Ed Note: The discussion of neoconservatism starts here and continues here. Ali Eteraz jumps in to respond to the latest round, here.

Daniel Koffler says that when it comes to foreign policy, neoconservatism is neither liberal internationalism, nor illiberal expansionism, but really just an elitist and intellectual project, defined primarily by its belligerence, exceptionalism and (Straussian) secrecy. Koffler comes up with this third category because he is intent on showing that neoconservatism is not a "movement" like the other two foreign policy views, and therefore cannot quite qualify as a "nationalism."

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that neoconservatism is a conspiratorialLet's not give the neocons too much credit cabal. In Koffler's words: "an exclusively elite movement with limited membership."

That gives neoconservative foreign policy too much credit. Intellectual and elitist movements (even conspiracies) usually have some kind of identifiable structure to them. Yet, neoconservative foreign policy, since 2001, has been a morass of empty slogans and ambiguous declarations. It has been an idea in construction. It was never settled on where it was going. It was for this reason that it put forward nebulous ideas like "terror" and "axis of evil" and "doctrine of integration" and "with us or against us." If anything, neoconservatism is the 21^st century version of 19^th century nativism, the 1920s Red Scare and 1950s McCarthyism --- yet another instance of America panicking in the face of a global encounter.

We know this because before 9/11, and before being elected President, the Bush foreign policy shop had said that that they would not focus on international humanitarianism as Clinton had done (I believe this was in Rice's Foreign Affairs article in 2000). Yet, after 9/11, humanitarianism --- in the form of "nation-building" --- was the first thing out of the neoconservatives' mouths (which as Ahmed Rashid points out they then botched). No rhyme, no reason. That's why one day Bush was talking about Islamofascists and the next acknowledging that the term wasn't accurate, why one day we were entering Iraq because of WMD and the next day because of Saddam's links with Al-Qaeda. That's why one day we were declaring war on all state-sponsors of terror and the next day we were hobnobbing with Saudi Arabia.

Now, nearly every faction ---- from neo-conservatives to liberal hawks to libertarians (like Koffler) --- objects to understanding neoconservative foreign policy as inherently devoid of any content. Neoconservatives themselves reject this idea because they think it smacks of confusion, and my, it couldn't be that they had no idea what they were doing. Liberal hawks reject it because they feel extra guilty for being duped by a movement that had no idea what it was doing. People like Koffler reject this reading because in order to justify their preferred projects it is more effective to demonize neoconservatives as a cabal than to recognize them as people who had little idea of what to do when thrust into Hillary Clinton's 3 AM scenarios.

As much as I'd like to believe that neoconservatism was a conspiracy that broke out after 9/11, the more reasonable explanation is that the people we had in charge were utter incompetents who, when confronted by the world coming to their shores, didn't know what to do, so they did everything under the sun. Pre-emptive war? Yes, we do that! Humanitarian war? We do that too! 100 years war? That too! Nation-building? Sure, why not! Empire? Fuck yeah! (as a Bush advisor told Ron Suskind in slightly different terms). War on terror? Check! World War IV? If we include Iran, yeah baby!

The fact is, and as pitiable as it sounds, on 9/11 America got hit in the head with a mallet, and rather than taking a moment to get a sense of who we were, our government started behaving like a punch drunk boxer.

Neoconservatism foreign policy is 21^st century American hyperventilation. It is panic, and panic is a far worse characteristic in a government than institutional corruption. People like Koffler who actually oppose neoconservatism shouldn't give it historiographical credit.

Is the traditional conception of politics as contest between the economically statist, socially progressive left, and the market-friendly, socially retrograde right, just pining for the fjords, or is it stone dead?

Consider this: Jesse Larner wrote a thoughtful critical appreciation of Friedrich Hayek in the Winter issue of Dissent, pointing out several historical and theoretical lacunae in Hayek's thought but crediting Hayek's critique of planned economies as decisive. It's notable not only for being a beautifully written piece, but also for where it's coming from: a left-wing writer in a prominent left-wing magazine (albeit one that's always been regarded as "the right wing of the left"). When the premier journal of democratic socialism agrees that the viability of systems of central planning is over, it's over. But on the other hand, Larner perceptively notes what might come as a shock to some of Hayek's most ardent fans, namely that he "recognizes such a thing as the social interest and will even endorse some limited redistributionalism --- he goes so far as to suggest that the state ensure a minimum standard of living." Which suggest the potential for a reconciliation between classical and contemporary liberalism.

