The Competition: Bruce Kovner

Since I'm currently shaking you all down for spare change, I was struck by "George Soros's Right-Wing Twin," a profile in New York by Philip Weiss of financier Bruce Kovner, the Chairman of the American Enterprise Institute. Kovner is #106 on the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans.

An interesting life story: Kovner grew up in an extended family that consisted mostly of Stalinists and/or gangsters, went to Harvard, became the student of the brilliant early neoconservative social scientist Edward Banfield (The Unheavenly City), who expected him to become as much of an academic star as his earlier student James Q. Wilson, but then he dropped out, drove a cab, got interested in commodity trading, made more money than God, and now spends it on the Lincoln Center and the American Enterprise Institute.

Since I'm in many ways an Old Neocon in the tradition of James Q. Wilson, Nathan Glazer, and Charles Murray, the AEI would once have been a natural place for me to turn for financial help, but my public criticism of the New Neocons of the invade-the-world-invite-the-world stripe makes it unlikely I'd be welcome there.

Weiss writes:

"Neoconservatism is a career," says Scott McConnell, editor of American Conservative. "One thing neocons have that both other factions of conservatives and liberals don't have is they can employ a lot of people. AEI provides a seat for the kind of mid-level intellectuals who can produce op-ed pieces. It's 50 to 100 people with decent prose styles, or Ph.D.'s, and they form a critical mass. They help create the reality of being the dominant strain of conservatism."

Kovner's relationship to AEI is the same as his relationship to all his causes: lordly. He plays visionary and psychiatrist to the AEI board. "He's brilliant," says Perle. "He's intellectually rigorous, balanced, and thoughtful."...

James Q. Wilson, a member of the AEI board, says that Kovner has pushed AEI to build an endowment so that scholars are more independent, so they don't have to hunt up grants for their work. Kovner?s hedge fund manages the lion's share of the group's investments, which grew from $28 million to $40 million in 2003, the latest year collected by Guidestar.org.

The article about Kovner is a fascinating portrait of how neoconservatism has changed over the decades. Kovner started out as a social scientist under Edward Banfield, working alongside James Q. Wilson, then he went into commodities trading and now he runs the Ahmed Chalabi Fanclub, as the American Enterprise Institute has sadly become.

Why? This is perhaps the greatest mystery in modern American politics -- why did the neoconservatives started out as hard-headed skeptical social scientists but then lose most of their interest in domestic issues and become obsessed with Israel, just as Israel's security was becoming ever more rock-solid as its enemies grew weaker? Why did neocons become simultaneously softheaded (as their infatuation with the convicted conman Chalabi demonstrates) and bloodthirsty (as their manuevering us into the War in Error in Iraq to put Chalabi on the throne in Baghdad shows)? Was it just Kovner who went off the rails and his money bought everybody else's acquiescence in his new obsession with invade-the-world thinking? Or was it a broader malady that seduced a few dozen inter-connected individuals?

Any clues?

Michael Brendan has more.

It is perhaps the most intriguing political development of the last fifty years. Although the neo-cons were decidedly anti-Communist when they appeared on the scene they came at a time when this was de rigeur on the right. What was so novel and brilliant about them was their vivisection of L.B.J.'s Great Society liberalism- using the tools of social science against liberalism at a time when most eggheads on the right were still talking about tradition, theology and political history (as right-wing eggheads always do).

The great untold story of the neoconservatives is how they moved from that stance of looking at domestic questions, challenging liberal pieties about race, welfare, and big government to one focused so intensely on (in Adam Wolfson's parlance) a "hard Wilsonian" foreign policy. This second movement, neo-conservatives who went from opposing revolutionary and Soviet communism (as nearly all on the American right did) to pulling the Right along in opposing "Evil" generally (see An End to Evil by David Frum and Richard Perle)

Do read the article, or have an assistant read it to you. And dream like I did, that rich patrons would go back to funding the politics of prudence, cultivation and real conservatism.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer