, suggests that from the administration of Franklin Roosevelt until the early 1990’s, the Republican Party in the United States was largely dead. Dependent on raising the banner of anti-communism and fiscal responsibility Kristol states that the Republicans merely looked like miserly fear-mongers in the face of the high ideals of Democrats and as such made no progress, representing a minority in the House and Senate.

For Kristol, neoconservatism was the parasite that burrowed into the nearly defunct Republican party and gave it new life, the life that has given the party the wherewithal to capture all three branches of the United States government in a mere twenty years. At some level this understanding of neoconservatism existing inside the shell of the Republican Party can be comforting to Democrats. People who vote Republican believing they are voting for fiscal responsibility and small government may eventually realize that they are actually voting neoconservative thus causing a major rupture in the Republican ranks, but this supposed rupture might easily come too late to prevent an irreversible sea-change in American life and government.

The foregoing being said, it begs the question: if Republican doesn’t mean Republican anymore, and instead means neoconservative, why do people still vote for Republican candidates? Shallow pundits such as Anne Coulter would suggest glibly that anyone who doesn’t vote Republican (meaning neocon in this case) is a) unpatriotic, b) brain-dead, c) gay, d) an environmental nut, or e) all of the above. Alas for Coulter and her ilk their simplification of neoconservatism for a radio audience merely serves to highlight their own stupidity. The fact is that neoconservatism is a highly complex doctrinal system based on intense and perhaps fevered readings of history and classical philosophy with an emphasis on Socrates and Aristotle.

In my own work as a consultant for the non-profit sector I am often asked by struggling organizations “we do such good work, why don’t people want to fund us?” Often times we return to them with the same solution: “do only those things which directly advance your mission; package and clarify your work for funders.” If we can for a moment imagine neoconservatism as an automobile, the success of the doctrine becomes clear in short order; yes it has a complex supply line, yes building it is a lengthy and involved process, but with a coat of well-lacquered paint anyone can tell you it’s a car. Taking the automotive analogy one step further, the hiding of neoconservatism within the Republican Party also helps to explain the doctrine’s success. Neoconservatism has enough parts drawn from classical Republicanism to appear very similar, almost indistinguishable to last year’s model such that a casual observer won’t be able to tell the two apart until he’s been driving long enough to read the fine print under the clock on the dashboard.

Roots

Thus far we have established that neoconservatism, despite being complex, is easy to swallow because it somehow looks familiar, but what is this near religion actually about? The theory is complex and in many ways cyclical. Finding a spot to break in can be hard, but stripped of the highly polished coats of lacquered paint; neoconservatism is actually composed of doctrines which would hopefully leave many Americans disgusted.

At bottom neoconservatism believes, contrary to America’s founding traditions, that most men are incapable of self-government, a judgment based on Aristotle’s concept of an ideal city-state ruled by a philosopher king. They also believe that democracy is inherently dangerous and always on the verge of wobbling out of control and plunging into anarchy; a fear implanted in the doctrine by its architect Leo Straus.

Straus, a Jew, believed that the permissiveness of the Weimar Democracy directly led to the rise of the Nazis who forced Straus to flee for his life. In the admittedly left-leaning history books of my high-school and college careers, the Weimar period was characterized as an inspired break from the autocratic Prussian tradition which allowed a flowering of creativity in German music, literature and film. The books also tacitly admitted that the Weimar period saw a breakdown in traditional German morality especially in the large coastal cities. Chronologically it cannot be denied that the Nazi era came directly after the Weimar era. In my mind it is also a closed matter that certain political weaknesses of the Weimar constitution, and the arrogance of certain politicians within that system, allowed the rise of Nazism. What to me rings hollow is that the creative flowering of the Weimar’s loosened morality came as a result of a democratic system in Germany.

One might just as easily make a Marxist argument; a neocon would not, but I might, that would posit that a libertine era in Germany was the result not of democracy, but of the trauma of WWI. Why not live for today if you might be blown up tomorrow, and within an economy which could not sustain the mass of demobilized German troops, why not get wasted and get a girl or two in here, it’ll take my mind off the fact that I’ve been unemployed for two years.

