Remarks delivered to the Hudson Institute panel on Ben J. Wattenberg's Fighting Words: A Tale of How Liberals Created Neo-Conservatism.

DeWitt Wallace Fellow Nick Schulz

I want to thank the Hudson Institute for putting together this panel. It is good to be here with Ben and if you haven't done so yet I encourage you to buy this excellent book. It is a personal political biography, but it is also a good distillation of many of the important political and cultural currents of the last half century.

I should say out the outset that I have worked with Ben off and on for many years now, on TV, documentary and other projects. So I am hardly a disinterested commentator today.

Indeed, I have Ben to thank for first taking me to the Hudson Institute out in Indiana, the great old mansion in Indianapolis where we went to tape several television shows that aired nationally on PBS. I have always had a soft spot for Hudson. I'm a big Herman Kahn fan, for example, and his work is as relevant now as it was when he was alive. Ben helped me understand Hudson's enormous and continuing importance in America's intellectual life. So it's a delight to be here.

Neocon Label Confusion

This is a book about neoconservatism--indeed it is, as the subtitle calls it, a Tale of How Liberals Created Neo-Conservatism.

Now, it's difficult to know exactly what neoconservatism is today. There is a great deal of confusion about neoconservatism. Neoconservatism was originally a term of opprobrium used by intellectuals on the political left to criticize former friends and colleagues who moved to the political right. The term came to be embraced by those labeled neocons--they said they were liberals mugged by reality.

It is today, in the wake of the second Iraq war, in many circles once again a term of opprobrium. It is hurled by critics to mean something Jewish and belligerent, putting Israeli interests over American interests.

The distinguished historian Jerry Muller, in an unpublished essay, has written that: "In many parts of the world, after the American-British invasion of Iraq, the term ‘neoconservative' was used to refer to a purported Jewish-Zionist cabal in the American government. Used in this sense, the term leaves the realms of ideas and ideology, and enters that of conspiracy theory."

Muller is right. Recently we had a media dust-up that demonstrates this dynamic in action. Time magazine's Joe Klein has been making accusations that supporters of an aggressive response to Iran's nuclear ambitions have dual loyalties to the US and to Israel. These are neocons, he says.

Indeed I must confess I don't entirely know exactly what neocon is supposed to mean anymore. I consider myself something of a neocon even though I'm Catholic (so I've been accused of having divided loyalties--but to Rome, not to Jerusalem or Tel Aviv). I have never been to Israel. But I do think Iran is a serious problem so if that's what it means to be a neocon today, I guess I'm one, too.

Neoconservatism and Ben Wattenberg

In any event, let me say a few words of what I think neoconservatism was (and in some respects still is), and how Ben fits into the neocon picture. Neocons--many of whom being former liberals and in many cases former Marxists--are in my view known primarily for the following things.

First, they criticized the dysfunctions of elements of the welfare state and large government programs as these programs emerged from the Great Society efforts of the Johnson administration and subsequent administrations. These criticisms packed more political punch because these critics were liberals or former liberals.

Now, Ben is a former Johnson guy and once a Johnson guy, always a Johnson guy; so out of respect for Ben I won't dwell here on my own criticisms of Johnson. And Ben is willing to defend many aspects of the Great Society. That said, Ben shared the viewpoint that many of the Great Society programs and their progeny had unintended consequences that were harmful, particularly to America's inner cities.

Neocons were also critical of the deterioration of cultural habits, standards and mores that gathered steam in the 1960s. Now here, Ben did not go nearly as far as some of his neocon brothers and sisters. Ben is more of a social liberal than many neocons came to be.

And neocons pushed back against the anti-bourgeois pose that also emerged among elites at this time, particularly with the New Left in American politics. Ben was deeply--and, rightly, in my view--uncomfortable with the New Left's attacks on America and American ideals. While Ben has always been a Democrat, what Jeanne Kirkpatrick called the blame-America-first wing of the Democratic Party was what Ben was fighting.

Lastly, neocons wanted to stem the steady erosion of resolve among American elites--in academia, journalism, and so forth--to fight communism in the Cold War. Here, Ben joined in intellectual arms with his neocon brethren in an effort to save the Democratic Party from its slide into anti-Americanism and declinism, in order to resist and rollback Soviet communism.

Ben likes to describe neoconservatism the way Scoop Jackson talked about it when he called it: Common sense, for a change. This was, and remains, a very useful formulation.

Neocons were not like traditional conservatives in that they were not by instinct or temperament skeptical of change. Ben is an enthusiast of technology, welcoming to immigrants, comfortable with much of pop culture and so forth. So social change and institutional change is greeted with less skepticism--to a degree--by neocons than by traditional conservatives. Indeed, Ben would argue, that common sense means you must embrace some change.

