Neocons and paleocons after the Cold War. Gingrich, Reagan, and Abrams

View 710 Friday, January 27, 2012

I confess to feeling a great wave of relief. I was deeply disturbed by the Elliot Abrams diatribe against Newt Gingrich which circulated yesterday, but much more so by the included quotes which supposedly showed Newt being disrespectful and downright condemnatory of Ronald Reagan and his cold war policies.

I had been reasonably close to Newt in those days, and after, and in the decades that I have known him I have never heard him say anything derogatory about Reagan, even when he was in disagreement over some of Reagan’s tactics; and in fact I could not really remember that happening, although it must have; after all, I also disagreed with some of Reagan’s tactics in his final years as President, and said so; but tactical disagreements are not denunciations nor are they disrespectful.

Abrams said

Mr. Gingrich voted with the president regularly, but equally often spewed insulting rhetoric at Reagan, his top aides, and his policies to defeat Communism. Gingrich was voluble and certain in predicting that Reagan’s policies would fail, and in all of this he was dead wrong.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/289159/gingrich-and-reagan-elliott-abrams

He buttressed that with what looked like quotes from a Gingrich speech made in the House. I probably met Elliot Abrams before I met Newt Gingrich: it was at an American Conservative Union event at the Mayfair Hotel in Washington DC. Dr. Stefan Possony was on the ACU Board and I was in DC essentially to carry his briefcase, although I think I had a press assignment, probably from the National Catholic Press. This would have been early in the Reagan Administration, possibly just after the Inauguration (to which I had an invitation but didn’t go). At the ACU meeting Possony and I had lunch with Mr. Abrams, and I had no reason to have anything but respect for him. Subsequent encounters and incidents have not changed that view until the NRO article yesterday. Thus my dismay: here were two people, one an old friend, another a fellow Cold Warrior, and the warrior was at my friend’s throat. I had never heard Newt say anything like what Abrams was quoting. I never heard Newt “spew insulting rhetoric” at Reagan or his top aides, and I am quite certain that if he ever had, he would have lost the regard of Nancy Reagan – who has said that Newt inherited the torch of liberty from her Ronnie. Anyone who knows Mrs. Reagan would know that if Newt had been “spewing insulting rhetoric at Reagan,” Mrs. Reagan would never have spoken to or about him again. They remain friends.

Here is what Newt actually said in the speech that Abrams quotes to justify his “Spewing insults” remark:

"The fact is that George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Irving Kristol, and Jeane Kirkpatrick are right in pointing out the enormous gap between President Reagan’s strong rhetoric, which is adequate, and his administration’s weak policies, which are inadequate and will ultimately fail." http://spectator.org/blog/2012/01/27/elliott-abrams-caught-misleadi

There’s more. See “Elliot Abrams Caught Misleading on Newt” by Geoffrey Lord

In fact, I’m sorry to say, what appears to be going on here is that Elliott Abrams, a considerably admirable public servant and a very smart guy, has been swept up in the GOP Establishment’s Romney frothings over the rise of Newt Gingrich in the Republican primaries. …

. . .

Due to the diligence of one Chris Scheve of a group called Aqua Terra Strategies in Washington, Mr. Abrams has been caught red-handed in lending himself to this attempted Romney hit job. [clip]

I put in that last line to make sure that Chris Scheve, one of Newt’s staffers when he was Speaker, gets the credit he deserves. The entire piece by Lord is well worth your time. http://spectator.org/blog/2012/01/27/elliott-abrams-caught-misleadi

What Newt was saying was true when he said it: the President had the right ideas, but his administration was not implementing them strenuously enough. This is a disagreement on tactics, not fundamentals. In those days Newt was in the minority, and very much frustrated by the slow progress of the Strategic Defense Initiative. I could understand that disappointment. So was I. But that’s another story for another time; what wasn’t happening was any denunciation of Reagan by Newt Gingrich. Those were the times when General Graham and I were partners in trying to make America a Spacefaring nation again, and if Newt had alienated the President we would have had a choice to make. That never happened. Newt was on the SDI team from the time he was elected to the House, through his long time in near isolation as he made those conservative speeches, through his selection as Minority Whip, and through the end of the Cold War. He supported SDI, DC/X, space exploration, commercial space development, X Projects and Prizes.

