Cold war liberalism’s multilateralism was a secondary feature of an approach defined more fundamentally by its Manicheanism. Its theoretical foundation relied in great part on the concept of “totalitarianism,” which elided the distinction between communism and fascism and could be taken to justify nearly any form of power politics on moral grounds. If the need to defeat the Axis had authorized Dresden and Hiroshima, as most cold warriors generally agreed that it had, then what could the threat of communism not justify? The result was that the Wilsonian imperative to make the world safe for democracy did not necessarily entail making the world safe through democracy, as demonstrated by the US-backed decapitation of democratic regimes in Guatemala, Iran, Chile, and elsewhere.

The Manichean impulse was neoconservatism’s most important inheritance from the cold war. Totalitarianism, with its rigid dualism, remained the central concept: each enemy a Hitler, each compromise a Munich, the only models Churchill and Chamberlain. Neoconservatism has no aversion to realpolitik, contrary to what is sometimes said, but it does conceive of the enemy in starkly different terms than the conservative realist. For the realist, interests are finite and enemies rational, and the most attractive possibility in such a world is often to strike a deal. For the neoconservatives, however, the enemy is always totalitarian, and any compromise can only offer temporary respite before a final confrontation. The need to defeat the enemy is not merely a pragmatic imperative, but a moral one; not only is the national interest at stake, but the fate of the entire free world. Every mission is messianiac; every struggle is millennial. Norman Podhoretz split the last seventy-five years of global history into World War II (the struggle against fascism), World War III (the struggle against communism), and the ongoing World War IV (the struggle against “Islamofascism”); this periodization veered close to self-parody, but it captured the essence of the neocon Weltanschauung.

Thus it was in response to Henry Kissinger’s pursuit of detente that the original neoconservative hawks clustered around Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson mobilized to fight even the slightest intimation of compromise. More recently, Robert Kagan, the smartest and most systematic thinker of the younger generation of neoconservatives, has attempted to resuscitate a kind of great power politics built around the idea of an overriding conflict between the democratic and non-democratic worlds—most imminently, between the US on one hand and China and Russia on the other. Yet as Francis Fukuyama (himself a recovering neocon) has pointed out, any traditional notion of great power politics is fundamentally alien to the neoconservative sensibility, since the great power vision posits a rational enemy with whom it is possible to do business. It is precisely because of the need for a totalitarian adversary that neoconservatives and their allies among the liberal hawks have been so insistent on the strained portmanteau of “Islamofascism” in the post-September 11 era, aiming to shoehorn the war on terror into the conceptual framework of the struggles against fascism and communism. Without such an adversary, it becomes much harder to square the circle between ruthless means and moralized ends.

What about democracy? As with other elements of the neoconservative mythology, the image of neocons as ardent Wilsonian democracy promoters has been propagated by both supporters and opponents. If neoconservatives have claimed the mantle of “democracy” in order to portray themselves as idealistic do-gooders, their critics have often been happy to cede the point in order to convict the neocons of naivete—which seems to be considered the only unforgivable sin in Washington foreign policy circles. Critics of the Iraq war, in particular, were often reluctant to couch their opposition in explicitly moral terms for fear of appearing soft-headed or otherwise unserious. It seemed far more adult and politically palatable to suggest that the war was foolish than to suggest that it was wrong; in this way, the neocons’ opponents frequently colluded in portraying them as Wilsonian utopians in order to claim the mantle of hard-headed anti-utopianism for themselves.

In fact, there is little to suggest that democracy promotion has ever been at the heart of neooconservatism. The movement’s early programmatic statement, Jeane Kirkpatrick’s 1979 Commentary essay “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” was a call for defending friendly dictators against left-wing popular movements, a course that set the tone for neoconservative foreign policy through the end of the cold war. Once again the theoretical backbone of the argument was furnished by the totalitarian-authoritarian distinction; in practice, Kirkpatrick’s scheme largely collapsed into the distinction between unfriendly left-wing regimes, democratically elected or not, and friendly right-wing ones, no matter how brutal. In recent years democracy promotion has become a more explicit part of the neoconservative program, but one need only look at the Bush Administration’s handling of Egypt and Palestine to see how quickly democratic processes have been scuttled when they have threatened to bring undesirable parties into power.