Still, Straus did not buy the Marxist approach, and instead chose the moral argument. This being the case the sometimes seemingly murky connection between neoconservatism and evangelical Christianity becomes clear; indeed Irving Kristol and his ilk directed their writings at the evangelical Christians who made up the far right of the Regan Republicans in the late 1980’s.

Taking this connection as a starting point we can then bring in Aristotle. Aristotle conceived that in his ideal city-state people would be educated and slotted into a given role in society entirely based upon their intellectual merits. While this concept can seem very attractive and very American, delving deeper into it one comes away with the understanding that Aristotle sees that the great mass of men are entirely unfit to govern the state themselves and are in need of an elite cadre of intellectuals at the pinnacle of society to do it for them. Those who are unfit to govern are also largely unfit to know the truth and will be on the whole happier and easier to control if they are fed a steady diet of information pre-prepared by their leaders for them, especially if those untruths come from the mouth of a man similar to themselves, like Bush: a C student, a regular fellow, “the guy you’d most like to have a beer with” as the polls kept hammering during the election.

Allies

It is perhaps easier to view these things from inside the neoconservative’s head. To the neocon, democracy needs to be saved from itself. The special interest groups that have emerged since the founding of the United States: trade unions, African-Americans, gays and lesbians, Hispanics, academics, and environmentalists are all gnawing away at the roots of democracy like so many termites. If they are allowed to gnaw unchecked they will eventually drive American democracy into a Weimar stage from which dictatorship and disaster are the only exit.

In attempting to break this slide into dictatorship the neocon has natural allies with whom he may have very little in common. The evangelical Christian is deployed to cope with feminists, gays, lesbians, and transgender people. Large corporations are encouraged to shift labor over-seas to destroy the power of unions and to keep African-Americans and Hispanics out of the power structure. Corporate interests can also be successfully deployed against environmental groups stating that it is environmental regulations which are actually costing Americans their daily bread; and all along the neocon media machine cranks out a steady drumbeat to ensure that all of us not allied with any one particular special interest group that any special interest group is dangerously out of touch with the majority of Americans and hell-bent on hijacking the country and turning it into one vast Provincetown.

I did not come to praise neoconservatism, but to bury it, if I may plagiarize a phrase. Some people I know and admire have even gone so far as to accuse me of having neoconservative leanings. This isn’t the case, but I do confess to being fascinated with a plan so well conceived as to have essentially given America a single, ruling party in the short span of twenty years. As a Democrat suddenly backed onto the defensive the luxury of cataloging the inside of the neoconservative head like some early nineteenth century naturalist listing the variations of dolphin teeth is denied to me. Ideological divisions with “true” Republicans or not, the neoconservatives have the legislative, executive and judiciary branches of government in their clutches and have free reign like no party since the Federalists of Washington’s day.

If we are to successfully beat neoconservatism, we must understand it; we must know what the neoconservative knows. Perception is 9/10 of reality and the neoconservatives have mastered and grasped this fact from their seemingly interchangeable dark-suited, red-tied Ashcrofts and Rumsfelds, ascetically and idealistically devoted to their duty, to minority tokens Condi Rice and Colin Powell (both leaving the 2nd Bush cabinet,) to President Bush himself, the folksy “Texan” who actually hails from Connecticut and went to Yale albeit as a mediocre student.

Still, as one astute conversationalist of my acquaintance observed, you can only fool so many people with perception and that’s so. The old saying goes “you can’t have it both ways” and yet the neocon seems to have magically found a way to do just that. Neoconservatism is founded on complex academic doctrines, but in the past election Bush’s team was able to tar Kerry as “academic.” Bush presented himself successfully as a simple man, guided by his simple Christian faith, yet the only person capable of speaking to the leaders of other nations, if only in English.

