Weiss saw Scott McConnell at the IDF demonstration in New York the other day–after McConnell had participated in a demonstration against Ahava Dead Sea products in Washington–and asked him why a conservative was spending so much time with left wingers, could McConnell write a few words about his progress?
Perhaps one of those moments to examine the shifting Left-Right of identities has come around again. Several weeks ago I attended a small conference in DC devoted to Left-Right cooperation possibilities in the antiwar movement, and the magazine I’m associated with, The American Conservative, is now preparing a symposium on aspects of this question.
The progressive-conservative dichotomy is less fixed than generally presumed. Historically, of course, the intellectual officer class of anti-communists was made up almost exclusively of ex-communists, a group far broader than the neoconservatives who have made that transition famous. I saw the other day that some right wing group at CPAC was giving an award to the great Marxist historian Eugene Genovese. Can you imagine, Genovese!
In my case, the shifts have been much less dramatic. I was kind of on the Left as a kid, driven for the most part by opposition to the Vietnam War. I began shifting rightward after the Paris Peace Accords in 1973—I remember the summer of that year seeing Nixon on TV giving a press conference and being badgered by the press and feeling a tinge of sympathy for him– wow, where did that come from? By the mid seventies I was reading Commentary. A few years after that I was writing for it. Under the influence of reading and professors in college—often European-born social democrats who knew a lot about how fragile bourgeois societies could be—I became pretty seriously anti-communist. Plus, (and I would note that this seems much less a problem with the contemporary Left) I was getting the vibe in the mid seventies—the hey-day of liberal identity politics—that the Left didn’t like white males all that much.
I was propelled by a Commentary view of the world for about twenty years, which shaped (and no doubt aided) my career. But sometime in the mid nineties, that world view began to seem insufficient. The Cold War was over. Urban crime—especially crime in New York where I lived —was way down. Those two issues had probably been at the emotional core of my conservatism, or neoconservatism, in the eighties and early nineties. Of course one doesn’t necessarily recognize the changes right away, as they are happening. Life was busy. I had a good job at the New York Post, most of my friends were neoconservatives. And I was still (and remain) fairly right wing on any number of issues. But the ideological boundaries of the world I lived in were breaking down. I was opposed to large scale immigration, beginning to get concerned about global warming, starting to worry that the United States was no longer a “middle class society”—a place where working class, not unduly gifted, people, could make comfortable and secure lives for themselves. And the only person on the Right seeking to address these issues (well, not global warming) was. . . Pat Buchanan.
I plan to write some day about Pat, and Buchananism. I believe that history will arrive at a much more favorable view of him than the current mainstream consensus. He was, not so incidentally, one of the first people to feel the brunt of full scale barrage from the Israel lobby and the neocons. For me, and perhaps for others, he represented an appealing way to depart from establishment conservativism, without our necessarily realizing it. Perhaps there’s an analogy to be made to Trotskyism here – the vehicle many rode away from the Stalinized Left, arriving eventually at pro-capitalist positions.
As was the case for millions of others, 9/11 crystallized a lot things. I was nearby, my wife called me from her office on Wall Street—she had seen a plane on its way into a building while getting out of the subway. That summer I had been paying a fair amount of attention to the Mideast, writing a bit about checkpoints and settlers and the like for New York Press. I had long known, perhaps always, that the Palestinians had a reasonable argument. But it had seemed, in the nineties, with the Cold War over, and Oslo on track, that a more or less fair solution was imminent. There was no reason for me to upset all my social and professional ties by advocating for the Palestinians.
But as the decade progressed, it became obvious that the Israelis –under prime minister Netanyahu in particular– were trying to derail the Olso process through stalling and settlement building and general obfuscation. I actually said this to Wililam F. Buckley in a job interview dinner at his home, before a score of National Review editors. Needless to say, I didn’t get the job—though one veteran NR editor told me afterwards that he thought this remark “very interesting.” If I remember correctly, right before 9/11, I had written a column pointing out that the biggest pop song in Egypt that summer was one whose lyrics—referring to Palestine, said “America, Please do something!”
After the World Trade Center attack anyone paying attention could see that the neocons would use the event to push Bush into a war against Iraq (and after that many other countries), because Iraq was supposedly a threat to Israel. This was hardly secret—they had been portraying Iraq as the new Nazi Germany for years, but 9/11 was their grand opportunity. In an effort to mobilize conservative opposition to the Iraq war and begin to attack systematically the mindset that created the Iraq war, I started The American Conservative with Buchanan and Taki Theodoracopulos in 2002. I hoped that parts of the Right would not be swept up in the insane jingoism. And some parts did resist it, but never as many as I had imagined.
As you note, I spend some time with the Left now. Monday evening, I demonstrated in DC against Ahava with Code Pink. Tuesday, in New York I marched against Gaza war crimes, in a demo organized by what appeared to me to be Old Left groups. I’m involved with Churches for Middle East Peace. I’ve been to events with Inter-Faith Peace Builders. I write for this site. It seems blindingly obvious to me that America won’t have any sort of decent society, conservative, progressive or otherwise, if it’s involved in endless Mideast wars. We’ll end up bankrupt and without civil liberties. Clearly the Iraq War, even as it has been many times worse for the Iraqis, demonstrates where the present trend goes.
It’s also clear that right now, the biggest engine driving us into more and larger wars, and especially one with Iran, is Israel and those in the US who, either from conviction or a desire to maintain their establishment credentials, see the world through a right wing Israeli optic. And of course if Israel continues to refuse to make peace, it will always be at war, and always ”threatened”. It has and still does have the opportunity to make peace around the ’67 borders—and seems absolutely determined not to do so.
I don’t know where that puts me in the end. In many cases, and in mine, political identification is driven by one primary issue—civil rights, war or peace. My late friend, the brilliant political activist Jim Chapin, used to say people define themselves more by what they’re against than what they’re for—and the direction of their ideological movement is more telling than their past positions. Take away the war, and I would probably be on the center-right, arguing against most readers on this site. Philosophically and temperamentally I find much to admire in George F. Kennan and Sam Huntington, who may be the last of America’s great WASP intellectuals. They would be hard to place on a left-right continuum, and they certainly had their reactionary sides to them. But both were Democrats, and both opposed the Iraq war of course. Does this begin to answer your questions?