Abrams is dead wrong, and was persuaded to believe nonsense.

All right, so why? Well, during the Cold War there was an alliance between the neo-conservatives and the paleo-conservatives. We old time conservatives were reluctantly willing to expand government power to meet the threat of an enemy armed with 26,000 deliverable nuclear warheads, even when the liberals made a number of demands as a price of letting us get on with fighting the Cold War. Perhaps that was a proper thing to do and perhaps not. Possibly the world was not doomed to a CoDominium, but President Nixon and Secretary of State Kissinger certainly thought we were, and that the best the United States could do in the Cold War was détente. Kissinger famously compared himself to Metternich, trying to preserve what he could of the free world in the face of rising communism. Containment, the west’s governing strategy of the Cold War, required that the USSR be contained; that required a long term commitment to doing it; and with the fall of Viet Nam and the planting of pro communist regimes in Latin America, the US determination appeared to be inadequate.

Neocons and paleocons worked together, and the neocon Commentary Magazine was as intellectually important as National Review. Both were committed to Frank Meyer’s fusionism. If all this is babble to you, don’t worry about it. At one time it was very important. What you need to know is that neocons and paleocons were fundamentally agreed only on defeating the USSR; we were not agreed on social issues nor on the nature of government. Irving Kristol, a man I much admired then and now, began his intellectual career as a Trotskyite and some of the Marxist intellectual propositions stayed with him. Many of the neocons were less than enthusiastic about fundamental conservative principles like limited government and the belief that government cannot and should not  “solve” all the “problems” of life; nor should it attempt it. To many neocons government can do nearly anything: it’s not so much a problem of limiting government but of putting the right people in charge of it. Give us the sword of state and we will create a more beautiful world.

When the Cold War ended, many of them became “Big Government Conservatives”, as if such a thing were possible (in the view of paleocons like me, government must be limited in its scope else it will attempt to involve itself in every aspect of life, such as licensing stage magicians who use rabbits in their acts). Neocons and paleocons became estranged, and sometimes became outright enemies. There remain some common interests, particularly American/Israeli relations, so the enmity is often masked, but it is there.

Elliot Abrams was a friend and political ally during the Cold War (I hasten to add he is unlikely to remember me); and I had not followed his intellectual career since other than to express my concern over his persecution over the Iran/Contra affair. I was astonished to see his denunciation of Newt and devastated by the “quotes”. I remain astonished that he would let himself be deceived by the phony quotes , and I am greatly relieved that they were in fact false. As I said, I was around during those times, I had ties to both Reagan and Gingrich, and I did not remember any such quotes or attitudes.

When I mentioned all this to my wife she said “How old is Abrams?” I had to say I last met him a long time ago, and I didn’t know; I assumed we were about the same age. To which she just nodded. But I find that Abrams is 15 years younger than me, so his memory may be better than mine. On the other hand, if he believes that Newt Gingrich could have said the nonsense that Abrams was persuaded that Newt had said, perhaps his biography has his day of birth wrong by twenty or so years.

Obama’s State of the Union reminded me, I am sad to say, of some of the speeches of Huey Long, and of the man Huey got some of his ideas from, an Italian Socialist called Benito Mussolini. The State can do all, and any real problems are caused because the State is not doing enough to enforce fair play and steer things in the right direction. All we need is more State effort to solve social problems. Rich and poor can all get along, and the State is there to make sure they do. Mussolini went to his death affirming his devotion to Socialism.

Everything for the state. Nothing against the state. Nothing outside the state. Duce! Duce!

For those who want to understand the internecine battles within Socialism, I recommend Ignazio Silone’s novel Bread and Wine. Silone was an anti-Stalinist anti-Mussolini Socialist, exiled by Mussolini at the time he wrote the book. Of course he denounces Mussolini as not a Socialist at all. Mussolini disagreed.