The Bush team presents itself as being “Christian” and yet never was an administration so proud, so vain, and so incapable of turning the other cheek. Dick Cheney says people should be free to marry whom they please in reference to his daughter and yet he follows the orders of his Commander-in-Chief who earnestly desires a federal level gay marriage ban. Bush talks about helping the American worker while helping corporations export jobs overseas and actively working to strip women out of the workforce by closing the White House Women’s Initiative Office. The list goes on and on; we have four years worth and will no doubt have another four years of clinkers to eventually catalog.

The Formula

So, how does neoconservatism manage to cover these bright red, noisy inconsistencies that rumble down America’s political main street like so many fire trucks? Simple: it reduces a voter’s political process to java script. For those who didn’t take computer classes in college, java script is an easy-to-learn code which makes web pages interactive. If you visit a web site that asks you twenty questions and is then able to tell you the answer to “what dysfunctional office worker are you?” chances are that it’s run by java script.

Java script reduces all decisions to deterministic yes or no questions with no room for discussion of the issue. To go back to our internet quiz example, the piece of java script that operates question ten of the quiz, “do you drink so much coffee you’re constantly in the bathroom or so little you’re asleep on your keyboard?” will only render a yes or no value back to the web browser to ultimately produce an answer. There is simply no room for a concept like “I only drink so much coffee I’m in the bathroom all day on Wednesdays because I want to see a show that comes on at eleven on Tuesday night.” That’s fine and dandy for a computer which thinks in ones and zeroes, yes or no, but for a government it’s simply disastrous.

With this black and white thought system, the stage is set for neoconservatives to pound liberals like B-17’s raining munitions on Dresden. Being a liberal is hard work, it takes real thought. It means following an intellectual path, deciding you don’t like it, changing, backing up, going forward, changing your mind as the evidence dictates. It’s exactly how John Kerry operates and what cost him the election.

Without the Gott mitt Uns that’s stamped on every neocon’s brain, liberals have a constant internal debate going; they repeatedly check their course and if its done where anyone can see it, the neoconservative can jump right in and wreak havoc. Under such conditions the neocon simply sets up his agenda and goes to town, or as the Bush campaign put it to sink Kerry, you can have George Bush who follows an ideology and sticks to it or John Kerry who “flip-flops,” and the subtext is he who hesitates is lost, he who waivers in carrying the battle to the terrorists will leave us open to attack.

From there the voter is forced to tick grimly down a list of things he or she isn’t. She isn’t married to a billionaire, he doesn’t sailboard of Nantucket, they aren’t ready to call U.S. troops baby-killers and repeat the mistake of the Vietnam protestors and thus even if it makes them uncomfortable, they are backed into voting for Bush. Even gross errors in the neocon program can be white-washed over with this reasoning and the free pass the media has given Bush since 9/11 sure helps.

Our system is called deliberative democracy for a reason, it means weighing your options. It can be painfully slow but Americans like it fast, they want answers that are clear and definitive. Neoconservatism, with its rigid adherence to ideology, gives Americans just that. While the “liberals are wringing their hands in the corner” as neocon wag Irving Kristol characterizes the Kerrys, Kennedys and Clelands of the world, neoconservatives, the Bushes, Roves, and Rumsfelds have already swallowed whatever personal qualms they might have and reacted to a situation no questions asked because that, by the powers, that is the program.

Dupes

The baby boomers are also a big part of the problem because the neoconservatives have their number memorized. In a word, it is guilt. Middle and upper class boomers are worried that they can’t put the genie back in the bottle and that’s why the morality issue played so well in the 2004 election. The boomers protested Vietnam, got their college deferments, smoked pot and had sex for ten years while they sent the poor kids of the inner city off to war and called them swine when they came back. There’s a lot of guilt about that and so now their Lincoln Navigators sport a massive SUPPORT OUR TROOPS sticker.

John Kerry put his life on the line for the U.S. in battle while Bush was peacefully partying in Alabama, but Kerry’s making common cause with the anti-war movement upon arrival home was his undoing. In the neocon java script world Bush simply says: our troops are in harm’s way, they’re your sons and daughters, we must support them. And to the boomers, even though Kerry had a plan to better use our troops, he lost.

