Yes, I know I should be moralizing about teenage white boys from Kentucky, but I’d rather be writing about New York Jews. Because I gotta be me!
My kvetch du jour is a lengthy piece by Columbia University professor Stephen Wertheim appearing a few weeks ago in the New York Review of Books’s NYR Daily, “Return of the Neocons”, the good prof and I being one in thinking this is not a good thing.
Not so long ago, according to Stevo, the neocons seemed to be on the way out, thanks to the Triumph de Trump:
[H]is election victory appeared to deal a double blow to the neoconservative persuasion. It not only broke the neocons’ hold on the Republican Party, but also, in the same stroke, revealed that they lacked a popular constituency. There they were, free-floating pundits, alone and exposed—neither intellectually credible nor politically representative.
Why, given this development, would Republican politicians respond by once again seeking out the neocons’ counsel? Why, far less, would Democrats? And why would much of the news media, grappling with historic levels of public distrust, accept neoconservatives and neoconservatism as the baseline for foreign policy analysis?
Yet exactly this has happened. Today, neoconservatives are riding high once more, in the White House, on Capitol Hill, in the most prominent organs of opinion.
Why indeed? As Wertheim himself remarks, Trump’s compulsive bullying (or, as Trump would call it, “winning”) would naturally incline him to the neocon “approach”, particularly with regard to Iran—where Obama made peace, Trump would make war. But why and how could the neocons master both the Democrats and the media as well?
As Wertheim notes, neocon Jennifer Rubin continues to hold forth at the Washington Post, as does David “Axis of Evil” Frum at the Atlantic, and the New York Times has added anti-Trumper neocon Bret Stephens to its editorial page. But why?
Has it never occurred to Dr. Wertheim that Rubin, Frum, and Stephens are all Jewish neocons, passionately devoted to the cause of Israel, as are the editors of their publications, and that Stephens in particular is distinguishable from fellow Timesmen David Brooks and Thomas Friedman only in that he is more passionately anti-Trump and pro-Israel than they? Doe he not know that Norman Podhoretz and Bill Kristol, and Robert Kagan and Max Boot, all mentioned in his article, are all Jewish as well? And doesn't he know that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, aka "AIPAC", though its influence in the Democratic Party has somewhat declined, is still one of the most potent lobbies in Washington?
Of course he knows all these things. It’s hard to believe that there is more than one degree of separation between Dr. Wertheim and Bill Kristol, hard to believe that he hasn’t attended cocktail parties with many of these people. He surely recognizes their motivation, their conviction that the U.S. will falter in its support of Israel unless American voters see the support of Israel as part of global crusade against “evil”, see the constant support of Israel as a necessary part of an ongoing, life and death struggle against the enemies of democracy, who would destroy us all if only they could. He knows all these things, yet remains discreetly silent.
Afterwords
The biggest, and worst, neocon of all is the seriously non-Jewish John Bolton. Most Jews are not neocons, about which Norman Podhoretz and others at Commentary have spent the last 50 years complaining. I myself have spent a lot of time complaining about neocons.
