Black Mass: How Religion Led the World into Crisis (20 page)

While the political ascendancy of the Christian Right reflects recent changes in American society, it also confirms America’s unrivalled religiosity. The US is a secular regime, but unlike nearly every other long-established democracy America lacks a secular political tradition. Though the separation of church and state is a pillar of the Constitution, this has not prevented religion exercising enormous power in American political life. Like some other European countries Britain has an established Church; but organized religion has far less political influence than in the supposedly secular United States. The contrast is not only with the post-Christian countries of Europe but also with some Muslim countries. Judged by almost any standard the US is a less secular country than Turkey. In no other highly industrialized country is there widespread popular belief in Satan or a powerful movement contesting Darwinian theory. Nowhere else does a large segment of the population believe that the events of 9/11 were predicted in the Bible, as did a quarter of Americans polled in 2002.
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There is no other advanced country of which it could be observed that a theological dispute between pre-millennial and post-millennial Christians has ‘had profound implications for [American] politics’.
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With the ‘Southernization’ of American politics the Christian Right gained in strength. On George W. Bush’s first day in office he restored
a gag rule on aid to international organizations that counsel women on abortion, and his withdrawal of federal funding for stem cell research and US aid programmes that involve population control and the use of condoms as the most effective way of countering the spread of AIDS are signs of the Christian Right’s power.
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This power is not unchallenged, and in domestic politics there are limits to the extent to which any administration can advance a fundamentalist agenda. Despite attempts to change it, American law on abortion and gay rights remains similar to that in other democracies. America has not – and will not – turn into a theocracy, and it is conceivable that the Republican strategy of courting the fundamentalist vote could cease to be productive if it locks the party into policy positions – such as favouring restrictions on immigration from Hispanic countries, for example – that alienate other significant constituencies.

None the less the theo-conservative Right remains a force no administration can ignore, and its impact on American society could grow. The blow to America inflicted by Iraq is profound, and the impact on fundamentalists may be a state of mind not unlike that described by the early twentieth-century sociologist Karl Mannheim, when he wrote:

Chiliasm has always accompanied revolutionary outbursts and given them their spirit. When this spirit ebbs and deserts these movements, there remains behind in the world a naked mass-frenzy and a despiritualized fury.
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If America is exceptional it is in the power of religion. In the
last chapter
I will consider what this tells us about the Enlightenment tenet that there is an inherent connection between modernization and secularization. At this point it may be worth underlining the paradoxical quality of American modernity. Throughout most of its history America has seen itself as the prototype of a new civilization that will someday be universal. Yet its unique origins and singular religiosity preclude American life being replicated in any other country.

These contradictions appear in neo-conservatism. In neo-conservative thinking America is the supreme modern regime, which all others are bound to emulate. At the same time it is unique and
unparalleled. Neo-conservatism is a movement that could only have arisen in America, mobilizing conflicting beliefs that have recurred throughout the country’s history.

The United States is the last militant Enlightenment regime and the only advanced country that is still unshakably Christian. The two facts are not unrelated and help to explain the peculiar qualities of neo-conservatism and its rise to power in America. Despite its name, neo-conservatism is an ideology that originated on the Left. It has been able to gain power in America by allying itself with the Christian Right and with sections of liberal opinion. By allying itself at once with apocalyptic religion and a secular belief in human progress, the neo-conservative movement mobilized two powerful American traditions.

Like several other political labels, ‘neo-conservative’ was coined as a term of abuse. It seems to have been first used in the 1970s by the American socialist Michael Harrington to describe – and condemn –a small group of former leftists who were adopting stances in foreign policy that had in the past been confined to the Right. As the neo-conservative writer and Catholic theologian Michael Novak has written:

It is worth remembering that the first so-called neocons were a tiny band, indeed, usually quickly named as Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb, the two Daniels, Bell and Moynihan, Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter, and a very few of their intellectual friends. Virtually all of this company
had a history as men and women of the left, indeed to the left of the Democratic party, maybe in the most leftward two or three per cent of Americans, in some case socialist in economics, in others social democratic in politics.
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The origins of neo-conservatism on the Left explain some of its persisting qualities. Many of the older generation of neo-conservatives began on the anti-Stalinist far Left – Irving Kristol, the political godfather of the movement, wrote an autobiographical essay called ‘Memoirs of a Trotskyist’
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– and the intellectual style of that sectarian milieu has marked the neo-conservative movement throughout its history. The chief figures who shaped the neo-conservative movement – such as Irving Kristol, the Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell, the editor of
Encounter
magazine Melvin Lasky, the writer and editor of
Public Interest
Nathan Glazer, the political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset and the Democratic politician Patrick Moynihan – did not take their intellectual nourishment from conservative thinkers. It is doubtful if they read much of Edmund Burke, the eighteenth-century parliamentarian who first articulated English conservatism, or of Benjamin Disraeli, the British prime minister whose novels contain an elegant statement of a conservative view of the world. If the present generation of neo-conservatives reads Russell Kirk or Michael Oakeshott –twentieth-century conservative thinkers, the first American and the second British, who aimed to deflate ideology in favour of practice –it is likely with distaste. All these conservative thinkers believed the ideological type of politics that emerged from the French Revolution was a destructive force that had wreaked havoc in the twentieth century. In opposition to this view, neo-conservatives believe that politics is a type of warfare in which ideology is an essential weapon.