Boomers are also worried about sex. The boomers act like they discovered the human body and everything that it can do. You can have fun with it. Masturbation is O.K. Being gay is O.K. If it feels good, do it, right? Well, maybe for me back in the 60’s, things were “different” back then the reasoning goes. Now that they’re the parents the boomers feel the same anguish that compelled their parents to vote for Richard Nixon, only trouble is, there’s a lot more boomers. However, it all comes back to guilt. The white baby boomers made the world somewhat acceptable for gays, lesbians, feminists, African-Americans and a host of other neoconservative enemies. They lent their support until in the mid 1980’s when suddenly it was time to buy a house and have children; the white boomers withdrew that support leaving that revolution that won’t be televised pulled out of the oven half baked.

The neoconservative understands that to a boomer, out of site truly is out of mind. You can dye your grays, hit the gym, buy the new beetle, listen to the oldies station and stay a flower child forever. You can vote neoconservative and let George W. Bush clean up your mess for you. Nobody should view it as a coincidence that neoconservatism flowered in academic circles in the late 1980’s; great televangelists like Swaggert and Baker had huge audiences as the boomers’ first kids were starting to approach their teenage years, the timing was impeccable.

The unfinished nature of the 1960’s civil rights movements and sexual revolutions is where the neoconservatives insert their parasite into the American caterpillar. The neocons have successfully made the case to at least 51% of Americans that to complete the revolution of the 1960’s is to go too far, too soon. The sin of the baby boomers wasn’t to dissent, it was to leave unfinished what they started, leaving the sheepfold gate ajar for the neoconservative wolf.

Dithering

What to do? The neoconservatives are well-drilled and professional. They have a number of highly effective strategies that can tap affluent baby-boomers and Southern Baptists who love Jesus and NASCAR. They do reasonably well with both women and men. They have harvested the fruit given to them by 9/11 and made a poisonous pie that America just keeps eating.

Do we throw up our hands and surrender? I know people who I hold in high esteem who are talking about leaving America, people who think Canada or Japan look good. I love them dearly but they are wrong. The power of the United States is such that nowhere, not Europe, not Japan and certainly not right-next-door Canada is free of its influence. I would sound the tocsin that if you leave the United States you will simply have to confront the neocons again when they are that much stronger. The strategies we Democrats have put forth thus far have not brought us to power. We have put four years of evidence before the American people, 51% of whom blithely ignored it.

You cannot speak truth to power when power will not even acknowledge truth or in the words of Karl Rove: “when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’ It’s frightening.

At heart the neoconservatives are looking to create some kind of new medieval era in which George W. Bush or the next folksy figurehead they find takes over where the Pope left off; i.e. if we say that we are succeeding in Iraq then we are, if we say Saddam Hussein was an Al Qaeda operative then he was. The conception of the world as it has been viewed since Francis Bacon suddenly ceases to function.

The neoconservatives have a homogeneous base by and large, white, middle to upper class, and evangelical Christian and they know what that base wants to hear. By contrast, we poor Democrats have to hunt and peck to form a coalition of special interests all of which have to be brought behind the candidate the DNC believes has the broadest national appeal.

For example, during the primaries, Howard Dean held the attention of young voters, but when he imploded on stage and the DNC selected Kerry, Kerry had to find a way to reach Dean’s house-party throwing MoveOn.org bloggers. The casualty was Kerry’s message, which didn’t find its true voice until after the convention, because it was forced to shift to assimilate a different facet of the Democratic base. By contrast, Bush had one message from mid-2003 on and he hammered it home.

Looking at the electoral vote map we must concede that as Democrats, the neoconservatives operating inside the shell of the Republican Party have driven us back to our ideological homeland and are on the verge of annihilating us. We carried the east coast as far south as Washington and west through New York and Pennsylvania in an increasingly narrow band that fizzled after Minnesota. We succeeded in taking all three continental west coast states as well but just barely.