Coming at the same question from the opposite direction, Cato's Will WilkinsonThe Elections Of 1896 And 1996: Notice the switch? observes by reference to Friedman and (James, not Pat) Buchanan as well as Hayek that liberal-libertarian "fusionism" is really "just seeing our way back to a pre-existing economically literate political liberalism." Socialism and communism are dead, and with them the tactical rational for libertarians and classical liberals to make common cause with the right. "The question these days," Wilkinson argues, "is whether the U.S. will have the good sense to adopt more rational market-based old-age pension policies, like Sweden or Australia, or lower corporate tax rates to a level more in line with the rest of the wealthy world...Slightly higher personal tax rates and slightly more redistribution is a possibility, but a slide into socialism just isn’t on the table."

So that's what a pair of out of touch eggheads think; what about real people? There are two texts to consult here: Christopher Caldwell's classic 1998 Atlantic Monthly piece, "The Southern Captivity of the GOP," surveyed a vast range of socioeconomic data and tracked the correlation between the shift to a post-industrial economy marked by massive suburbanization to the revival of the national Democratic party in the 1990s. Ruy Teixeira and John Judis' ill-timed but increasingly prescient The Emerging Democratic Majority filled in the political side of that story. Whereas the Roosevelt coalition was smashed when Richard Nixon and then Ronald Reagan pried away its southern and sun-belt wings, the Reagan majority is moribund due in part to the migration of Yankee Republicans to the Democrats, but at least as much in virtue of the Democrats adding scores of new voters to the electorate, thanks to the expansion of the McGovern coalition and an even larger expansion of the Latino population.

That's where the Larner and Wilkinson pieces come back into the picture. Each of them approaching the prospect from opposite starting points argues that achieving a liberal-libertarian equilibrium is not only possible but desirable. The data Caldwell, Texeira, and Judis marshal suggests that if the fulcrum of the coming realignment is a shift in the country's substructure, the lever can be a shift from persistent Roosevelt-era concepts of left vs. right and liberal vs. conservative, towards a new ideological division to match the new political economy: liberalism (broadly construed) vs. populism.

Look at two of the most emotionally salient issues in our politics, trade and immigration --- which in addition to being emotionally salient, are two sides of the same coin --- to see how it might work. Currently both parties contain populist wings furious in their opposition to trade (Democratic populists) and immigration (Republican populists); yet the emerging, if silent majority (to borrow a phrase) is friendly to both. Moreover, the core of support for populism in the south and Appalachia neatly overlaps the power center of the GOP. Whereas the Democrats have solidified their bases, nearly completely conquered traditional Republican strongholds like New England and California, and made strong inroads into "new" southern states like Virginia and North Carolina through the expansion of the wine-track liberal vote congenial to markets and primarily concerned with environmental and foreign policy and by winning over the proverbial "socially liberal, fiscally conservative" suburban moderates who used to tilt Republican. Their next battlegrounds are the southwest and Rocky Mountain states, which they can flip through the same phenomena plus the huge expansion of a Latino electorate invested in liberal immigration policy.

In other words, the Rawls-Hayek fusion Wilkinson speaks of doesn't just make philosophical sense. It's also a promising strategy for the Democrats to build a national majority they haven't enjoyed in more than half a century. Conversely, by rejecting liberalism in favor of full-throated populism, the GOP is on the verge of fulfilling Caldwell's predictions, and reducing itself as a rump Anglo party trapped in the deep south and Appalachia.

An English professor is walking along Broadway in the Village when he's approached by a homeless man asking for change. The professor instead imparts classical words of wisdom: "Neither a borrower nor a lender be." And as if to underscore the pedantry, he adds, "William Shakespeare." The homeless man wears a sour expression on his face and after pausing a moment replies: "Fuck you. David Mamet."