So what is this common sense, exactly? Well, one way to think of it is the general sense or sensibility of the American people, which Ben wanted to study and illuminate. And this is where Ben made such a lasting contribution to American political life. By helping Americans--particularly American elites--see and understand the common sense views of Americans, he helped undercut the radicalism and declinism that was on the march in academia and the media and in the political class.

Americans, it turned out, were not declinists. And so they could not be led into decline. They did not believe their country or its institutions were illegitimate. And so they would not assent to a radical overhaul of American institutions.

Americans were concerned--in a very common sense way--about stability and law and order (what Ben helped dub "the social issue" in American politics). These concerns did not make Americans racist, as the New Left implied or asserted. Americans were open to change, although preferred change that was slow and ameliorative as opposed to radical or revolutionary.

This is very common sensical--and indeed very American. And in his books and television programs and newspaper columns and so on, Ben helped explain this to an American elite that was often unwilling--certainly not eager--to listen.

Neocons and Social Science

Another contribution neoconservatism made that's worth mentioning here is to the American conservative movement. Primarily that contribution was bringing the tools of social science--tools that had been used by progressives and reformist for decades--in the service of conservative aims or at least common sense, American aims.

The conservative critique of social or institutional change was well encapsulated by Samuel Huntington: "When the foundations of society are threatened, the conservative ideology reminds men of the necessity of some institutions and the desirability of existing ones." What neocons helped conservatives to do was to not just remind but demonstrate, when possible, with social science and social science data, the necessity of some institutions and the peril of fiddling with them or jettisoning them. And so you had Pat Moynihan investigating what was yielding the collapse of black families (and, increasingly, white families), James Q. Wilson investigating the true drivers of criminality and the problems with liberal policies on crime, Peter Berger and Richard John Neuhaus investigating the effect of welfare programs on families and religious organizations, Nat Glazer's work on the effects of quotas.

For Ben, his particular arena of social science was demography and digging deeply into Census data to tell the real story of what was happening in the United States over time.

What did Ben find? Some change, to be sure. But a surprising degree of continuity--in attitudes about the country, family, religion, values, and so on.

Indeed, it was this continuity Ben discovered that, in my view, made him so deeply skeptical of the radicalism and declinism of the 1960s and 1970s political left. Ben was able, through his study, to understand when elites were stating fact as opposed to expressing elite opinion. He did this acutely well in his books This USA, The Real Majority, The Real America, The Good News is the Bad News is Wrong, and The First Universal Nation. And he recounts much of this in Fighting Words.

Ben's Optimism

Indeed, it is this continuity that runs through America that buttresses Ben's unyielding optimism, one if his hallmark characteristics. His scholarship and his professional work have been defined by optimism.

Optimism and politics--particularly the tension between optimism and conservatism--has interested me for some time. Years ago I worked for Jack Kemp, known to many for his relentless--some might say, pathological--optimism. But I also worked for Bill Bennett. The author of a book ominously called The Death of Outrage is many things, and he is a dear friend, but his politics are not known primarily for their optimism.

Jerry Muller, who I mentioned earlier and who has written several influential books on conservatism, argues that "Conservatism arises from the anxiety that valuable institutions are endangered by contemporary developments or by proposed reforms." With no shortage of contemporary developments or reformers out there, conservatives are likely to be anxious or even gloomy much of the time.

Now, consider Muller's assertion about the nature of conservatism in light of Ben's steadfast, even cheery, defense of immigration. I remember an episode of Think Tank I helped produce on immigration and we had Peter Brimelow, the author of Alien Nation and a notable immigration critic as a guest. Peter kept going on something to the effect of "I am concerned about the social order!"

This concern for the social order is a natural conservative pose. Indeed, it is not the natural pose of most conservatives to be particularly optimistic of a contemporary development such as mass immigration from Latin America. They look at the wave of immigrants and are alarmed. And yet Ben can look at a development such as this and, despite being fairly conservative, he can be optimistic.

So what accounts for this?

I think this optimism is grounded first and foremost in faith in the American idea; but more importantly, this faith is rooted in the knowledge of America's continuity in the face of change. Despite all the change in America in the 20th and early 21st century, there was remarkable continuity as well--Americans remained people of common sense values and attitudes. It was a firm grasp of this continuity that permitted Ben to keep his sense in the 1970s when his political party was losing its moorings, losing its sense of where the American middle was. It was this appreciation for continuity in American life that makes him confident Americans can absorb--and assimilate--immigrants coming in by the millions. Continuity gives the nation strength and resilience and ballast. And it is what enables his upbeat disposition today.

In my darker moments, I think of Ben's approach to politics and culture and am made more optimistic as a result. Congratulations, Ben, on a remarkable book. I look forward to the Q and A with the audience. Thank you.

Nick Shulz is the editor-in-chief of The American and the DeWitt Wallace Fellow at AEI.