Without sugarcoating, the Democratic Party is on the brink of irrelevance, of becoming a party which represents the Northeastern United States and nothing else. We are discovering that either America is grossly misinformed and possessed of notions of which we cannot disabuse them using the methods of empiric reason, or the rest of the country has in fact for whatever reason dragged to the right. Either way the Democratic Party is faced with a simple choice: figure out how to shift itself to re-attain power or accept a permanent minority status and eventual disintegration with members splitting either Republican or Green as the party repeatedly fails to win control of anything.

Is There a Doctor in the House?

Now here’s where I prescribe some bitter medicine: we must successful adopt, exploit and utilize to our best advantage the methodology of neoconservatism while shifting the Democratic face to the right.

Read carefully now, this doesn’t mean an actual turn to the right, but it means guarding our core beliefs, changing our methods of operation and electoral combat, while learning to present a new face. John Kerry had the right idea when he promised to hunt down the kill the terrorists tapping into Red America’s drive for simple, decisive and aggressive solutions but it was a day late and a dollar short.

The trick for us will be to swing the party just right enough for people to realize that are voting their interests; a recent poll showing that many Americans who voted for Bush admitted to voting against their interests. We must convince the people that a Democratic vote is in fact not going to get them killed by terrorists or have their children perverted by the teaching of homosexuality in schools.

This means developing a harder, colder Democratic Party, a party that doesn’t spit on guns and red meat. It means getting the Hollywood darlings off the stump. It means no more movies by Michael Moore. It means that those folks who are naturally going to fall on the party’s leftward fringe, feminists, gender activists, minorities, environmentalists all need to move out of the spotlight or accept their ultimate failure. We simply cannot afford to have the popular perception of our party be that it represents Hollywood and a snide, sneering, overly-educated disdain of Middle America. We cannot afford to present as the party which will fund your son’s conversion to homosexuality or your daughter’s access to birth control – the risk is too high.

I am not suggesting that we turn our backs on our natural allies but they must be willing to make the sacrifice of stepping out of the limelight momentarily for the sake of gaining power – the power to actually execute our vision for a truly just America. The Democratic Party needs to find Ashcrofts, Rumsfelds, Cheneys and Bushes of its own, white, rigid and doctrinaire patriarchs who can tap that side of American soul.

The difficulty is that liberal values, especially in a time of war, are difficult to articulate. The abstraction of tolerance will never trump the concrete desire for security. The abstraction of moderation will never trump the concrete “give’em both barrels!” The hazy concept of a deliberative thought will never defeat a folksy cowboy who promises to “protect the American people.”

It has been said that the neoconservatives won the election on God, guns and gays. To some extent telling a homogenous base exactly what it wanted to hear was effective in marshalling the strength of that group and ensuring its support. But the crucial 2% that turned John Kerry into an also-ran with nothing to show for his efforts was won by a skillful propaganda machine and a projection of control, power, and iron-willed determination that the Democrats could not match. At every turn, the neoconservatives were able to present themselves as the clear, steely-eyed, pure-of-heart, clear-of-mind defenders of truth, justice and the American way while painting the Democrats as weak-willed, sexually permissive and ultimately corrosive to America’s moral fiber.

Conclusion

We are in the Gotterdammerung of American politics, but just who’s twilight we are in is as yet uncertain. To date, the lynch-pin of successful neoconservatism has been a friendly, folksy face that of “honest, plain, God-fearing” George W. Bush who is able to woo the crucial 2-3% with a glowing presence that provides the velvet glove to the iron fist wielded by Cheney, Rumsfeld and Ashcroft. Even more important is name recognition that allows old-line party stalwarts to think they are still in fact voting for a “true” Republican.

Deprived of this face in 2008, the neocons suddenly find themselves at a terrible impasse and forced to run either a first Bush administration cabinet member or a Bush-a-like, both of whom would stand a good chance of failing. However, if we as Democrats present the same set of hard-to-articulate and complex ideals harnessed to a popular sense of sexual permissiveness, then the downfall will be ours and we may very well face a permanently neoconservative America. The handwriting is on the wall. In the soiree of American politics, the neocons are calling the steps and holding the fiddle; our survival depends on learning to do their dance that much better.