'I'm Such a Pariah,' Neocon Reflects

The Forward justly recognizes Matt Brooks of the Republican Jewish Coalition as one of the 50 most important Jews in America, but its piece gives a kind of benediction to the contumely and smears he heaped on Barack Obama, as somehow advancing the next holocaust. Brooks knows what the score is. He says, "I'm such a pariah this year." Important fact. Too bad that the Forward exalts other neolibs and neocons, like Bill Kristol and Jeffrey Goldberg, those two horsemen of the Iraq apocalypse. Where is Glenn Greenwald? Or David Bromwich? Both important voices on the liberal side of the discussion. Bromwich on the neocons: "Never before, in the history of the United States, has there been an ideological camp so fully formed and equipped to extend itself as neoconservatism in the year 1999. It was, and remains, a sect that has some of the properties of a party."

Comments

[David Green]

Bromwich is a case in point. I've followed him since high school, since we went to the same one (heavily Jewish Grant High in Van Nuys, CA, circa 1968). He styled himself as a radical before he went off to Yale, where he's been ever since. He got upset at Black Power, typical for aspiring Jewish intellectuals justifying restraint. He's been writing articles in The New Republic for years, as well as Dissent (he's on the editorial board). He doesn't criticize Israel in any serious way, perhaps not at all. I don't mean that he should espouse the Lobby theory, which I don't agree with, but just express some outrage. But his leftism has always been designed to find favor with the TNR/Dissent/NYRB wing of the establishment. Thus, Israel is on the back burner--you come out when it's safe to criticize Republicans (not Democrats), on invasions and occupations (not Israel's). Bromwich is of the Gitlin/Walzer/Wiesletier fashion, the apologetics of omission regarding Israel and U.S. support. He hasn't challenged Peretz. He learned early on that establishment liberal/leftists don't go there if you want to maintain respectability. It would seem, however, that he could afford to "come out" (obviously, he has tenure at Yale). Why doesn't he? I fear he doesn't really get it. Or perhaps he doesn't want to become an object of controversy. Understandable, but hardly courageous. We've got a "liberal" in office now. Will the liberal left criticize him on Israel. I doubt it.

[anon]

Reminds me of Goebbles' musings.

[LeaNder]

I don't mean that he should espouse the Lobby theory, which I don't agree with, but just express some outrage.

His review, linked above, expresses quite a bit of outrage, don't you think? It feels he is circling "the Lobby". Or its main protagonist in the administration: Dick Cheney.

Yet Cheney as CEO had a value as great as that of any official who has passed through the revolving door that separates government office from corporate chairmanships. His importance was as a connection maker, a facilitator, a speculative explorer of large innovations. While at Halliburton, Cheney would commission a study of the utility of employing private security contractors to fight in wars—only a piece of "research" at the time, but it would pay later for both the company and the vice-president, with the off-the-books contracts that by privatizing state protection kept much of the Iraq occupation out of public view.

These were the years, too, of Dick Cheney's close association with the American Enterprise Institute and its offspring, the Project for the New American Century. The parent think tank, once an ordinary home for postwar business conservatism, had mutated, under the guidance of Irving Kristol, into the most lavish and energetic of the quasi-academic lobbies of neoconservative doctrine. The AEI, in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, had been transformed into an institute for the promotion of laissez-faire economics, militarized foreign policy, and the dismantling of the welfare state. It differed from, say, the Rand Corporation in eschewing any claim to impartiality of analysis. It was polemical and took confrontational positions that were disseminated early in the lectures and seminars open to resident fellows. The AEI differed, also, from an older centrist policy outfit like the Brookings Institution in having superior access to the mass media, thanks to careful self-advertisement and the coaching that its representatives often received from editors and agents such as Adam Bellow and Lynn Chu. A more-in-sorrow style was favored in discussing the grim necessity, for example, of increasing America's nuclear stockpile or stopping the "culture of poverty" in the black community by cutting off federal programs.