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PARTISAN REVIEW
of bureaucrats, their remoteness from popular will or legislative
control, deficiencies of decentralization. And here some of our neocon–
servative thinkers exhibit a frightening provincialism which is evident
in Nathan Glazer's litany of the difficulties with socialism, and in the
repudiation of nationalization by the democratic socialist parties of
western Europe. And it is interesting that the critique of government in
neoconservative thought in many instances takes no account of our
own political tradition.
A third theme of the neoconservatives has to do with the fear of
egalitarianism. Peter Steinfels has pointed out in his book how the
publication of John Rawls's book produced a kind of ideological St.
Vitus reaction on the part of some of our conservative thinkers . And
here a series of rather contradictory arguments again make their
appearance: in the first place, a great fear of the destruction of elites,
and indeed a threat
to
western culture. Secondly, the notion of an
enormous wave of unnatural egalitarianism, a leveling downward .
This theme coincides with the belief that the classification of people by
racial and sexual groups is bad, but the classification of people by
neighborhood groups, certain kinds of class coherence, is somehow
good .
The fourth theme is the familiar phrase about the adversary
culture, and the notion that modernism has taken to the streets. At the
same time there is in fact a very old-fashioned defense of progressivism,
of the historical value of technology, of productivity. Here neoconser–
vatives are at one with Soviet leaders, with very old-fashioned nine–
teenth-century Marxists like those to be found in the Soviet and French
communis t parties.
They also defend what cou ld be called traditional familial values
which the neoconservatives don't always practice in their own lives,
but which they think are certainly good for others. But the defense of
traditional culture, of course, comes up against the difficulty that there
is no traditional culture to defend, and that it is quite true that the
fragmentation of our kind of cultural existence, its division into
competing and fragmented class, ethnic, and regional notions , makes
the defense or the consolidation of a national community about one set
of cu ltural values exceedingly difficult and artificial.
Finally, there is the maintenance, or defense of American power in
the world, and again in the area of foreign affairs, very different themes
emerge. One is the notion of the United States as the best, or the most
important bastion of freedom in the world. This is generally accom–
panied by a systematic campaign of disparagement of the western
