The Washington Post has plenty of editorial space available, and it’s hardly unreasonable for the editors to offer its pages to “competing views.” But when offering space to outside opinion, one might expect, as a courtesy to its subscribers, that the Post would require these contributors to state their case honestly—opinion yes, propaganda no.
But (of course) the way of virtue is hard and narrow, and the Post often stumbles from the path. A case in point is “5 Myths About those Nefarious Neocons,” a mischievous sally by Jacob Heilbrunn that appeared in the Post’s Feb. 10 Outlook section. Mr. Heilbrunn, author of They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons, is quite reasonably anxious to get paid for selling his book, but why the Post feels obliged to assist him is another matter.
In his article, Mr. Heilbrunn labors to demolish five “myths”—myths which, by my count, are either true or nonexistent.
Myth No. 1 The neocons are chastened liberals who turned right. Nonsense, says Mr. Heilbrunn. They’re all former Trotskyists,* who “briefly embraced liberalism in the late 1940s” but then turned further right in response to the “convulsions of the Sixties.”
First of all, twenty years of liberalism is hardly a brief embrace, by most standards, and secondly many neocons were never “Trotskyists” at all, being born too late. And some of the neocons who were old enough, like Jeane Kirkpatrick, never got into the commie thing at all. Why Mr. Heilbrunn leads off his article by demolishing an obvious truth is hard to understand. Perhaps he needed five myths and could only come up with four.
Myth No. 2 The neocons are Israeli lackeys. This is one I never heard. By “proving” that neocons aren’t Israeli lackeys, Mr. Heilbrunn dodges an obvious truth, that Jewish neocons center their emotional lives around Israel.
Myth No. 3 The neocons had too much power and took over Bush’s brain. OK, Bush brain jokes aside, anyone with half a brain has realized that policy in the Bush Administration has been set from Day One by George, Dick, and Donnie, none of whom spent much chair time arguing about Trotsky with anyone named Irving.
Myth No. 4 The neocons are bloodthirsty ideologues, trying to impose a militant Wilsonianism on the United States that is alien to our foreign policy traditions. This is the longest myth I ever heard of, and long myths usually aren’t true. Anyway, Woodrow Wilson was president of the U.S. for two terms, and I’m guessing he pursued policies that were pretty Wilsonian, so I’m not sure how Wilsonianism could be all that alien to our foreign policy traditions, particularly since Franklin Roosevelt, who served in the Wilson Administration for two terms and then was president for four terms, could get pretty goddamn Wilsonian at times.
Myth No. 5 The Iraq debacle has discredited the neocons. “This could be the biggest whopper of them all,” Mr. Heilbrunn assures us. Since he hasn’t come up with any whoppers so far, his assertion strikes me as dubious. What he really wants to tell us is that the neocons are alive and well (sad, but, unfortunately, true), a message that isn’t too surprising, since Mr. Heilbrunn is a senior editor at The National Interest, a magazine founded by “Mr. Neocon,” Irving Kristol (something neither Mr. Heilbrunn nor the Post bothers to tell us).
What’s most striking about Mr. Heilbrunn’s article is that he endorses, wittingly or unwittingly, a real myth about the neocons—surely the biggest “whopper” of them all—that they’re all Jewish. In fact, there were plenty of Catholic neocons, like Peggy Noonan and Chris Matthews, disgusted by the Democratic Party’s penchant for radical chic, Asian neocons like Michelle Malkin and Ramesh Ponnuru, disgusted by academia’s preference for correctness over merit, and the occasional WASP like George Will, just plain disgusted. It’s just that a lot of these have been jumping ship over the War in Iraq, which somehow doesn’t seem to be their fight.
Afterwords
It’s only fair to point out that The National Interest in its present form is shockingly un-neocon. The website currently contains a piece by Ximena Ortiz (I’m guessing, not Jewish) giving John McCain, the “neocons’ hero,” according to Mr. Heilbrunn, a thorough spanking.
*I thought the proper term was “Trotskyite,” but no matter.
