Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics (17 page)

Jonah, agent fatale Lucianne Goldberg’s 29-year-old son, entered the national stage when he listened to the Linda Tripp tapes with his mom….

From an early age, his mother, who has acknowledged being an undercover Republican political operative during the McGovern campaign, exposed her son to feisty right-wing hi-jinks—and instilled in him a strong sense of family loyalty and affection. Indeed, Goldberg says he first entered the media fray “to defend my mom” from those who deemed her the money-grubbing Wicked Witch of the Upper West Side.

Of course, like all right-wing
National Review
tough guys, Jonah hates handouts; believes strongly in the glorious virtues of self-sufficiency and pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps (and, apparently, by one’s unsevered umbilical cord); demands meritocratic policies; and is teeming with stiff-spined courage. These are the kind of people who hate affirmative action because of how unfair it is, but who thrive on legacy admissions to college and have their mommies and daddies secure them jobs and careers.

Our coddled, cowardly warriors on the Right (with an eager assist from their media enablers) have made masculinity and Tough Guy iconography a central part of their political identity. Here, as but one of countless examples of this core adherence to faux masculinity, is Jonah Goldberg’s revealing explanation in October 2003 of his support of the war on Iraq. It is a perverse little exercise that is emblematic of the war-seeking cheerleaders of the Right:

Q:
If you’re a new sheriff in a really bad town, what’s one of the smartest things you can do?

A:
Smack the stuffing out of the nearest, biggest bad guy you can.

Q:
If you’re a new inmate in a rough prison, what’s one of the smartest things you can do?

A:
Pick a fight with the biggest, meanest cat you can—but make sure you can win.

Q:
If you’re a kid and you’ve had enough of the school bullies pants-ing you in the cafeteria, what’s one of the smartest things you can do?

A:
Punch one of them in the nose as hard as you can and then stand your ground.

Goldberg then approvingly quoted fellow neoconservative war cheerleader Michael Ledeen as follows:

Well, I’ve long been an admirer of, if not a full-fledged subscriber to, what I call the “Ledeen Doctrine.” I’m not sure my friend Michael Ledeen will thank me for ascribing authorship to him and he may have only been semi-serious when he crafted it, but here is the bedrock tenet of the Ledeen Doctrine in more or less his own words:
“Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.”
That’s at least how I remember Michael phrasing it at a speech at the American Enterprise Institute about a decade ago.

Seriously ponder the level of obscenely demented thinking here. Men who have never been near war, who have done everything possible to avoid it, whose lives have been protected and built from the start by their moms and dads to whom they tightly cling, relentlessly urge dropping bombs on other countries and sending their fellow citizens to war so that they can parade around as paragons of strength.

These Faux Tough Guy themes are also unceasingly deployed to demonize liberals and Democrats as cowards and perverts. Behold the chest-beating derision spewed by Goldberg for those who oppose the wars he cheers on:

I know—from painful experience—that there are lots of people out there who subscribe to the bumper-sticker slogan “peace through strength is like virginity through f**king”…
If peace cannot be attained through strength, I invite one of these bespectacled, purse-carrying, rice-paper-skinned sandalistas to walk out into a prison yard.
Let’s see how receptive Tiny and Mad Dog are to entreaties over the futility of violence. “Sir, there’s no need for fisticuffs, I would be glad to share my Snapple with you. Can’t you see this sort of conflict is precisely what the multinational corporations want?”

International relations is much more like a prison yard than like a college seminar at Brown.

Those who are opposed to sending off their fellow citizens to die in one war after another are, in this deranged calculation, “bespectacled, purse-carrying, rice-paper-skinned sandalistas”—in contrast, of course, to the swaggering warrior Goldberg, whose snide, derogatory descriptions of anti-war activists as being “bespectacled”—not to mention bereft of any masculine warrior virtues—rather plainly apply to himself:

Yet Goldberg believes himself to be immune from the accompanying mockery—and even has the audacity to run around talking as though he’s George Patton—all because he types from his house about how great wars are and about how “we” (meaning others) must “punch one of them in the nose as hard as you can and then stand your ground” and insists that “the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.”

War cheerleading is the hallmark of these right-wing tough guys. And indeed, when asked why, despite being of prime fighting age, he never bothered to enlist during the Iraq War, which he claimed to find so important, Goldberg replied,

As for why my sorry a** isn’t in the kill zone, lots of people think this is a searingly pertinent question. No answer I could give—I’m 35 years old, my family couldn’t afford the lost income, I have a baby daughter, my a** is, er, sorry, are a few—ever seem to suffice.

In other words: I am a full-throated Supporter of the Epic War of Civilizations, but I can’t fight in it, because my knee hurts and I need to collect advance checks from Regnery for my books and I want to stay at home and wipe dribble from my baby’s chin. But those people over there can and should fight. And in between watching
Star Trek
on television and playing war video games, I will periodically draft articles and posts about how great these wars are and I, too, will therefore be strong and noble, resolute and brave.

Giuliani supporter John Podhoretz of
National Review
and the
New York Post
has trod a life path similar to Goldberg’s. He is a reduced version of his father, Norman, and of his mother, Midge Decter—two of the most deeply revered neoconservative figures. In October 2007, it was announced that John had been named editor of
Commentary,
the pro-war neoconservative magazine his father founded and edited for many years.

