Bernard-Henri Lévy on Politics à la Carte

Bernard-Henri Lévy is worth quoting from this conversation with Francis Fukuyama in The American Interest, "It Doesn't Stay in Vegas":

My greatest bone of contention with your neoconservative friends and perhaps with you, as well. I can understand how free-thinking intellectuals would line up with some aspects of a president's policy, including his international policy. Furthermore, I can understand that, not content with just offering support, they set out to shift the emphasis, inspire and prompt the policy of an administration that everything had separated them from up until then (after all, that's exactly what I did at the time of the Bosnia crisis). And I find nothing shocking—though this time it was not my personal choice—that people like Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle or Bill Kristol, who are, broadly speaking, Wilsonians—have been found for some years now treading along the lines (with regard to Iraqi issues) of the Jacksonians surrounding George W. Bush. But what I don't understand is that in the process they decided to accept everything else. What I don't understand, and what upsets me, is that just because they came together on one issue—granted, a key issue—they felt compelled to line up on every other issue and to endorse the Administration's entire agenda. What I won't accept—and what I see as a big mistake—is this way you decide, just because you agree on Bosnia, Afghanistan or Iraq, that you also have to agree with the ethos on the death penalty, on abortion, on gun control, on the neurotic fixation on gay marriage, and on all sorts of other issues. When I met Bill Kristol in Washington, I asked him: "When you go to a restaurant, do you order a dish or the whole menu?" He looked at me quizzically. Yet the problem is right there. When I go to the restaurant I choose a dish, maybe two. He takes the entire menu. And that's absurd, even dangerous, for at least three reasons.

First, it's an insult to intellectual freedom. An intellectual is someone who never puts himself or herself at someone's service. An intellectual is no one's puppet. An intellectual may join the powers that be on a specific issue, but nevertheless continues, with regard to the other issues, to defend not only his or her colors, but also the different hues of those colors.

Second, when neoconservative intellectuals took the full-package approach, they took the risk of compromising a beautiful concept we had in common, and I'm not sure in what state it will emerge from this venture. That concept is the "right to intervene" or "duty to step in." This is a key concept, a genuine enhancement of applied Western political philosophy. But to see it associated with pathetic attacks on Clinton's privacy, with absurd religious crusades or to confuse "reasons of state" with lies of state, is a sad sight. It raises fears that this cherished concept might emerge deeply corrupted and weakened from all this.

And third, by eating the entire menu, they diminish American intellectual and political life; they soften whatever sparkle, diversity, conflicting or contradictory nature it might have. Diversity will send a wake-up call on the very day when the true Bushites realize they have nothing in common with idealistic and adventurous neoconservatives and drive them out—which, in my opinion, will come soon. But for the moment, that's how the matter stands. And neoconservatism, which once invigorated the ideological debate in this country, is now rarifying and simplifying it instead.