Who really didn't see this coming in the American playwright who invented a discourse -- and used a metronome to do it -- to accommodate every shade of masculine barbarity? David Mamet has confessed in the Village Voice that he's no longer a "brain-dead liberal," and he describes his slow-mounting epiphany, as it was helped along by his wife, the unnamed but lovely actress Rebecca Pidgeon:

As a child of the '60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.

These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them in my life. How do I know? My wife informed me. We were riding along and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the fuck up. "?" she prompted. And her terse, elegant summation, as always, awakened me to a deeper truth: I had been listening to NPR and reading various organs of national opinion for years, wonder and rage contending for pride of place. Further: I found I had been—rather charmingly, I thought—referring to myself for years as "a brain-dead liberal," and to NPR as "National Palestinian Radio."

Anyone who has read Mamet's penultimate book The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Self-Hatred and the Jews is aware of his religious zealotry. And I can recall scanning his helpful guide to drama, Three Uses of the Knife, when I was playing Shelley "the Machine" Levine in a college production of "Glengarry Glen Ross" (half the cast was female!) and being surprised to find that even the smashmouth bad boy of the Great White Way reserved a saintly word for Theodore Herzl. If you will it, "Fresh Air with Terry Gross" is no nightmare.

The essay's written in Mamet-speak, which is a hard taste to acquire if you haven't got it already (I have, even though I enjoy parodying it as much as appreciating its staccato rhythms and intellectual abrasions: "Baby, I'm so cool, Disney Land visits me.")

What is it, though, about the stylists of heartburn prose that makes them all go public with their goodbyes to all that? Martin Amis had "The Age of Horrorism" in the Guardian two years ago, and there was Kingsley Amis' "Why Lucky Jim Turned Right" in the sixties. Mamet's stuff is pat ball to this father-son team's champion game.

And yet... Mamet has his moments, too. He reminds us that there is such a thing as a tough-minded, no-bullshit liberalism that takes a view of history longer than the Bush administration, and an assessment of human nature more complicated than the Halliburton tax returns:

Bush got us into Iraq, JFK into Vietnam. Bush stole the election in Florida; Kennedy stole his in Chicago. Bush outed a CIA agent; Kennedy left hundreds of them to die in the surf at the Bay of Pigs. Bush lied about his military service; Kennedy accepted a Pulitzer Prize for a book written by Ted Sorenson. Bush was in bed with the Saudis, Kennedy with the Mafia. Oh.

Knowing the symptoms of Mamet's conditions pretty well (I've made a minor study of changing ideological fever-dreams), I'd wager that most of his policy prescriptions have not changed much since he came to the realization that the free market is better than the command economy, and that the United States is not reflexively vicious, but rather resilient against vice because founded on the best kind of pessimistic doctrine of government.

The Independent newspaper in Britain has taken the occasion of Mamet's piece to distinguish between the British definition of "liberalism" and the American one (the "brain-dead" adjective must have really upset the leader writers).

Mamet will of course be called a "conservative" by his ex-friends in Hollywood. Or they'll use the more convenient dread term "neoconservative," which is preloaded ammunition for fools. You're either with us or against, the lefties will tell him. Either you're scrawling Etch-a-Sketch political cartoons of Dick Cheney shooting his friend in the face for the Huffington Post, or you're calling the more pacifistic elements of the American Enterprise Institute "stupid fucking cunts." Which is it, David?

Welcome to the counter-revolution.

Apropos my defense of the Euston Manifesto and Nick Cohen's What's Left, here's another perspective from E.J. Dionne on the prospects for a revival of liberalism after George Bush. Money graphs:

[After] Bush leaves office, liberals will face a moment of truth on foreign policy. It is easy enough to reject Bush's unilateralism, his squandering of the post-9/11 opportunity, his failure to understand what the invasion of Iraq entailed and required, his expansive view of executive power. Far more difficult will be settling arguments between advocates of democracy promotion and opponents of imperialism; between realists who have learned the need for prudence from the Iraq adventure, and idealists who insist (as in Darfur) that there is still a role for American power to promote moral ends, and to avert moral catastrophe.