John Podhoretz’s entire career as a tough-guy pundit follows loyally in the path laid out for him by his mommy and daddy. Podhoretz’s mother, Midge Decter, previously worked at
Commentary
and has written a whole slew of neoconservative screeds, including
The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women’s Liberation
and the satire-proof
Donald Rumsfeld: A Personal Portrait—
which, for oozing iconic worship, competes only with her son John’s
Bush Country: How George W. Bush Became the First Great Leader of the 21st Century—While Driving Liberals Insane.

And the nepotistic nurturing of the Podhoretz family extends out beyond its immediate sphere. White House neoconservative (and Iran-Contra convict) Elliott Abrams married Decter’s daughter (from her first marriage), and one of his first key jobs in the neoconservative movement was being chosen by Norman to write for
Commentary
(Abrams was also a major contributor to Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan’s PNAC).

At the end of 2007, the
New York Times
announced that it had hired Bill Kristol as its new Op-Ed columnist. That announcement provoked widespread bewilderment, given Kristol’s lengthy history of pronouncements that were as false as they were banal, as well as his previous vicious attacks on that newspaper. But the process by which Kristol secured his new position was no mystery. Bill’s father, Irv, was an old friend of longtime
Times
editor Abe Rosenthal, whose son, Andy, has now succeeded him in that position. Abe was appointed to his position by then-publisher Arthur “Punch” Sulzberger, and Andy was appointed by Punch’s son, current publisher “Pinch” Sulzberger. Bill, son of Irv, and Andy, son of Abe, became good friends, just like their dads, and it was Abe’s son (Andy) along with Punch’s son (Pinch) who together chose Irv’s son (Bill) as the new
Times
columnist.

In one sense, this intellectual and career incest reflects a broader and rather damaging aristocratization of our political process. The Bush family photo includes our current President, his brother, the governor of one of our largest states, their father the former President who, in turn, is the son of a former senator. And that clan continuously uses its political power to propagate itself, exploiting its vast power network to strengthen the careers and wealth of its family members while continuously breeding new heirs to the throne.

It is true that neoconservatives and Republicans do not have a monopoly on the political exploitation of family connections. The Kennedys still pervade the political system at all elected levels, and the political careers of Jesse Jackson Jr., Andrew Cuomo, Bill Daley, Senator Bill Casey, Al Gore, and Harold Ford Jr.—to name just a few—clearly benefited from the political accomplishments of their fathers. And Hillary Clinton’s status as a leading presidential candidate was derivative, first and foremost, of the fact that she is married to a former president.

But the warmongering neoconservative dependence on parents goes beyond mere exploitation of family ties for political career gain. Many leading neoconservatives end up following in their parents’ footsteps—remaining attached to them and becoming carbon copies of them—to an extent that is quite unusual and clearly significant. As a phenomenon, an entire highly influential political movement being so dependent on their parents for their careers and worldview seems, at the very least, to merit some commentary.

Separation from one’s parents is a basic rite of passage in becoming an adult. In that regard, rebellion against one’s parents is—to invoke an emerging cliché—a feature, not a bug, of adolescence. Repudiating parental control and finding one’s own way in life is a critical part of becoming a fully formed adult, and so is an effort to have accomplishments exist independently of Mommy and Daddy. Individuals who travel the exact same career path as their parents, fueled by their parents’ friends and accomplishments, and who recite their parents’ political views almost uniformly, are people who seem to be reliant on their parents in the extreme.

Rebellion for its own sake—against one’s parents or anything else—is adolescent in nature, and is just as mindless as remaining slavishly attached to one’s parents. And all of these dynamics exist as generalities with all sorts of exceptions. But in general, choosing to live in the shadows of one’s parents—where one copies their path and is shaped and molded by them—would seem to create a very stunted and coddled personality.

Many, perhaps most, of the leading neoconservatives don’t seem to have arrived at their political worldview through much intellectual struggle or independence, nor do they seem to have had to make their own way in building their careers. Quite the opposite—they seem to have been bred into their lives, and they just marched, like good little boys, along with their parents’ views and plans for them. And they not only willingly accepted, but seem to have eagerly sought, assistance from their parents in building their careers, in exchange for embracing their parents’ views almost without deviation.

It’s rather ironic (and almost certainly not coincidental) that these same neoconservatives strut around spewing tough-guy warrior rhetoric and sermonizing on the virtues of self-reliance even though they have chosen extremely coddled, privileged lives feeding off the accomplishments and directives of their mothers and fathers. And quite significantly, the political leader they found to represent their belief system, to personify their contrived warrior pose, and to implement their radical agenda—George W. Bush—is as extreme a version of the coddled and father-dependent personality as one could hope to find.

It is glaringly apparent that the twisted and bloodthirsty tenets of neoconservatism that are dominating our country—this insatiable craving for military domination that is as endless as it is pointless, along with the corresponding, equally insatiable desire to expand presidential power—are not rooted in some coherent geopolitical doctrine so much as they are rooted in rotted personality disorders. These neoconservative phenomena are more psychological than political.