Interview with top British Neoconservative commentator Douglas Murray

In 2008, I was delighted to be presented with the chance to interview the leading British Neoconservative political commentator and author, Douglas Murray. The interview was originally published on the now defunct NeoConstant website and so I have decided to post it here on ‘Politics & Poetry’. This fascinating interview will be found no where else but here.

In the year 2000, Douglas Murray became the youngest ever published biographer with his widely acclaimed ‘Bosie: A Biography of Lord Alfred Douglas‘. However, it is probably his most recent book ‘Neoconservatism: Why We Need It‘ that has seen his reputation and popularity soar. He’s also written articles for numerous newspapers and magazines across the globe including The Sunday Times and The New York Sun whilst his lectures, broadcasts and discussions have been featured on BBC radio and television, Sky and Fox, to name just a few. He is the director of the think-tank The Centre for Social Cohesion.

Edward – Mr. Murray, first of all thank you for taking time from your busy schedule to answer some of my questions. Your time and insight are very much appreciated. I’d like this interview to focus on what Neoconservatism really is, with the hope of sparking interest in our reader’s minds to research further and perhaps indeed, purchase your book.

I personally had the great pleasure of reading your book on Neoconservatism; however for our readers who have not, would you please give a brief synopsis and your main reasons for writing the book?

Douglas Murray – Well it’s really my attempt to provide what I hope is a coherent and unified explanation of how I and other people broadly defined as ‘neoconservatives’ view the world. I give a history of neoconservatism’s origins and antecedents. Then an explanation of how this point of view moved from the academy into politics. This is really the ‘what neoconservatism is’ section.

Then in the second half of the book I try to demonstrate why the neoconservative impulse is vital at this moment in history, concluding with a kind of manifesto for British (and in the US edition American) neoconservatism. That’s the structure. But the drive of the book is really an attempt to put down a marker. Having observed the allegedly ‘anti-war’ left sink into what became in large part a pro-war, but pro-the-other-side-winning stance it seemed to me that a philosophical and practical explanation had to be attempted which identified not only the jihadist enemy, but also the disastrous relativistic bent of our time which has given that enemy some of its oxygen. Relativism has deeply damaged my own generation and greatly hindered our chances of defeating this or any future enemy.

The notion of being open to the idea that you or your society might be wrong seems to have transformed into the notion that we and our society could never be right or that anyone who assaults us must have a point. It seems to me that to deny the obvious supremacy of liberal-democratic values over the morals of, say, the Taliban, is a demonstration not of cultural generosity, but of nihilism. The book is an attempt to hit back at that, and an attempt to show that such nihilism is more than indulgent: it is suicidal.

Edward – You mention in your book that a room full of Neoconservatives would be as likely to argue amongst each other as agree, except for a few basic but important points. What are these fundamental beliefs of “Neoconservatism”?

Douglas Murray – Broadly, neoconservatives would agree on the fact that liberal, democratic values constitute the most desirable end-point of human political striving – that accountability of the government to the people is not a luxury but something to be fought for. Much of this we would share with contemporary liberals. What differentiates the neocon from the modern-day liberal is the unanimously-held neoconservative belief that force can be used for the good, and that force should be used, where appropriate, to stand up for liberal-democratic values. Many conservatives agree with the occasional necessity of the use of force, but don’t agree with neoconservatives on using force to carry out regime-change or intervene in situations where a government is abusing its people. So neoconservatives stand at a curious place in the middle of the political debate – not to the far-sides of it as is often alleged, but rather in the middle, making common cause with lots of people for often differing reasons. The term ‘muscular-liberals’ has a slightly embarrassing and self-aggrandizing quality, but it might sum up the tendency best if we agree on using the term ‘liberal’ in the classical sense.

Edward – Many people who claim to know what Neoconservatism is have never read the works of the German-born American political philosopher, Leo Strauss. How important is he to understanding what it means to be a Neoconservative?

Douglas Murray – Both important and not terribly important. To those of us who like to trace intellectual lineages, Strauss’ impact is fascinating. But I feel sorry for those who think that ‘Natural Right’ or ‘On Tyranny’ constitute some kind of invader’s handbook. Strauss’ writing is enormously esoteric and in my reading has very little in it which can be applied directly by those interested in governance. So on the one hand his impact is obscure. On the other, though, Strauss laid out a quite extraordinarily detailed refutation of twentieth-century relativism and his works stand like monoliths against the worst elements of contemporary philosophy. That was Strauss’ area. Strauss was a philosopher’s philosopher, not some wild Machiavellian (in the vulgar derogatory sense) interested in world domination. As I have often said, his political vision, if he had one, was simply to make the world safe. It is the ultimate expression of his Athenian pre-occupation. If people are interested in his impact then they would be best to go to his disciple (for once the term is apposite) Allen Bloom. Bloom extended the Straussian critique and made it applicable to the academy and indeed – through his teaching and writing – to Washington.

