Jeanne Kirkpatrick

The following might have been lifted from any current edition of any political journal or op-ed piece, which models itself as an obituary on a recently imploded idealism:

This perspective on contemporary events is optimistic in the sense that it foresees continuing human progress; deterministic in the sense that it perceives events as fixed by processes over which persons and policies can have but little influence; moralistitic in the sense that it perceives history and U.S. policy as having moral ends; cosmopolitan in the sense that it attempts to view the world not from the perspective of American interests or intentions but from the perspective of the modernizing nation and the "end" of history. It identifies modernization with both revolution and morality, and U.S. policy with all three.

Two things immediately jump out here. The first is the allusion to the Hegelian construction "end of history;” the second is idea that the "long-view" of history has been the main coefficient in American geopolitical calculations and to the peril of short-term American interests. Where have we heard all this before? Or stating the matter in a slightly different way, from the lips of what dusky Minerva was such judgment about a heedless and messy foreign policy ever passed? The answer is Jeanne Kirkpatrick, and the essay I quoted from is one of the inaugural texts of what everyone now calls "neoconservatism." Latecomers to the game of second thoughts on wars of choice might be interested to learn that the title of Kirkpatrick’s essay, which originally appeared in Commentary in 1979 and brought this obscure political science professor to the attention of the Reagan White House, was "Dictatorships and Double Standards." That’s an arresting binary that might grace the cover of today’s Weekly Standard as an indictment of cynical realpolitik, the kind in evidence in the Iraq Study Group’s recommendation that the U.S. make nice with Syria and Iran, for instance. However, in Kirkpatrick’s case, the realpolitik belonged to her, the double standards were good, and reactionary dictatorships were deemed beneficial as allies in the Western campaign against communist aggression. Pause to appreciate the magnitude of this schema shift. Aren't neocons the monomaniacal Leninists, to use Francis Fukuyama’s hysterical comparison, engaged in plotting revolutions in the very regions of the world least amenable to change? Kirkpatrick was arguing that "moderate" autocrats like the Shah of Iran and President Somoza of Nicaragua were not only preferable to their vanquishers — Khomeini and the Sandinistas, respectively — but were really the only alternatives for promoting "stability" and earning influential American friends during the cold war. The best we could hope for was slow-motion regime changes in Latin America; fascism corroding from within and giving way to democratic reform, but not before the U.S. fully exploited that fascism to its own ends. What's quite startling about Kirkpatrick’s formulation is that one now finds every improvisational leftist and antiwar critic agreeing, whether they realize it or not, with neoconservatism in its embryonic stage. This is the same Kissingerian thinking that colored Saddam Hussein as a containable tyrant. There's quite a lot worth revisiting in Kirkpatrick's essay now that we’re said to be in the twilight of the ideology of which every obituary assigns her den mother. “Dictatorships and Double Standards” shows just how far neoconservatism has altered or mutated since its advent in the seventies. (The term itself was invented as a derisive epithet by Michael Harrington and, like suffragette or impressionist, was soon co-opted by its targets as a happy form of self-identification.) Why is it that the best critics of the Bush Doctrine have been liberals like Paul Berman and the Englishman Oliver Kamm? Because they detect in modern neoconservatism – the un-Kirkpatrick strain of the movement – flickers of a hoary Marxist radicalism. The interventionist mettle exhibited by a handful of GOP policy wonks when it came to Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq was more in keeping with the global purview of the anti-Stalinist left of the 1930’s than it was of the Reaganite right of the 1980’s. The Kirkpatrick Doctrine would never have allowed for the election to the presidency of a democratic Iraq a Marxist Kurd whose party has active membership in the Socialist International. You might have actually heard Jeanne's ovaries of steel clanging together to consider how such wayward sons have unbottled Iraq’s Communist Party, which Saddam, as one of the “moderate” dictators, had all but annihilated. The neocons we now most readily associate with the ideology – Bill Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz – are precisely the ones who have been, so to speak, hoisted on their own soixante-petard; or as George Will and Fukuyama never tire of pointing out, the ones who are really closet leftists. They share more of an objective sympathy with Danny Cohn-Bendit and Joshka Fischer than they ever did with Barry Goldwater or Richard Nixon – an astute observation made by Bernard Henri-Levy in American Vertigo. The notion, or rumor, that Trotskyism plays a large part in the intellectual rhythms of neoconservatism is true up to a point, even though the theory of “permanent revolution” had absolutely nothing to do with regime change in Iraq. (The overthrow of Saddam was undertaken in the spirit of bourgeois nationalism, not socialist internationalism, and Iraq’s population was conspicuously lacking in a feudal peasant majority, the existence of which, in czarist Russia, was what compelled Trotsky and his mentor Parvus to articulate the theory in the first place.) Still, this hasn’t stopped some critics from wondering about the radical past of those now whispering into the president’s ear. When Partisan Review folded in 2003, Sam Tanenhaus — now the editor of the New York Times Book Review, but once the brilliant biographer of Whittaker Chambers, a credential that might have better informed his surfing of the vicissitudes of radical orthodoxy and conservative heterodoxy — wrote in Slate of the "hilarious coincidence that the greatest of all Trotskyist publications should have announced its demise at the very moment that a belated species of Trotskyism has at last established itself in the White House." It is true that Kirkpatrick used to employ in her office one or two influential "Shermanites," members of an obscure Trotskyist groupuscule that once included Irving Kristol and his wife Gertrude Himmelfarb – the paternal Ghost and, well, Gertrude to Bill's Hamlet. But what lasting impact these underlings had on their boss should be counted as negligible. Like Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Henry “Scoop” Jackson, Kirkpatrick was a prominent Democrat allied with the Republicans on taking a tough stance against the Soviet Union and not brooking any pathetic claims of moral equivalence between East and West. But that’s where her neoconservatism began and ended.