The neocondition

Explications of neoconservatism (most of them scathingly critical) continue to accumulate. Jacob Heilbrunn's contribution to this genre distinguishes itself from the rest -- or at least tries to -- by exploring in detail "the mental world" that neoconservatives inhabit. The principal result of that exploration is to expose the intellectual pretensions of that world's inhabitants. When it comes to ideas, the neocon legacy promises to be thin, derivative and largely pernicious.

In "They Knew They Were Right," Heilbrunn, a Washington-based journalist who was formerly a senior editor at the New Republic and later an editorial writer for the Los Angeles Times, provides a succinct but comprehensive neoconservative genealogy. Beginning his account in the 1930s, he surveys the people, publications and events that have combined in the present-day to give us the Weekly Standard, the American Enterprise Institute and various talking heads on Fox News, along with the Bush Doctrine of preventive war and the debacle of Iraq.

Along the way, Heilbrunn rousts all the usual suspects -- the Trotskyist Max Shachtman, the political theorist Leo Strauss, the nuclear strategist Albert Wohlstetter, the cultural critic Allan Bloom and the militantly anti-communist Democratic "senator from Boeing," Henry "Scoop" Jackson -- and he recounts the contribution each made in shaping today's neoconservative worldview. Heilbrunn devotes particular attention to political journalists Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, who over the course of very long careers have never ceased to write, to organize and to agitate. Absent Kristol's considerable entrepreneurial talents and Podhoretz's flair as a polemicist, neoconservatism as we know it would not exist.

Little in this survey qualifies as genuinely new. The book is not deeply researched. Heilbrunn makes no great discoveries and drops no bombshells, although his contention that "neoconservatism is in a decisive respect a Jewish phenomenon" will likely raise hackles in some quarters. To describe neoconservatism as "ineluctably Jewish," he insists, "is anything but an anti-Semitic canard." Fair-minded readers are unlikely to dispute his judgment.

Beyond emphasizing neoconservatism's Jewish roots -- hardly a revelation -- three broadly unflattering impressions emerge from Heilbrunn's narrative.