This will be bad news for conspiracy theorists who want to believe that an insidious cabal of neo-conservatives (and you know what we mean ::nudge nudge:: ::wink wink::) have taken over the Bush administration and turned young American boys and girls into stooges for the Sharon government:
Do you ever get the sense the whole world is becoming unhinged from reality? I started feeling that way awhile ago, when I was still working for The Weekly Standard and all these articles began appearing about how Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Doug Feith, Bill Kristol and a bunch of “neoconservatives” at the magazine had taken over U.S. foreign policy.
Theories about the tightly knit neocon cabal came in waves. One day you read that neocons were pushing plans to finish off Iraq and move into Syria. Web sites appeared detailing neocon conspiracies; my favorite described a neocon outing organized by Dick Cheney to hunt for humans. The Asian press had the most lurid stories; the European press the most thorough. Every day, it seemed, Le Monde or some deep-thinking German paper would have an expose on the neocon cabal, complete with charts connecting all the conspirators.
The full-mooners fixated on a think tank called the Project for the New American Century, which has a staff of five and issues memos on foreign policy. To hear these people describe it, PNAC is sort of a Yiddish Trilateral Commission, the nexus of the sprawling neocon tentacles.
For what its worth, I think Brooks overplays his hand. Wolfowitz is a self-identified neocon who wields tremendous influence in the administration (although there are those persistent rumors that he’s on the way out). National Review is a self-identified neocon rag. But Brooks is entirely right that very often, “neoconservative” is just a code word for “Jew”.
UPDATE: Calpundit also thinks that Brooks overplayed his hand, but he goes too far the other way by denying that anti-Semitism is often coded as criticism of the neo-conservative agenda (it seems safe to assume that an article refering to a “cabal” of neoconservatives, probably means Jews).
ANOTHER UPDATE: Mickey Kaus weighs in on this issue and since I can’t figure out how his permalinks work I’m sending you to the frontpage. He also argues that it’s legitimate to categorize neoconservatives as a loosely-allied group of largely Jewish men committed to particular policy objectives, and again, that’s probably a fair characterization. The problem comes in when anti-Semitic tropes – shadowy cabals, illegitimate access to money, etc – do actual rhetorical work in constructing arguments. That is, the invokation of those tropes comes to have a persuasive function that a less embellished description of the situation might not. It’s hardly easy to pick out when that’s happening, and not every discussion of Judaism and neoconservativism will be such a situation.
However, to insist, as Kaus and Drum and Joshua Marshall do, that anti-Semitism never creeps in to discussions about neoconservativism, seems to be an overcorrection.
