Mugged By Nomenclature

 “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

-      Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride

A little over a week ago, National Review, disconcerted by Donald Trump’s refusal to obey the laws of political gravity, delivered a broadside against the be-coiffed would-be saviour of populist conservatism. Its “Against Trump” special issue included contributions from 22 leading conservatives – including Glenn Beck, John Podhoretz, Dana Loesch, and Bill Kristol – and a thunderous editorial that condemned Trump as ‘a philosophically unmoored political opportunist‘ and ‘a menace to American conservatism.’ Much of the commentary that followed this intervention noted NR’s historical role as the ‘great intellectual gatekeeper’ of the American right, purging those who threatened the respectability of the movement, as in the case of John Birch Society.[1]

Thirty-seven years earlier, another magazine with a respected political pedigree, disturbed by the presidential prospects of another controversial New Yorker, published a similar philippic. In that case, however, both were on the other side of the political spectrum: the magazine was The Nation and the New Yorker was Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. By 1979, Moynihan, then only two years into his first term as senator from New York, was being talked of as a possible challenger to President Jimmy Carter in the 1980 Democratic primaries. Though a freshman, Moynihan had emerged as one of President Carter’s most colourful sparring partners in the Congress, particularly on foreign policy and New York’s fiscal relationship with the federal government. ‘If there is not yet a Moynihan campaign,’ wrote Morton Kondracke in The New Republic, ‘there is a Moynihan movement and a Moynihan logic.’[2]

The Nation’s response to this was to devote an entire special issue to Moynihan, under the heading “The Conscience of a Neoconservative” (a deliberate echo of the title of Barry Goldwater’s 1960 book, generally accepted as a mission statement of the New Right). ‘Why is this man on our cover?’ asked the editorial. Because, it went on to explain, Moynihan was ‘the point man for an increasingly visible, vocal and … powerful intellectual movement: the neoconservatives, who cloak conservative conclusions in the language of liberalism.’ Contributors dissected Moynihan’s positions, and by implication the ‘neoconservative’ prospectus, on welfare, foreign affairs, race relations, and the use (or misuse) of social science in answering questions of public policy.[3]

Look, if you can find more copyright-free photographs of Moynihan, we'll stop using this one to illustrate our posts.

Around the time of the Iraq War, the word ‘neoconservative’ enjoyed a resurgence as a political epithet. Indeed, by 2007 the New York Times’ Roger Cohen, a self-identified ‘liberal hawk,’ had diagnosed the condition of ‘neoconitis’ which he claimed had become ‘as rampant as liberal-lampooning a few years back.’[4] It is certainly the case that some deployed the word ‘neocon' in a manner that recalled George Orwell’s 1946 complaint about the widespread use of ‘fascist’: “The word Fascism now has no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’.”[5] Many leftists who supported the 2003 invasion, in both the US and elsewhere, took exception to being branded as ‘neoconservatives.’ In this, they trod a similar path to Pat Moynihan, who found himself struggling to shake off the label from almost the moment it entered the American political lexicon. 

The widespread use of the term ‘neoconservative’ in a US context is generally dated to a 1973 article in Dissent magazine written by the socialist writer and activist Michael Harrington.[6] In Harrington’s original formulation, the ‘neo-conservatives’ were liberal intellectuals who had been so disillusioned by the apparent failures of the War on Poverty that they had embraced the conservative critiques of social welfare programmes as dependency-fostering. The modern understanding of the label gives far greater prominence to foreign policy concerns: ‘neoconservative’ is usually taken to denote one who supports overseas military adventurism in the service of the US national interest and the promotion of democracy. In its original form, however, neoconservatism was understood to be as much a reaction to the perceived failures of liberal social reform as any other factor. This was expressed in Irving Kristol’s better-known description of a neoconservative as ‘a liberal who has been mugged by reality.’

Kristol was perhaps the only person to whom the label was applied who ever willingly accepted it. Moynihan, by contrast, fiercely resisted its application to him. One can certainly make a strong case to identify Moynihan as a neoconservative: a former official in the Johnson administration, he had become disenchanted with the Great Society; as UN ambassador, 1975-76, he was a pugnacious defender of American ideals and interests, winning praise from Ronald Reagan, among others; and he enjoyed close friendships with many ‘neoconservatives,’ among them Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and Midge Decter. However, these flirtations did not add up to a broader rejection of the liberal tradition to which he always felt he belonged. Moynihan may have been mugged, but reality had left him with his wallet. His papers in the Library of Congress are littered with examples of him taking issue with journalists and editors who used the word to describe his politics.

In 1979, for instance, he wrote to Peter Steinfels of Esquire magazine to object to the latter’s use of ‘neo-conservative’ in a recent article. With typical self-effacement, Moynihan explained his concern:

A good many persons of open mind and friendly mien will simply learn that the smartest people these days are something called neo-conservatives, and adapt their own disposition accordingly. Is it a service to liberalism to encourage this? … We are liberals much as John F. Kennedy was a liberal. A bit more so.[7]

In December 1981, he wrote to his friend, the publisher of the New York Times Arthur ‘Punch’ Sulzberger to suggest that ‘insofar as a neoconservative is a liberal who votes for the defense budget’ the Times could perhaps refer to such legislators as ‘patriots’ instead (e.g. ‘Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a member of the patriotic faction of his party’). Many of Moynihan’s exchanges on this subject were with Sulzberger. That his ‘hometown’ newspaper, to his mind, so casually misrepresented his political leanings was a source of particular consternation.[8] Later that same month, he was dismayed to discover that the label had gone international when Le Monde Dimanche described him as ‘champion du neoconservatisme americain.’[9]