But check out the whole thing. And, if you can afford it, buy a copy of the magazine.

It is not always a good thing when people go to the streets; indeed the history of revolutionary action shows that people go to the streets to shed blood more often than they do to demand democratic reforms. Perhaps it is an appetite for activist politics that explains why so many Western observers are now captured by the moment. Otherwise, it would be hard to explain why it seems as if no one had learned from the failures of the Bush administration’s freedom agenda—namely the Palestinian Authority elections that empowered Hamas—or could remember its successes.

(Smith, who has seemingly never met an orientalist cliche he doesn’t like, also explains Mubarak’s actions by informing us that “[t]he test of an Arab dictator is not the virtue of his rule, but the length of it, and to be followed by his progeny extends his name further into the future.” The fact that nepotism and dynastic succession are not phenomena exclusive to the Arab world, and that authoritarian rulers in general typically like to hang on to their power, seems not to have occurred to him.)

The Washington Post editorial page has for some time now been issuing noble-sounding calls for democratic elections in Egypt that have pointedly refused to suggest that the country’s largest opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood, should be allowed to participate. This is in line with a general axiom of neocon policy-making in the Middle East, namely that democracy promotion is desirable if and only if it brings to power parties that are acceptable to Israel. So it is no surprise that the Post has issued a rather equivocating editorial on the current protests that closes by suggesting merely that “Ms. Clinton and Mr. Obama need to begin talking about how [the Mubarak government] must change.” Similarly, National Review cautions that “Mubarak Should Go – But Not Yet,” and warns that the US “shouldn’t fool ourselves about our ability to influence events on the ground.”

As it happens, I don’t think all of this is bad advice. It’s true that the US shouldn’t overestimate its ability to influence (much less control) popular uprisings in other countries; similarly, we should be hesitant in rushing to publicly brand such protest movements with an American seal of approval — not least because such a seal of approval can be far from helpful to the protesters themselves. Yet the contrast with what these same commentators were saying during the 2009 Iranian election crisis, for instance, is remarkable. Then, they excoriated the Obama administration for taking roughly the same approach that they are advocating now — despite the fact that the US’s patronage of Mubarak gives it a much greater ability to influence the situation in Egypt than in Iran.

As Ross suggests, this combination of outright silence and incoherent messaging probably reflects confusion in the neocon camp as to what the party line should be going forward. However, I think we can all predict what will happen once the dust settles. If the protests are ultimately unsuccessful, the neocons will attack Obama for letting the protesters twist in the wind; if the protests are ultimately successful, they will claim the events in Egypt as vindication for the Bush democracy promotion agenda (as Jennifer Rubin has already tried to do with Tunisia).

When the Post hired former Bush speechwriter and torture enthusiast Marc Thiessen as an opinion columnist, I encountered widespread disgust and some outrage among the people I talked to about the hire. Reaction to the Rubin hire, by contrast, has largely consisted of amusement and incredulous smirks. “What was Fred Hiatt thinking?” has been the question most frequently asked asked about the Post‘s hawkish editorial page chief. While the Post op-ed page still features some smart right-of-center commentary from Charles Krauthammer and George Will, Hiatt has also brought on board a number of party-line hacks like Thiessen, Bill Kristol, Michael Gerson, and now Rubin. The fact that Rubin is intended as a counterpart to Sargent is also revealing about the way that “balance” is understood in the mainstream media. Sargent certainly leans liberal, but he is also a very good reporter who breaks stories and is willing to criticize the Democrats; Rubin, by contrast, has no real experience as a reporter (as opposed to commentator) and has never met a Republican or Likud talking point she didn’t like.

