Thursday, December 21, 2006

On phony ex-leftists

I posted a retraction, yesterday, correcting a recent Brainiac post of mine in which I'd too hastily described Habermas, Arendt, Berlin, and Popper as "the heroes of American neocons," a characterization that is somewhere between imprecise and incorrect, as Danny Postel pointed out to me.

Now a mutual acquaintance of ours, Scott McLemee, who writes the Intellectual Affairs column for Inside Higher Ed, and who has been mentioned more than once on Brainiac, emails to voice his support for Postel's argument. (NB: When we launched Ideas in September of 2002, if memory serves, McLemee and Postel were still colleagues at the Chronicle of Higher Ed.)

Among other things, McLemee has this to say about my misstatement:

One problem is that the term "neoconservative" now has very little historical specificity. Almost nobody going by the label now ever had any relationship at all to [Partisan Review] -- and the oft-repeated claim that neocon foreign policy is somehow related to Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution is a matter of high-sounding but pluperfect ignorance. (I have yet to meet anyone making this claim who had any idea whatsoever what that theory was.)

That's good material, but his next graf is even better:

The belief that the faction now known as the neoconservatives has some deep continuity with the old New York intellectual left has become a kind of urban legend. For every Gertrude Himmelfarb who spent a little while in the Young People's Socialist League (Fourth International), there are two dozen guys like a certain third-tier neocon functionary I met here in Washington a few years ago who turned one visit to the meeting of a very mildly reformist campus organization into a marketable story about My Disillusionment With the Far Left.

There's a novel of ideas in here somewhere, don't you think?

Posted by Joshua Glenn at 02:06 PM

Print | E-mail to a friend | Permalink | Subscribe via rss