All this is fascinating to me, and I believe helps to explain how one strand of neoconservative thought found intellectual weight. But the reason I say that Strauss is also not terribly important is simply that most people who I would describe as neocon-ish have never read him and didn’t need to in order to arrive at their position. Most neocons arrive at their outlook through a process of being, as Irving Kristol famously put it, ‘mugged by reality’. This is how they will continue to emerge. Neocons will exist as long as people experience Damascene moments when they realize that liberalism as such is not enough, and that liberalism sometimes has to fight to defend itself if it is to be more than a mono-generational phenomenon. I can’t imagine today that many people will come to this point of view because they read Strauss first. For my part, I went to Strauss to find antecedents for views I already intimated.

Edward – Shadia Drury, the prominent Canadian critic of Leo Strauss, labeled the Straussian ideology as a ‘cult’ and one that needs to be exposed to the world. What are your views on her work and why do those averse to Neoconservatism constantly bring up the ‘noble lie’?

Douglas Murray – She is a ludicrous figure, hardly worth the attention. If she didn’t have a chair at a university she would be a Brian Haw-style figure, squatting on some street-corner, wearing sandwich-boards covered with conspiracy theories, selling pencils from a cup. Her fleeting popularity is merely a reminder of the desire of a sadly perennial fringe to identify cliques and cults which run world-affairs from some secret control-room. For Drury it is Straussians who do this. Others follow the Bilderberger angle. Some pursue the lizards line. What they all have in common is an inability to distinguish fact from fantasy. It’s a first attempt by inadequates to imagine how the world works – with sinister and secretive sub-groups fitting in nicely to a world-view so ludicrous that it cannot be disproved to the satisfaction of the holder. As Swift once said, it is useless to attempt to reason someone out of an attitude which they were never reasoned into.

Edward – I’m sure many readers, including myself, would like to know more about your personal political development. Are you a former “Liberal” ‘mugged by reality’ or have you always been seated in the Conservative camp?

Douglas Murray – Well it’s not easy to say. I find it much easier to analyze other peoples’ journeys than I do my own. I’ve never been a party-political man if that’s a key. I’m not tribal as it were. I’d say that I’m both a liberal and a conservative. I’d certainly identify as being on the liberal side of the spectrum in the American culture-wars (ie. pro-abortion, pro-gay-rights etc). But I’m also conservative in small ‘c’ ways. I’m in favour of a very small state, am a low-tax type etc. I suppose the key is that I want government to do very few things, and what I want it to do least is to believe that it can make many choices for me better than I could have made them for myself. However, those things that only the state can do (police, raise armies etc) I think it should be good at.

I think I was on the left for a while, and said it, as well as felt it. But it wasn’t a long-standing menage. I was very much in favour of the intervention in Kosovo whilst I was at university, and remember arguing its merits furiously to slightly bemused friends. I’m almost certain that I had a period before leaving university (and mercifully without going into print on the matter) in which I thought that the International Court and so on could answer most of our problems.

I suppose I do feel like I have been ‘mugged’. And I can identify a number of such muggings – mostly obvious. The first one was the realization that a genocide could go on in mainland Europe in the 1990s and that the world would do nothing to stop it. It was deeply shocking growing up in that period and realizing how hollow ‘never-again’ rang from then on. The inability of European countries to get to grips with the problem and the eventual saving-grace of American hard-power certainly made a great impression on me.

After that the main mugging I experienced was not so much the 9/11 attacks themselves, but the reactions of so-called liberals to those attacks – the desire to reach for justifications which were never asked for and provide excuses which were never requested. That was the period when – like a lot of the people who are now my comrades – I found myself falling out with my ‘liberal’ friends and allies. (Something I don’t mind, by the way. I’d rather not associate with apologists for clerical fascism.)

But perhaps more shocking to me, and genuinely and personally affecting were the twin-murders of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh (in 2002 and 2004 respectively) and the gradual surrender as I see it of a Dutch tolerance which I have much admired and which I think that country will lose. It is from Holland more than any other country that I learnt the sad truth that history can go backwards. Progress does not necessarily possess a pull like gravity.

Edward – You were born in 1979. Critics could be forgiven for wondering whether your relatively young years might be an indication of youthful political idealism without the weathered experience of reality that older commentators could claim to hold. Could this be true? Have you found that your age has been held against you?

Douglas Murray – Yes it has been. But what can I do about it? I’m sure if I were 80 people would find a reason to criticize me as well.

For what it’s worth, far more than the allegation of youthful idealism I am told that I am world-weary, cynical and rather more burnt than 28-year olds are meant to be. I’m certainly fairly pessimistic about certain innate characteristics of human nature which I believe have to be contained. So no, I don’t think I’ve got much of a rose-tint on my spectacles. Of course I think I’m a realist, but then everybody does. And of course on some things I am idealistic. But then what am I idealistic about?

