Neo-Conservatism, Anti-Utopianism, and ‘Jewish Intellectuals’

The question of who the neo-conservatives are, what kind of influence they once had or still had, and their effect on US politics cannot be covered in one post. Here we wish only to say something about their so-called ‘Jewishness’. This debate generally tends to generate more heat than light, getting bogged down in stupid arguments about whether it is anti-semitic to critique neo-conservatives, and bizarre geneaologies going back to the 1980s, 1960s and even 1930s. To stave off one criticism, we are well aware that solid evidence can be marshaled that the neo-conservatives, if they ever existed, don’t really exist. We will address this question in a separate post.

What of the so-called Jewish connection? It is pretty easy to show that significant constituents are not Jewish. Nobody in their right mind would consider Francis Fukyama a Jewish intellectual, yet he has been one of the most influential neoconservatives. Indeed, his ‘The End of History’ is one of the defining statements of any kind of contemporary neo-conservative philosophy.

But perhaps there is something specially Jewish about the neo-conservative way of thinking? As this book review on neoconservatives from the Jewish socialist paper The Forward suggests, what is peculiarly Jewish about the neo-conservative mode is precisely the end of history thesis. It is not just that neoconservatives somehow believe that, post-Holocaust, Jews must ‘defend Jewish interests’ but that, more broadly, the greatest moral danger is totalitarianism in any form. On this view, they accept Hannah Arendt’s ‘moral equation between communism and Nazism’, and project it onto America as a whole as the last defender of liberal pluralism. The intriguing conclusion of this view is that, as an anti-totalitarian ideology, neoconservatism is not unrealistically utopian but fundamentally pessimistic, believing utopian projects are in fact a grave danger because they end in totalitarian efforts to remold individuals and societies.

Now it may be possible to trace an intellectual genealogy of anti-totalitarianism through a number of Jewish thinkers (though, as Russell Jacoby has done in his book Picture Imperfect, one can also come up with a genealogy of Jewish utopian thinking). But it is wrong to think that the moral crusade against totalitarian dictators reflects the peculiar influence of a particular kind of Jewish thinker or idea on the administration. What has prepared the way for the neo-conservatives and the war on terror is the general acceptance of the end of history in the wider society. The war on terror as a crusade against totalitarianism or ‘Islamo-fascism’, fits with an anti-utopian contemporary mood.

It is not just a few Jews who believe the lesson of the 20^th century is that utopian projects end in misery, and that politics should have the more limited goal not of transforming society but of blocking and constraining ‘fundamentalisms’ everywhere. That view has in fact been accepted by a wide swath of society – it is certainly an idea that both political parties in America accept, and is one common amongst intellectuals and activists across the spectrum. That one should find Jews amongst the intellectual vanguard of this ideological trend is no surprise given that Israel is the state most tightly tied to the notion that the moral foundation of a so-called liberal state is its ability to prevent the worst catastrophe not create the conditions in which individuals can flourish and realize new potentials.

But one should not confuse cause and effect. Anti-utopianism, end of history and fighting ‘totalitarianism’ are not especially Jewish ideas. To identify them as such is a dangerous gesture, for it fails to identify the deeper roots of contemporary moral pessimism in the broader political culture, and projects a general social malaise onto a particular group. In his famous essay ‘On the Jewish Question’ Karl Marx suggested that the features his society identified with Judaism were in fact the essential features of capitalism itself. So too, those features commonly identified as especially Jewish in neoconservativism are in fact the ideas animating our society itself. The war on terror is not a new utopian crusade but an attempt to make a political project out of this anti-utopian political ideology.