It was this conception of politics rather than any specific doctrines that neo-conservatives carried over from their time on the Left. Few of the leading neo-conservative intellectuals were Trotskyists for any length of time, and the chief political lesson that many of them took from Trotsky was the deeply repressive character of the Soviet regime. Here neo-conservatives did no more than reflect the post-war development of the Left. Marxists like Sidney Hook and Trotskyists such as
Max Shachtman developed into anti-communist social democrats not unlike the ex-communists who were among the most intrepid cold warriors in 1950s Europe. Like many others, these thinkers of the Left rejected Marxism during the Cold War. It is too simple to view neo-conservatives as reformulating Trotskyite theories in rightwing terms, but the habits of thought of the far Left have had a formative influence. It is not the content of Leninist theory that has been reproduced but its style of thinking. Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution suggests existing institutions must be demolished in order to create a world without oppression. A type of catastrophic optimism, which animates much of Trotsky’s thinking, underpins the neo-conservative policy of exporting democracy. Both endorse the use of violence as a condition of progress and insist the revolution must be global.

In abandoning Trotskyism, neo-conservatives moved closer to the American mainstream, but at the same time they lost Trotsky’s broad perspective on world events. The callow and parochial ideologues that hijacked US foreign policy lacked Trotsky’s knowledge of history and could only emulate his utopianism and his ruthlessness. Trotsky’s delusion that the European working class longed for socialist revolution in the interwar years is matched by the neo-conservative fantasy that the Arab world yearns for American-style democracy. His contempt for the ‘Quaker-vegetarian chatter’ of those who condemned Bolshevik methods such as hostage taking in the Russian Civil War is mirrored in neo-conservative scorn for those who condemn the use of torture in the ‘war on terror’.

Neo-conservative thinking is a mix of crackpot realism and chiliastic fantasy. The changing views of Francis Fukuyama illustrate the difficulties that arise when this mix becomes a basis for foreign policy. A major influence on Fukuyama’s thinking was the work of Alexandre Kojeve, a Russian émigré philosopher who settled in Paris. Kojeve wrote his doctoral dissertation on the Russian religious philosopher Vladimir Solovyev (1853–1900), who in 1899 published a book entitled
War, Progress and the End of History
in which he depicted Nietzsche as the precursor of the Antichrist. A version of Solovyev’s idea of the end of history appears in Kojeve’s work and reappears in Fukuyama’s book
The End of History and the Last Man.
Kojeve
presented the end of history in terms derived from Hegel, suggesting the terminus was not communism – as Marx had imagined – but a global capitalist system. Kojeve recognized that Soviet communism was another attempt at the utopian project pursued in the Great Terror in revolutionary France, which could not prevail against the overwhelming dynamism of capitalism. The model for the post-historical world that was coming in to being was the US rather than the USSR.

This view of America was embraced by Fukuyama, who was introduced to Kojeve’s thought by Alan Bloom. Along with the defence analyst Albert Wohlstetter, Bloom – a disciple of Leo Strauss who popularized a version of Strauss’s thought in his best-selling book
The Closing of the American Mind
(1987) and features as the central protagonist of Saul Bellow’s novel
Ravelstein
(2000) – forged the neo-conservative network and provided it with the ideas its members took into government. A lifelong friend and admirer of Kojeve, Strauss had for many years sent favoured students to study under him. Bloom was one of them and carried on the Straussian tradition by impressing on Fukuyama the value of Kojeve’s work.

More than Strauss, Kojeve shaped the thinking of Fukuyama and neo-conservatives as a whole. With his background in Solovyev and Hegel, Kojeve took for granted an eschatological view of history. So does Fukuyama, who continues to believe that America is the first post-historical society. Fukuyama has denied he ever believed history had ended in any literal sense. It is true he did not commit himself to the view that all sources of large-scale historical conflict were disappearing – a risible notion, though one he often came close to endorsing. He did assert that conflict about the most legitimate type of government had ceased. In the summer of 1989 he wrote:

What we are witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or a passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.
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This pronouncement contains two elements – the claim that history has reached a final consummation and a more specific proposition to the effect that liberal democracy is now the only legitimate mode of
government. The idea that history is moving towards an End is a myth that cannot be supported or refuted by rational argument. In contrast, the claim that liberal democracy is now the only legitimate mode of government has the merit of being demonstrably false.

The proposition that ‘western liberal democracy’ is ‘the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution’ is a confession of eschatological faith. It is curious that this fact has gone unnoticed. It was only to be expected that in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse long-suppressed conflicts would be reactivated. In other words history was set to resume, but in an entertaining inversion of language those who noted this fact were accused of doom-mongering. The truly apocalyptic notion that history had ended was accepted as realism.
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In recent years Fukuyama has attacked the Bush administration’s foreign policy, criticizing the push to democracy in Iraq and elsewhere on the ground that it attempts to force long-term trends to a premature conclusion. He has condemned this policy as Leninist but it is a judgement that is unfair to Lenin. Certainly Lenin’s goals were utopian, but he was supremely realistic in reformulating his policies. He reversed War Communism when it became obvious that it was leading to famine, and signed a humiliating treaty with the Germans at Brest-Litovsk in 1918 in order to allow Russia to exit from the First World War. Lenin displayed a capacity to learn from experience that has never been visible among neo-conservatives, who attacked the Bush administration’s conduct of the Iraq war only on grounds of incompetence (and for the most part only when it was clear voters were about to repudiate the war).
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