I don’t know why Barack Obama decided to dine with radical extremists like Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Rich Lowry and David Brooks last night nor do I particularly mind that he did — it was ultimately an exercise in pacifying the DC chattering class who have shown they are willing to rip into a new President like a pack of wild hyenas if obeisance is not paid to them.   No doubt Sally Quinn can’t decide whether to sharpen her daggers or polish the good silverware now.

At today’s meeting with center-right pundits and Rachel Maddow there were no "far left" voices who could match the violent right wing extremism of the neocon-heavy dinner at George Will’s house last night.  Granted, there are exactly zero pundits on the left as radical as Charles Krauthammer with that kind of notoriety so it would have been impossible to achieve parity.  But while fringe neocon house organs like Commentary and The Weekly Standard were overrepresented, it’s not like anybody was invited from The Nation.

Whatever his motivations, it’s part of the received political wisdom of DC that Ronald Reagan was a genius to offer the neocons refuge from a Democratic party they felt had turned hostile to their interests during the Carter Administration.  Obama’s actions will no doubt be viewed in that light.

Jacob Heilbrunn writes in They Knew They Were Right:  The Rise of the Neocons:

The neoconservatives were flourishing, and a kind of military-intellectual complex was coming into existence, bemoaned by liberals such as the New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis and championed by hawks like Paul Nitze, who was enraged that Carter had failed to give him an appointment in his administration.  Lewis complained in a 1976 op-ed,

There is a new element, and intellectual one.  It includes strong supporters of Israel who since the Yom Kippur War have become a significant factor in the growing support for larger U.S. defense budgets.  The magazine Commentary is at the hart of this element, along with such Senators as Henry Jackson and Daniel Patrick Moynihan.  The New Republic, now a leading pro-Israel voice, made a sustained attack on Paul Warnke before the election.

It was a fatal error on Carter’s part not to have co-opted Nitze.  Instead, he left him outside the tent, free to agitate for a bellicose policy toward the Kremlin under the umbrella of the Committee on the Present Danger, which served as the locus of the traditional right and neoconservatives.

Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s 1979 essay in Commentary on Carter’s unseemly commitment to human rights, Dictatorships and Double Standards, became — as Heilbrunn notes — "a rallying cry for Carter’s opponents."  Although the Reagan Democrats who defected the party were in large part working class whites disgruntled about abortion and affirmative action, Kirkpatrick’s essay gave the neocons who had grown uneasy with Carter and the Democrats "a coherent theory, a basis of attack, one that presidential hopeful Ronald Reagan, among others, quickly embraced."

Carter made a late attempt to mend fences with the neocons through Walter Mondale, meeting with Norman Podhoretz, Elliott Abrams and Kirkpatrick.  But it was a disaster — they quickly wrote him off as "a foreign policy weakling" and defected to the Republican Party.

Well, not all of them.  The New Republic maintained its position as the primary outlet for mainstreaming neocon ideology within the Democratic party, and the Coalition for a Democratic Majority still pursued Scoop Jackson’s goal to "bring the Democratic party back from the edge of extremism to its historial role as the party of the progressive center."

It was a goal that would be enunciated time and again, most recently by Senator Joseph Lieberman.

Obama has certainly bent over backwards to keep Lieberman in the fold.

Mondale tried to woo the neocons back in 1983, but they were already firmly embedded in the Republican party and cultivating the Christian right.  George H. W. Bush had little use for them and called them "the crazies in the basement" for bolloxing Iran Contra, and they in turn hated him for Baker/Scowcroft and the decision not to pursue Saddam Hussein during the first Iraq war (and the subsequent gassing of the Kurds and Shiites).   

They thought Bush Sr. was far too friendly with the Saudi monarchy and not supportive enough of Israel, and several actually backed Bill Clinton in ‘92 — Richard Schifter and AIPAC’s David Ifshin even reached out to neocons on his behalf.   By the time Bill Kristol, John Podhoretz and David Brooks conjured up the Weekly Standard in ‘95, however, they were in the vanguard of ridiculing Bill Clinton, clamouring for impeachment and leading a "values" charge against homosexuality.

It’s not surprising that Obama wants to keep the neocons neutralized — they certainly have the megaphone to be able to do him considerable damage, and there is no question that they are vicious enough to do it for pure sport.  They are also vain and egotistical enough to be susceptible to public courting and flattery.

But are they truly capable of being appeased?

From the LA Times review of Heilbrunn’s book:

[T]o describe the neocons as conservative is to misconstrue their purpose, which is to overturn rather than to preserve. Although having nominally made a transformative ideological journey from the left to right, neoconservatives, writes Heilbrunn, have “never really ceased to be radicals in temperament and style.” This residual radicalism is especially evident when it comes to foreign policy, which neoconservatives invariably view as a contest pitting good against evil. Contemptuous of realism, disdaining stability and equilibrium, neoconservatives show pronounced utopian propensities, fueled by exaggerated expectations about America’s capacity to set things right. Whether directed against communism, “Islamofascism” or the United Nations (or domestically against the CIA, the State Department and liberal Democrats), this utopianism finds expression in a penchant for uncompromising and confrontational militancy.

When Obama takes office next week he’s going to be walking into the Gaza woodchipper; the minute he deviates from the Bush position on Israel by so much as a scintilla all bets are off.  Like Bill Clinton before him, he’ll soon find his own face being mercilessly mocked on the cover of the Weekly Standard.

The neocons were ex-Trotskyists who scribbled their way to power in small but influential rags like the Partisan Review, Commentary and Encounter.  Their leap from intellectual gadflys to governance was disastrous, and we’ve all paid the price as they implemented their now discredited crackpot theories.  Yet they’re like crazy ancients locked in the DC attic demanding fealty lest they start lobbing refuse from the gables.  If Obama wants to dine with them, fine by me.  

But there is an energetic online left which in many ways resembles the neocons in their early period, growing in popularity and influence as a result of having been vocally right for the past 8 years about the war, supply side economics, deregulation, bankruptcy, healthcare and a whole host of issues.  Obama’s outreach efforts rarely seem to include them (though Maureen Dowd who referred to Obama as "Obambi" and Frank Rich who pelted him over Rick Warren were invited today).

Obama’s high approval numbers are keeping the wind at his back and meaningful opposition on the left from reaching critical mass.  But the two Democratic freshmen that the DCCC gave the most money to in 2008 are anti-choice members from Alabama who voted against the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.  Over time, the battle with the GOP — which is barely even a national party any more — may become less critical (and certainly less interesting) than the battle with progressives over the soul of the Democratic Party.

In that event, I’m sure Larry Kudlow will be willing to rally to his defense and gush on cue.

Bon appetite!


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