The Tribute That Vice Pays to Virtue

 The most insufferable thing about neoconservatism—back in its heyday—was always its rank hypocrisy. The neoconservatives of the Bush era supported war; they supported militarism; they supported torture and surveillance and indefinite detention and other cruel abuses of executive power. But all the time, they dressed it up in sanctimony. They said: we are doing these things because we are more in favor of democracy and human rights than you are. We are doing it because we want to see liberal democracy triumph everywhere. 

In short—even when they were bombing civilians and sending people to CIA black sites—they still declared it was all in the name of universal values. (Which is why Harold Pinter ironically entitled his poem about the Bush administration's chauvinism and aggression "Democracy," for instance.)

Which was all pretty disgusting, no doubt about it. 

And yet—it has to be said—this hypocrisy was (as hypocrisy always is) at least a kind of back-handed compliment to the shared values of liberal democratic civilization. By mouthing its hollow platitudes about human rights and democracy, then—neoconservatism was at least confirming that these values were still regnant in the world. Everyone had to pay tribute to them; even if insincerely. 

This is what Isaiah Berlin observed about the postwar period in Europe too. In the wake of the fall of fascism and the bloodshed of the second world war—he wrote in a 1959 essay—there were still tyrants and authoritarians in the world. But the values of liberal democracy had achieved such universal acceptance, that even the tyrants and authoritarians now had to at least speak the language of democracy and human rights—if only out of one side of their mouth.  

"The spokesmen of despotism" in the post-war period—Berlin writes—at least "profess (it may be not always sincerely) that the brutalities and repression which they practice are designed to make these same values shine the more strongly in the new world which they are about to build. If this does not ring true, it is at any rate not cynicism but hypocrisy: an attempt to seem virtuous; a tribute to the restored prestige of humanism." 

This was the same tribute that neoconservatism in the Bush years always paid to liberal democracy. Yes, they said—we have re-introduced torture into civilized societies. Yes, we are confining people in secret prisons. Yes, we are undertaking unprovoked wars of aggression. But it's all for the sake of promoting universal values of democracy and human rights. 

Berlin contrasted this sort of hypocrisy—which at least pays tribute to virtue—with the kind of moral nihilism that prevailed before the war; and which was preached openly by many fascist and Stalinist intellectuals who derided humanism and universalism as so much useless "sentimentality." 

"[I]n the 20s and 30s of our century," Berlin writes, "[...] totalitarians of both the right and the left affected to reject humanistic values as such [...] and did not say, as they now say more and more frequently, that they were serving them better than we." 

Compared with this frank nihilism, Berlin finds the hypocrisy of the postwar order—when everyone had to at least give lip-service to humanism and universalism—to be a marked improvement. "This seems to me genuine gain," he writes, "genuine progress towards an international order, based upon a recognition that we inhabit one common moral world." 

For the same reasons, we may now have cause to regret the demise of neoconservative hypocrisy in the Republican Party. As annoying as it was—while it lasted—its rhetoric at least reflected the default hegemony of liberal democratic values. 

Now, in today's MAGA version of the GOP—we find something very different. We find an order of moral values much more similar to that of the "20s and 30s" that Berlin talked about—the one in which people do not even offer the tribute of lip service;  the one in which they reject universal values openly and proudly; and are therefore incapable of shame. 

The Trump administration, after all, still threatens to invade people. They still confine people indefinitely, without charge or due process, in offshore prisons. They still bomb people and murder them in drone strikes without legal cause. 

They have extrajudicially executed more than 80 people in the last few months alone, in drone strikes on vessels at sea. They move aircraft carriers into position to threaten Venezuela. They bombed Iranian nuclear sites—fulfilling a longstanding neoconservative wet dream. 

But when they are asked what makes them different, then, from the neoconservatives of the Bush years—whom they claim to despise—they say: we're different because we do it without hypocrisy. We don't have any pretense of a humanitarian mission. We do it without the rhetoric of democracy promotion. We are done with nation-building. We do it merely out of a narrow definition of our own national self-interest. We do it just because we want to blow things up. 

"I don’t think we’re necessarily going to ask for a declaration of war," as Trump famously said of the murderous drone strikes he is conducting against boats in the Caribbean Sea. "I think we’re just gonna kill people [...] We’re going to kill them. They’re going to be, like, dead."

And so, the new Republican Party still bombs people as much as always. They still start foreign wars and commit acts of unprovoked aggression and murder. But the key difference now is that they do it without so much as a facade of humanism. They do it in frank rejection of universal values. They do it while saying: "we believe in America First now. We don't care about what happens to other countries—those 'lesser breeds without the law'—we just care about what happens to us." 

So indeed, we may soon have good reason to miss the old hypocrisy of the Iraq war hawks, then. However unbearable and annoying it was—it at least reflected that no one at the time could escape the paradigm of democratic values and other-directed morality that prevailed throughout the world. That, surely, was "genuine progress towards an international order, based upon a recognition that we inhabit one common moral world," as Berlin put it. 

What's happening now reflects a pointed diversion away from the aspiration for an international order. It says: we do not share a common moral world with other countries or other peoples. It says: what's good for me may be bad for you; but I don't care—I'm going to do it anyway. 

We have something—then—in this administration that is more like the amoral nihilism of the 20s and 30s that Berlin described. A world where people openly boast about rejecting universalism and humanism—or any form of altruistic morality whatsoever. 

We inhabit now a world where people can't be shamed; a world in which human rights observers don't have to recover videos of the administration bombing civilians without legal justification—because the administration posts these snuff films of their own murderous handiwork on social media, for all to see. 

They boast about it: they say, yeah, we're murdering people; what of it? "I don't care what you call it"—as J.D. Vance said—after someone on social media accused his administration of committing war crimes. 

We're in a world where people say: we don't give a rat's ass about your humanism and your universal values. A world in which they say: "we only thrill to perversity, murder, suicide, rape— / bragging a little, really,"—as the bright young things put it in a poem by D.H. Lawrence. We're back in the amoral atmosphere of the 20s and 30s indeed. 

"This division of mankind into two groups," Berlin writes in the same essay: "men proper, and some other, lower, order of beings, inferior races, inferior cultures, subhuman creatures, nations or classes condemned by history—is something new in human history. It is a denial of common humanity—a premise upon which all previous humanism, religious and secular, had stood." 

MAGA is precisely such an ideology that denies even the premise of a shared humanity or of the validity of universal concern. "America First" is a statement of moral nihilism. It is a division of humanity from the outset into sheep and goats—some who will be saved, on the basis of nationality; and others who can starve or die or be blown up with bombs without their fate ever troubling our conscience. "Lesser breeds without the law." 

Yes, indeed—compared with this—neoconservatism is starting to look downright jolly. We may well have reason to regret the loss of the former GOP's old-fashioned hypocrisy. It was, if nothing else, the tribute that vice pays to virtue.