While many neoconservatives would find a new political home in the Republican Party (Norman Podhoretz wrote later that Moynihan’s refusal to jump into the 1980 race freed him to vote for Reagan), Moynihan emerged in the early 1980s as one of the president’s most trenchant critics. He blasted Reagan for failing to get to grips with the ballooning deficit, and accused the administration of ‘purposeful[ly]’ pursuing ‘a hidden agenda’ to create a fiscal crisis that would force the retrenchment of social programs.[10]

As Greg Weiner wrote in a recent article on the same topic, many conservatives who see an ideological soulmate in Moynihan attribute his refusal to embrace neoconservatism fully to his attachment to the comforts of the Senate.[11] Chester ‘Checker’ Finn – who moved from Moynihan’s Senate staff to become an Assistant Secretary of Education in the Reagan administration – shared this belief, writing in his memoir that Moynihan ‘gradually moved leftward’ on a number of issues as he prepared for his 1982 re-election bid.[12] David Stockman, Reagan’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, inclined to the same explanation. ‘Moynihan’s got a problem,’ he told presidential aide Dick Darman. ‘He went off and got himself elected senator from New York. He just can’t get away with holding a sound view of economic policy. New York is the welfare state.’[13]

There may be some truth to the charge that Moynihan’s role as a senator from New York compelled him to moderate his iconoclasm. Perhaps his positions on welfare reform would have been different if they had been made from a Harvard office rather than the Senate floor. However, to accept this explanation as satisfactory misses something that was fundamental to Moynihan’s political identity. He always understood his own politics within a liberal Democratic tradition that stretched back through John F. Kennedy and Harry Truman to Franklin Roosevelt. Throughout his ideological evolution, he never wavered from the central tenet of twentieth century American liberalism: that, used wisely, government is an invaluable tool for the amelioration of social and economic ills. As one newspaper columnist joked at the end of his Senate career, he had been ‘born a Democrat and baptized a Catholic.’[14]

This was demonstrated in March 1981, when, with Reagan in full pomp and the Democrats in disarray, Moynihan spoke at the first Gridiron Club dinner of the new presidency. The dinner – a light-hearted, white-tie affair held annually at the Capitol Hilton in Washington, D.C. – traditionally featured a bipartisan pair of speakers delivering a humorous talk, alongside songs and sketches. Moynihan was that year’s Democratic speaker. He began by joking that Reagan was a mole planted to destroy the Republican Party from within: ‘Mr. President, you’ve been perfect, and by the time you’re through, we Democrats will be all set for yet another half century.’ The speech ended on a more serious note, with a full-throated defence of the ‘great idea’ at the heart of the Democratic tradition, ‘that an elected government can be the instrument of the common purpose of a free people; that government can embrace great causes; and do great things.’ Moynihan cast himself and his fellow Democrats as guardians of a faith whose day would come again. ‘We believe in American government and we fully expect that those who now denigrate it, and even despise it, will sooner or later find themselves turning to it in necessity, even desperation. When they do, they will find the Democratic party on hand to help.’[15]

It was rare in those months to find a Democrat prepared to make such a forthright case for government, and it was in this context that newspapers and magazines began to describe Moynihan as a ‘liberal’ again. The polarised political culture of the 1980s sharpened Moynihan’s identity as a Democrat. In October 1981, the senator from New York featured on the cover of The New Republic, smiling benignly under the headline “Pat Moynihan, Neo-Liberal.”[16] Three months earlier, he had been particularly delighted to find the New York Times referring to him as one of the ‘liberals from the Northeast’ (though the old hated soubriquet would still crop up in articles thereafter). ‘A Neo-Conservative no more!’ he exulted to Sulzberger. ‘Never underestimate the power of the Reagan administration!’[17]

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[1] For instance, Jeet Heer, “National Review Fails To Kill Its Monster,” The New Republic, January 22, 2016, <https://newrepublic.com/article/128176/national-review-fails-kill-monster>

[2] Morton Kondracke, “The Moynihan Movement,” TNR, July 22, 1978.

[3] The Nation, September 22, 1979.

[4] Roger Cohen, “The New L-Word: Neocon,” New York Times, Oct 4, 2007.

[5] George Orwell, The Penguin Essays of George Orwell (London, 1984), 359.   

[6] Michael Harrington, ‘The Welfare State and Its Neoconservative Critics’, Dissent, Autumn 1973.

[7] Steinfels article otherwise was, wrote Moynihan, ‘sensitive, informed, and, more to the point, fair.’ Letter, Daniel P. Moynihan to Peter Steinfels, February 20, 1979, Papers of Daniel P. Moynihan, Manuscript Reading Room, Library of Congress, Part II, Box 1

[8] Letter, DPM to Arthur O. Sulzberger, December 4, 1981, DPM papers, LOC, Part II, Box 4.

[9] Letter, DPM to Sulzberger, December 23, 1981, DPM papers, LOC, Part II, Box 4.

[10] DPM, “Reagan’s Bankrupt Budget,” TNR, December 31, 1983.

[11] Greg Weiner, “Moynihan and the Neocons,” National Affairs, 26, Winter 2016, <http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/moynihan-and-the-neocons>

[12] Chester E. Finn, Jr., Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik (Princeton, N.J., 2008), 92.

[13] David A. Stockman, The Triumph of Politics: How the Reagan Revolution Failed (New York, 1986), 244.

[14] Tish Durkin, “Hillary’s Got A Fella – Pat Moynihan,” New York Observer, July 12, 1999.

[15] Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Came the Revolution: Argument in the Reagan Era (San Diego, New York, and London, 1988), 5-7.

[16] Fred Barnes, “Pat Moynihan, Neoliberal,” TNR, October 21, 1981.

[17] Letter, DPM to Arthur O. Sulzberger, July 28, 1981, DPM papers, LOC, Part II, Box 3.