The right of all people – irrespective of race, religion, origin, creed or sex – to have possession of, and a say in the determination of, their own lives? The fact that I hold human-rights and liberal-rights to be universal?  The fact that in a battle between a dark-ages religious barbarism and every attainment of the modern state I don’t mind saying which side I’d like to win? If these things make me an idealist then I’m not sorry to be one.

Edward – Like yourself, I have been asked about my heritage and religion when it comes to my support of Israel and certain American foreign policy. Plus there have been the slurs about ‘Jewish cabals’ at the heart of the so-called Neocon agenda. Do you think a lot of the hostility to Neoconservatism is connected to anti-Semitism?

Douglas Murray – A part of it certainly is. There are some prejudices that seem so able to transmogrify that it makes you fear that they might be perennial. If you’d told me ten years ago that we’d again hear some of the sub-Der Sturmer stuff we’ve heard played in a just slightly different key with a new twist of emphasis these last few years I don’t think I’d have believed you. But there it all is.

Mearshimer-Walt, the New Statesman covers, Independent-newspaper cartoons daily opinion-filth from the Guardian et al. And before you know it, there we are again with perfectly open explanations – in its 60th birthday year – for why the Jewish state won’t long be with us. It’s sickening, but we should call people out on it every time. Relentlessly. And pardon me if I question peoples motives by noticing that of all the injustices in the world somebody decides to single out only those actions which they believe are attributable to the one Jewish state. I know what such double-standards demonstrate. It is not equality: it is prejudice and racism.

Personally I am perfectly pleased when somebody asks if I am Jewish. Not just because I don’t think that it is an insult, but because I know how much more people give away than they mean to when they ask me the question. Many of them just can’t quite believe that anyone who isn’t Jewish would support the state of Israel’s right to exist. That’s their sickness not mine, but it’s interesting who gets more flack for their stance. What it must be like being one of these ‘critics’ of Israel, eternally filling up the acres of newspaper comments-pages with the self-pitying ‘critics of Israel are being silenced’ stuff. Do they have any idea how ridiculous they look? Or how definitively they contradict themselves every time they take to the airwaves or do a book-tour saying that nobody will listen to them. It takes a heart of stone not to laugh.

Edward – In a recent interview with historian Michael Burleigh, he said “Terrorism as a tactic is, bound to fail.” Do you agree?

Douglas Murray – No I don’t. Terrorism is bound to fail when those being subjected to the terrorism are resolute and determined. Terrorism is bound to fail when the terrorists are identified, singled out, isolated and told in no uncertain terms that if they are determined to wage war on us then we will wage it back on them – and they will be the ones who lose. But I don’t think that is happening at the moment. As Jean-Francois Revel, among others, said, liberal democracies are the first societies in human history which, when attacked, ask what they did wrong.

In Britain we have a Home Secretary who has asked us to refer to Islamist terrorism as ‘anti-Islamic’ activity. And across the Western world our leaders, political and spiritual often seem to have spent the last seven years denying the root of the problem more busily than they have been tackling it.

It took one set of bombs to change the government of Spain. When the next big attack happens here in Britain, will the British people turn on their enemies and say: that stops right now, we don’t care for any ifs or buts, that won’t happen here. Will they say that even if, as I do not think is the case, this is all caused by our foreign policy, we will not allow terrorists to dictate our foreign policy?  Or will they decide it was all our fault, that we must have ‘provoked’ them, that it would never have happened if we forced Israel to cede the West Bank or Spain to give its bottom-half away or France to reverse the headscarf ban?  I’m not confident that I know which way we would go.  Terrorists fail when they try lacerating a society which is tough and resolute. But what about when they attack societies so riven with relativism that they’re willing to out-source their self-harm? That’s what worries me most. But it’s something we can sort out. It’s easier to cure ourselves than to get rid of the enemy. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do both.

Edward – Finally, what does the future hold for neoconservatism in both America and Britain?

Douglas Murray – For left and right, neoconservatism has laid down the case which needs answering. Ideologically it has few competitors and there is no school that unifies people from such a wide range of the political spectrum. That said, we might have to avoid flaunting the term around for a while. There’s no doubt that the willful misrepresentations and misunderstanding of what neoconservatism is, as well as the desire to pin the strategic mistakes made in Iraq on the neocons have combined to blacken the term. But it doesn’t really matter what we call it. There’s never much point in arguing over nomenclature. What matters is that the case for democracy and universal rights as well as the refutation of the lies and misunderstandings of our enemies – at home and broad – continues. Most people who engage in this will not call themselves neoconservatives. Many of them will not realize that is what they are. That is fine. What matters is that the case is made – unashamedly, unapologetically and by as many people as possible.

Edward – Douglas Murray, your expertise is much appreciated. Thank you.

See also: Douglas Murray’s website

Tagged as: Douglas Murray, Interview, Israel, Neoconservative, Politics, Strauss, Terrorism