In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • American Conservatism in Historical Perspective
  • Michael Zuckerman

It may have come to your attention that there has been no love lost, since the beginning of the war in Iraq, between the French and the neo-conservative Bush administration. The French had the gall not to believe the poppy-cock that Colin Powell presented to the UN about Iraq, weapons of mass destruction, and an axis with Al-Qaeda. For that they went to the top of the White House enemies list.

In an odd way, this tickled the French. It was an accident of language.

In French slang, the word con means jackass or imbecilic wuss. So when the neo-cons—the néo-cons, as the French read the term—went ahead with their ill-considered invasion and imperial occupation of Iraq, the French thought that that was just the sort of thing that neó-cons—incompetent fools, milksop morons—would do.

It is not much easier for Americans than for the French to make sense of the neo-cons. Certainly they are not conservative in the Burkean sense that defined the term for almost two hundred years. They do not seek to hold on to the preponderant part of the past. They make no effort to hide their determination to tear their world up by the roots and revert to an imagined olden time that few if any of them have ever experienced. The New Deal nation is now three-quarters of a century old. It is the only past that Americans alive today have ever experienced. The neo-cons mean to eradicate it altogether. That is radical, not conservative.

Or, at any rate, it would be radical if it was not so palpably incoherent. One major strand of the movement celebrates what neo-cons call family values and traditional morality. The other extols what they call the free market, which [End Page 464] undermines those values and that morality more corrosively than any of the liberal ideas and institutions against which neo-cons rail.

Put aside how problematic it is to call “family values” conservative when survey data suggest that four-fifths of Americans have abandoned them for at least a generation and less than a tenth of American households even take the nuclear family form on which they are predicated. Put aside how problematic it is to call the “free market” conservative when it is so patently a utopian imaginary that has never existed and will never exist. For the sake of argument, call them both conservative. It is still plain to see that what the neo-cons take for social conservatism, which professes to revere tradition, must be utterly at odds with what they take for economic conservatism, which entails incessant change.

In historical perspective, neo-conservatism bears virtually no relationship to the conservatism, such as it was, of the American Founders. Its assumptions and its obsessions are, without exception, new things under the American sun.

Take Alexander Hamilton, the Founder whom conservatives most often claim as an icon of their own. And take Maria Reynolds, too. Before there was Monica Lewinsky, there was Maria Reynolds.

In 1797 Hamilton was the most powerful man in American politics. He had bested Jefferson again and again to gain congressional approval of his plans to assume the debts of the states, pay for them, and institute a national bank. He’d had Washington’s ear and now he had the loyalty of more members of John Adams’s cabinet than the new president himself did. He was, as many who resented and resisted him accused, the veritable president of the United States. And then he came to the crisis of his career. An obscure journalist, James Callender, published the charges of an obscure sometime government official, James Reynolds, that Hamilton had taken advantage of his position as secretary of the Treasury to speculate in federal securities.

Hamilton was vulnerable. He had repeatedly bribed Reynolds to buy the man’s silence, and there was conclusive evidence of the payments. The only way Hamilton could defend himself was to reveal that his hush money had gone to seal Reynolds’s lips not about the secretary of the Treasury’s official...

pdf

Share