What's Right.

All Right Already

A man is standing on the platform of the Darien, Conn., train station, reading the paper. An elderly woman joins him. She glances at him appraisingly, and then approaches to ask a question. "Excuse me, Mister, I am sorry to intrude, but I have to ask -- Are you Jewish?"

The man is startled, but good-naturedly answers, "No, Ma'am, I'm not."

"Oh," says the woman in a crestfallen tone. A pause. "Are you quite sure you're not Jewish?"

"Yes, quite sure."

Another pause. "Maybe half-Jewish?"

"Madam," says the man with growing irritation, "I assure you: I have the greatest admiration and respect for the Jewish people. If I were Jewish, I would certainly acknowledge it. It just so happens that I'm Presbyterian."

Pause again. "You are absolutely certain you are not Jewish?"

Driven beyond endurance, the man shouts, "All right, all right, have it your way: Yes, I am Jewish. Now will you let me read my paper?"

"That's funny," the woman replies. "You don't look Jewish."

I think of this old joke whenever I pick up one of these super-heated screeds you see from anti-war conservatives about the sinister influence of the dreaded "neocons" on the Bush administration. Sometimes, when the screeds really get going, they will add my name to the list after their top hate-figures: Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Bill Kristol, and of course, NR's Jonah Goldberg. For a long time, I would register a little inward protest -- "I have the greatest admiration and respect for the neoconservatives. If I were a neoconservative, I would certainly acknowledge it. But it just so happens that I'm . . . well, a plain-vanilla conservative."

The term "neoconservative" was coined back in the 1970s by people on the left as a term of abuse for those fellow leftists who were showing signs of backsliding from the lunatic orthodoxies of 1960s liberalism. In those mad days, it did not take much to earn the "neo" label. You could be a socialist like Penn Kemble or a yellow-dog Democrat like Daniel Patrick Moynihan -- all you had to do was express some doubt that society was to blame whenever a black youth knocked down an old lady to steal her purse.

Quickly, however, the term "neoconservatism" assumed a more precise meaning. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, friends and foes of the neoconservatives came to accept something like the following definition: A neoconservative was a former liberal or leftist, typically from a poor background, typically Catholic or Jewish, who had been driven rightward by the intellectual and moral implosion of liberalism in the 1960s. They were often the children of immigrants. They had witnessed and in many cases suffered terrible oppression and persecution in Europe. As they saw it, the difference between America and Europe was the difference between life and death. They began as Democrats, but as the Democrats turned against American exceptionalism, so they turned against the Democrats. Still, they retained some of their youthful statism on economic issues and, often, some ancestral affection for Democratic heroes of the past: FDR, Truman, and sometimes Kennedy and Johnson.

(Hint: If you could get really angry about the depredations of the Federal Trade Commission, you were almost certainly not a neoconservative. I figured I didn't fit the profile, if only because I did get really angry about the depredations of the Federal Trade Commission.)

As the years wore on, the old line between neoconservatives and traditional Republicans began to blur: One ex-leftist-turned-rightist told me this story. She had attended the New York high school known as the Little Red Schoolhouse in the early 1950s. At her 40th reunion, one of her classmates reproached her for her political migration: "I hear you've become a neoconservative." The ex-leftist answered defiantly, "Yes -- in fact, I've just re-registered as a Republican." "Oh please," her classmate replied. "Don't exaggerate."

If you remember your chemistry, though, you'll recall that when you mix two chemicals together into a solution, you sometimes release a third chemical that can no longer bind with either. In chemistry, this third chemical is called a "precipitate." In the conservative world, it began to call itself "paleoconservatism," and it specialized in increasingly strident denunciations of neoconservatism, sometimes with a pronounced anti-Semitic tinge.

Through the 1990s, paleoconservatism exerted remarkably little influence on events. But after 9/11, the paleos at last discovered a role -- and an audience. Their idea that America had brought 9/11 on itself because of its support of Israel -- and that the whole war on terror was a sinister Jewish plot -- was eagerly heeded everywhere from the Saudi-funded think tanks of Washington to the left-wing newspapers of Europe. While the paleos personally failed to make much of a comeback (people who cannot restrain themselves from comparing Abraham Lincoln to Adolf Hitler will have trouble finding a welcome in polite society), their conspiratorial worldview and their sly labeling have helped to frame the discourse of the world.

Today, two years after 9/11, the term "neocon" gets applied to pretty much anyone who believes in the fundamental goodness of America and the rightness of its war. If you refuse to hear excuses for Islamic terrorism; if you want to hunt down America's enemies wherever they lurk; if you care more about American security than you do about the Security Council -- well then, the BBC and Pat Buchanan and Bill Moyers all have the same epithet for you. Or, as the man on the Darien platform might say, "All right, all right, have it your way: Yes, I am a neocon. Now can we wage our war?"