"It's Splendid When the Town Whore Gets Religion and Joins the Church": The Rise of the Jewish Neoconservatives as Observed by the Paleoconservatives in the 1980s
During the Reagan administration a new group of consevative intellectuals, with deep roots in the anti-Stalinist left and Jewish New York, was gaining influence in Washington. Their ascent was observed with ill-concealed envy by older conservatives who themselves had only recently gained a foothold...
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| Published in | Shofar (West Lafayette, Ind.) Vol. 21; no. 3; pp. 83 - 98 |
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| Main Author | |
| Format | Journal Article |
| Language | English |
| Published |
West Lafayette
University of Nebraska Press
01.04.2003
Purdue University Press |
| Subjects | |
| Online Access | Get full text |
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| Abstract | During the Reagan administration a new group of consevative intellectuals, with deep roots in the anti-Stalinist left and Jewish New York, was gaining influence in Washington. Their ascent was observed with ill-concealed envy by older conservatives who themselves had only recently gained a foothold in Washington. As the marginalization of the paleoconservatives by the neoconservatives became irreversible, the paleos lashed out in rhetoric subtly laced with antisemitic stereotypes. |
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| AbstractList | During the Reagan administration a new group of consevative intellectuals,
with deep roots in the anti-Stalinist left and Jewish New York,
was gaining influence in Washington. Their ascent was observed with
ill-concealed envy by older conservatives who themselves had only recently
gained a foothold in Washington. As the marginalization of the paleocon
servatives by the neoconservatives became irreversible, the paleos lashed
out in rhetoric subtly laced with antisemitic stereotypes. Small-scale attacks by Old Right conservatives like Joseph Sobran, senior editor of National Review, on neoconservatives had been a regular feature of paleo-journalism since the beginning of the [Ronald Reagan] administration. The first all-out attack, however, was sounded by The Intercollegiate Review in its "State of Conservatism" symposium in the spring of 1986. In his introduction Gregory Wolfe announced that "distinguished conservative scholars," by which he meant men who valued "order and organic community, class and natural aristocracy," who regarded "Christian belief as the foundation of morality and law,"(27) were dismayed at seeing conservatism in America, "the only force competent to articulate the first principles which are the prerequisite for any genuine social and political reform," suffer from "attenuation," "apostasy," and a "sense of malaise."(28) He cited four reasons for the paleos' despair: the emergence of the neocons as a result of the radicalization of the 1960s; the rise of the populist and evangelical New Right as a result of society's accelerating moral decay; the attraction of "pragmatists and camp followers to the seats of power and privilege" in the wake of "conservative successes at the polls" (IR 4); and the "liberal-dominated" media's pigheaded view that their "first cousins," the neoconservatives, who like old liberals continued to be plagued by utopian schemes, were the real conservative opposition, thus ignoring the paleos and defining them "out of existence" (IR 4). With neocons, New Righters, opportunists, and media liberals encroaching on paleo territory, the Old Right felt it had much to complain about. The target here is neither the New Right nor the media, but the neoconservatives, many of whom were descendents of Jews from Eastern Europe who had arrived in one of the massive immigration waves at the turn of the century. Although [Clyde Wilson]'s metaphor alludes to the desertion of their left-liberal positions during the 1960s, his metaphor also encodes the neocons' immigrant history as observed by an old-stock American, who in the 1920s would have perceived the arriving Jews as "herds" of Yiddish-speaking "refugees" fleeing from the "offensives" of mob violence in Tsarist Russia. Their efforts at assimilation, such as learning the language of their new country, are, of course, deceptive, since a leopard cannot change its spots. Just as their forebears may soon have acquired a Yiddish-accented English but retained their Jewish mindset, so the neoconservatives may now sound like conservatives but continue to maintain not only their liberal convictions but also their aggravating style of hairsplitting ideological combat. At the beginning of the century Eastern European Jews were considered unassimilable; similarly, Wilson considers the neocons essentially unchanged liberals and thus calls them "impostors" attempting to usurp his inheritance. In a subsequent paragraph, he takes the idea of the impostor a step further. Referring to the Civil War, when a captured Confederate soldier who preferred service in the Union army to languishing in jail was called a "galvanized Yankee," Wilson calls the neocons "galvanized conservatives." To a Southerner a "galvanized Yankee" is a traitor. And one of the stereotypes that attaches to Jews and looms behind the "galvanized Yankee" is that of men whose loyalty is dictated by opportunity and who will betray their liege or fatherland at the drop of a dime. Repercussions of the stereotype can be heard, when Wilson writes: "[T]he Old Guard cannot help but catch on the wind from the Potomac a faint but unmistakable odor of opportunistic betrayal" (IR 7). During the Reagan administration a new group of consevative intellectuals, with deep roots in the anti-Stalinist left and Jewish New York, was gaining influence in Washington. Their ascent was observed with ill-concealed envy by older conservatives who themselves had only recently gained a foothold in Washington. As the marginalization of the paleoconservatives by the neoconservatives became irreversible, the paleos lashed out in rhetoric subtly laced with antisemitic stereotypes. |
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| Author | Klingenstein, Susanne |
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| Copyright | 2003 Purdue University Copyright © 2003 Purdue University. Copyright Purdue Univ, Jewish Studies Program Spring 2003 |
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| DOI | 10.1353/sho.2003.0021 |
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| Snippet | During the Reagan administration a new group of consevative intellectuals, with deep roots in the anti-Stalinist left and Jewish New York, was gaining... During the Reagan administration a new group of consevative intellectuals, with deep roots in the anti-Stalinist left and Jewish New York, was gaining... Small-scale attacks by Old Right conservatives like Joseph Sobran, senior editor of National Review, on neoconservatives had been a regular feature of... |
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| SubjectTerms | Accentuation Antisemitism Armed forces Conservatism Culture English language History Ideology Immigrants Jewish people Jewish peoples Judaism Language acquisition Liberalism Metaphor Minority & ethnic groups Modernist art Neoconservatism Non-native accent Political aspects Politics Refugees Religion Social conditions & trends Stereotypes University administration War Yiddish language |
| Title | "It's Splendid When the Town Whore Gets Religion and Joins the Church": The Rise of the Jewish Neoconservatives as Observed by the Paleoconservatives in the 1980s |
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