Everyone from President Bush to Ann Coulter was using it to denote wimplike, Volvo-driving softies too spineless for dangerous times and too given to speaking French.
Liberals were going to hand the country’s defence to the United Nations, turn the war on terror into police work and cave to Osama’s Islamofascism.
As Gov Arnold Schwarzenegger of California declared in 2004: “If you believe you must be fierce and relentless and terminate terrorism — then you are a Republican”.
No matter that none of the above was true. No matter that 20th-century liberal thought, like Isaiah Berlin’s, stood in consistent opposition to totalitarianism in fascist or Communist form. The nuance-free message served to get the commander in chief re-elected.
In time, the fever ebbed. Iraq imploded, Bush fizzled and the Democrats took Congress. A retooled Schwarzenegger began sounding like a closet Democrat.
Not least, as America bumped down to earth, “liberal” lost the mantle of political insult most foul. Its place was taken by the pervasive, glib “neocon”.
What’s a neocon? A liberal “mugged by reality”, Irving Kristol said. The reality in question, back then, was Communism-as-evil, the centrality of military force, the indispensability of the American idea and much else. But that’s ancient history. The neocons are the guys who gave us the Iraq war.
Neocon, for many, has become shorthand for neocon-Zionist conspiracy, whatever that may be, although probably involving some combination of plans to exploit Iraqi oil, bomb Iran and apply US power to Israel’s benefit.
Beyond that, neocon has morphed into an all-purpose insult for anyone who still believes that American power is inextricable from global stability and still thinks the muscular anti-totalitarian US interventionism that brought down Slobodan Milosevic has a place, and still argues, like Christopher Hitchens, that ousting Saddam Hussein put the US “on the right side of history”. In short, neoconitis, a condition as rampant as liberal-lampooning a few years back, has left scant room for liberal hawks.
Liberal interventionists, if you recall, were people like myself for whom the sight in the 1990s of hundreds of thousands of European Muslims processed through Serbian concentration camps, or killed in them, left little doubt of the merits, indeed the necessity, of US military action in the name of the human dignity that only open societies afford.
One reluctant liberal interventionist signed the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998 that said: “It should be the policy of the US to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein”. His name was Bill Clinton. Baghdad is closer to Sarajevo than the Left has allowed. For this Left, anyone who supported the Iraq invasion, or sees merits to it despite the catastrophic Bush-Rumsfeld bungling, is a neocon.
Democrats have learned from their nuance-free bludgeoning by Republicans in the 2004 election, and they’re reciprocating. I’ll see your “liberal” with a “neocon” — and truth be damned.
But distinctions matter. The neocon taste for American empire is not the liberal hawk’s belief in the bond between American power and freedom’s progress. As for social questions, the gulf is large.
When John Kerry was vilified as a flip-flopping liberal by those armchair warriors, Bush and Cheney, I knew where I stood. When Michnik and Kouchner are neocons and MoveOn.org is the Petraeus-insulting face of never-set-foot-in-a-war-zone liberalism, I’m with the Polish-French brigade against the right-thinking American Left.
NYT