The dominant feature of Rubin’s politics, of course, is her ultra-hawkish Greater Israel Zionism. She is adamantly opposed to any Israeli territorial concessions, which explains her great affection for John Hagee’s Christian Zionists, who believe that Israeli control of the entire Holy Land is necessary in order to precipitate the Rapture. While she is quick to accuse Israel’s critics of anti-Semitism, Rubin is not so fond of actually existing American Jews, whom she views as unpatriotic and insufficiently supportive of Israel.

These aspects of Rubin’s thought came to a head in her Commentary piece “Why the Jews Hate Palin,” which was almost universally denounced across the political spectrum for sloppy argumentation and trafficking in anti-Semitic stereotypes. (To briefly summarize Rubin’s arguments, The Jews hate Palin because they are a bunch of effete, overeducated, rootless cosmopolitans, averse to manual labor and military service, who therefore despise Real Americans like Palin.) “In a strikingly unified response from liberals as well as conservatives,” the Atlantic noted in a rundown of the various demolitions of Rubin’s piece, “most commentators are trashing the piece as illogical, poorly-argued, and anti-Semitic.”

Along with Israel, Rubin’s abiding passion is her hatred of Obama, whose “sympathies for the Muslim World,” she argues, “take precedence over those, such as they are, for his fellow citizens.” Ever since Obama came to prominence, she has spent several posts a day prophesying impending doom for his political fortunes. I actually came to enjoy reading her analysis during the 2008 presidential campaign — every time the McCain-Palin campaign hit another pothole, Rubin would invariably come forward with a strained explanation for why this was only an insignificant setback, and the collapse of the Obama campaign was surely right around the corner. (Like Bill Kristol, I’ve often thought that Rubin would have made an excellent Soviet agitprop officer.) Of course, in recent months Obama’s popularity has indeed sagged — a stopped clock is right twice a day and all that. But even if Obama recovers and successfully serves another six years in office, we can expect Rubin to use her perch at the Post to offer daily predictions of Obama’s impending collapse until the moment he leaves office in 2017.

While it is sad to see the continuing self-destruction of one of America’s great newspapers, I am curious to see how low they can go. David Broder is getting up in years and surely due to retire soon; could Pamela Geller be next in line for his job?

One figure who has received less attention is the group’s fourth principal, Rachel Abrams — wife of Elliott Abrams, daughter of Midge Decter, stepdaughter of Norman Podhoretz. This is a shame, because she is almost certainly the craziest of the lot.

I must confess that when I began reading her blog, I was primarily looking for evidence of her Revisionist Zionism. And, to be sure, such evidence is not in short supply — e.g. this poetic ode to the Israeli landscape, which concludes “I know why we cannot let go of any part of this land.” She also constantly adopts the argot of the Israeli settler movement by referring to the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria”. Her sympathy for the settlers is not terribly surprising; the only question is how much it is shared by her husband, who as the Bush administration’s top Middle East advisor was supposedly in charge of implementing a two-state solution. Certainly, Elliott Abrams’s disastrous tenure at the National Security Council raised the strong suspicion that he was doing everything he could to destroy the possibility of a viable Palestinian state, but unlike his wife he is always careful to couch his arguments in the pragmatic and bureaucratic language of Washington peace process-ese rather than the ideological language of Revisionist Zionism.

