Reply #10: My favorite part [View All]

[mrgorth]

Not only America's cold war history but the British experience in the twentieth century has shaped neocon perceptions. This is not as strange as it seems. Britain was the leading world power until a few generations ago; many neoconservatives are adult immigrants from the British Commonwealth, like the former Canadian subjects of Her Majesty Charles Krauthammer and David Frum; and many neocon thinkers follow Lionel Trilling (whom Irving Kristol has cited, along with Leo Strauss, as one of the greatest influences on his thought) in looking to British culture to explicate American society. The first modern industrial society, Britain reached its peak, neocons believe, as a result of the combination of imperial ruthlessness, bourgeois (not managerial) capitalism and Victorian virtue. Tragically, however, British strength was sapped from within by the postbourgeois elitists of Bloomsbury, who mocked Victorian values even as the work ethic was eroded by the welfare state. As a result, Britain was morally and materially unprepared to fight fascist totalitarianism. The greatest man of the twentieth century, to judge from the number of times he is cited by neocons, was not Franklin Roosevelt but Winston Churchill, the upholder of Victorian values.

In neocon ideology, the United States is reliving the experience of Britain three-quarters of a century ago. Osama bin Laden (or Saddam or the Chinese leadership or Yasir Arafat) is the new Hitler. Bush is the new Churchill, as Reagan was earlier. Moderate Republicans and conservative realists, as well as liberal Democrats, are the new Neville Chamberlains. The working-class Protestant fundamentalists of the rural and suburban American South are equated with the bourgeois dissenting Protestants of Victorian England. The American university is the new Bloomsbury, full of decadent liberals and leftists sapping the morale of young Americans, who many neoconservatives think should be drafted and sent to fight a series of wars abroad to promote democracy. Four years ago, Donald Kagan and Frederick Kagan (Robert Kagan's father and brother, respectively) published a book called While America Sleeps, comparing the United States to Britain in the late 1930s. For the neocons, America is the Britain of Churchill and Chamberlain, and it is always 1939.

Something like what Vivian De Sola Pinto wrote of Kipling in Crisis in English Poetry (1968) could be said today of Kipling's admirer Max Boot and most of today's neoconservative imperialists: "There was no Irish or South African problem, only rebels and traitors; there was no aesthetic problem, only wasters and rotters like Sir Anthony Gloster's son who was educated at 'Harrer an' Trinity College' and 'muddled with books and pictures,' and Tomlinson whose sins were entirely literary; there was no problem of war and peace, only foolish liberals and sentimental or knavish pacifists. All the world needed was more discipline, obedience and loyalty, and above all a paternal British Empire with its unselfish and efficient administrators and admirable army licked into shape by perfect N.C.O.s."