In principle, American liberals can repair the model of international cooperation pioneered by Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. But it would be foolish to assume that such an approach to foreign policy can be miraculously recreated in a world very different from the one they confronted, or to assume that the dilemmas of liberal foreign policy will disappear when the Bush administration does.

If there is one takeaway from Jonathan Chait's admirable anatomy of the so-called "netroots" movement of blog driven neo-liberalism, it is this: the Clintons still have a monopoly on the Democratic Party. How else to explain that the cynicism of yesterday has repackaged itself, without a trace of self-awareness or irony, as the glittering new ideology of today?

I've always been amused by the Daily Kos and MyDD crowd's ability to paint themselves as pioneers when they proudly proclaim their tactical allegiance to the dirty-dealing Roveists of the New Right than to progressive McGovernites of the New Left. The very terminology their in-it-to-win-it contingent deploys underscores its promiscuity with convictions: "People-powered," "Kossacks." It's as if Lenin tried to make peace with the tsar. Are these guy radicals or reactionaries? Does it matter so long as the $400 haircut gibbering away on C-SPAN has a D preceding its name?

Markos Moulitsas would like to think he's assembled a recently awakened army to war against the spent Democratic establishment, one that was remodeled under Clinton as the Third Way of compromise and bipartisanship. Yet such compromise, and such tertiary off-road daillances, are still a-okay so long as they win elections. ("You don't understand," Sidney Blumenthal once said, in defense of his boss's firesale of liberal values, "It's our turn.") Netroots activists claim to deplore single-issue candidates, yet they will disembowel any candidate who isn't...antiwar. Can you remember a single policy position held by Ned Lamont besides his insistence that he'd never even met George W. Bush?

Kos himself has said that it's fine for a Democratic candidate to be pro-gun and anti-abortion in a red state, which I suppose is the same as Grover Norquist's blind eye toward slapping that all-purpose modifier "Rockefeller" before Republican in a blue state. But beware the netroots nihilism masquerading as political savvy: When Moulitsas cites the mounting death toll in Iraq to galvanize his base, he gets away with referring to mutilated and murdered construction workers as Fallujah as "mercenaries" about whom he should feel nothing. ("Screw them," was his notorious comment, which lost him mainstream Democratic support for all of thirty seconds, until the site traffic at Daily Kos was shown to flicker not at all.)

The GOP reinvigorated itself in the 70's by risking confrontation with two lumbering behemoths: the New Deal and Soviet Communism. Republicans led twin revolutions in a country known for its timidity in changes to domestic and foreign policy. What has netroots offered besides "Anybody But Bush" hysterics and an infinitely ad hoc approach to regional politics? There's no there there. So to suggest that they've incited a kind of leftist Goldwater Revival is laughable. Once Bush is gone, to paraphrase Nick Cohen, what will the netroots gang have to rally around besides keeping the movement from cannibalizing itself? All their old opinions will seem heresies, and all their old bugbears will be tricked out as what they had meant to stand for all along.

Future generations will look back on the post-9/11 era and have one prevailing thought: that at the turn of the 21st century, self-evident truths had become radical causes for celebration. Sam Harris takes a long, sober look at liberalism in America and is not pleased by what he finds. That the following sentence is even quotable shows just how much intellectual and moral spadework is left to be done in the current crisis of civilization:

Unless liberals realize that there are tens of millions of people in the Muslim world who are far scarier than Dick Cheney, they will be unable to protect civilization from its genuine enemies.

What Harris tilts against is what I'd call the if-we-justers. "If we just got Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories;" "If we just removed all American military bases from the Middle East;" "If we just pulled all troops out of Iraq (and even Afghanistan) tomorrow;" "If we just attempted 'dialogue' with bin Ladenists;" etc. The second clause is: "everything would be fine."

Orwell used to call confrontation with unpleasant truths the "power of facing." This power was always hardest to come by when what you had to face was your own shortcomings - as an individual, a society, a believer in ideology. But now it's equally difficult to call up when all that's required is to realize that a group of reactionary psychopaths mean business when they say they want to kill you because it'd please an invisible man in the sky.

The Paul Berman Award for Sensible Liberalism goes to Sam this week.