But as I continued reading Rachel Abrams’s writings, what jumped out at me was not so much her predictably crazy views about Israel, but her strange obsession with (and apparent hostility to) homosexuality. This first jumped out at me in her response to Peter Beinart’s New York Review of Books essay, a long rant in which Abrams pretends to write in Beinart’s voice. While most of her Beinart “parody” is devoted to accusations that he is insufficiently devoted to the state of Israel, a large chunk of it is spent on rather bizarre and gratuitous insinuations that Beinart is gay. Thus she has fake-Beinart complaining, about a focus group of Jewish students, that “an insufficient number were gay and too many were broads,” and espousing his support for “open debate that of course excludes those who would advance anti-feminist or anti-gay or pro-Israel argument”. (It’s striking that she equates “pro-Israel” with “anti-feminist” and “anti-gay” arguments.) Then she has fake-Beinart condemning Orthodox Jews for homophobia before defensively reasserting his own heterosexuality: “they condemn gays, though I want to reassert that I have children,” a trope that she repeats throughout the piece. One has to wonder why she is so intent to insist that Beinart is gay, as if this fact would have any relevance whatsoever to the content of his piece.

I was initially inclined to dismiss Abrams’s homophobic attack on Beinart as simply a failed and sophomoric attempt at humor, but the more of her writing I read, the more I noticed that this strange obsession with homosexuality seems to be a recurring feature of it. For instance, in a post claiming that Christopher Hitchens is “giving homosexuality a bad name,” and professing disinterest in the sexual pasts of “old Tory buggers,” Abrams writes:

Wherever one stands on the homosexuality question—I’m agnostic, or would be if the “gay community” would quit trying to shove legislation down my throat—there can be no denying bisexuality’s double betrayal—you never know, whether you’re the man of the hour or the woman, when the ground on which you’re standing is going to turn to ashes—nor any denying the self-admiring “nourishment” its promiscuous conquests afford.

I’m not entirely sure what it means to be “agnostic” about “the homosexuality question”. (Agnostic about whether it’s natural? Whether it’s moral? Whether it should be legal?) The upshot seems to be that Rachel Abrams would prefer not to think about “the homosexuality question” except that the dastardly gays and their quote-unquote community keep “trying to shove legislation down [her] throat”.

Similarly, Abrams is deeply offended by the Obama administrations’ human rights policy, but her complaint goes beyond the standard neocon one that Obama is not aggressive enough in pushing regime change against Israel’s rivals — what’s really galling is that the administration has identified LGBT rights in the U.S. as an important human rights issue. She froths that it’s Hillary “Clinton’s fawning speech in honor of ‘Pride Month,’ which she delivered the other day to members of the ‘LGBT community’ who have fanned out from the mother-ship of state, as it were…that’s the truly breathtaking expression of this perversion of a policy.” For telling this quote-unquote community such wildly controversial statements as “human rights are gay rights and gay rights are human rights,” Clinton is responsible for this “perversion” — I can’t imagine the word choice is accidental — of a policy.

I could go on. There’s her speculation, for instance, that the problems of the Afghan war originate in the rampant homosexuality of Pashtun males, which leads Abrams onto a long tangent about homosexuality among the ancient Greeks, concluding: “those ancient elitist pedophiles and narcissists, disturbingly fascinating as they are, will seem to many in our armed forces to have been people doing and suffering things that are very ‘base’ indeed.” There’s yet another rant about the Obama administration’s focus on LGBT rights, which she excoriates as an abandonment of America’s traditional “embracing of the rights of ordinary men and women,” (as opposed to perverts, presumably). There’s the way that Abrams throws a gratuitous warning about “a profitable surge in gay-couples-therapy sessions, as gay marriage, and divorce, become commonplace—nay, even humdrum” into an article on a completely unrelated topic. But you get the picture.

Conclusion: Rachel Abrams is a real piece of work, and seems pathologically incapable of hiding her obsession with (and distaste for) homosexuality. Perhaps it’s not surprising given her parents: Midge Decter was the author of the notoriously homophobic 1980 Commentary article “The Boys on the Beach,” while Norman Podhoretz’s particular brand of wounded, insecure, obviously-compensating hypermasculinity will be familiar to readers of essays like “My Negro Problem — And Ours” [PDF].

Israel’s defenders often contrast the state’s record on LGBT rights to those of many of its neighbors, and frankly this is one area where I think they have a point. Something tells me, however, that we won’t be seeing many of these arguments coming from Rachel Abrams.