No less embarrassing was the sophistical David Brooks, sometimes mentioned as liberals' favorite conservative. Writing for a Yale student publication in 2002, he'd chided those who feared that "if we try to champion democracy in Iraq we will only screw it up." Two years later, as we did screw it up, Brooks was writing, "Come on people, let's get a grip." By 2006 he was urging Americans to meet "savagery" with savagery in Iraq, where insurgents "create an environment in which it is difficult to survive if you are decent." His scapegoats included supporters of Ned Lamont's Senate race in Connecticut against Joe Lieberman--nihilists who "tell themselves that their enemies are so vicious they have to be vicious too." In August, in a review for Tanenhaus of Drew Westen's The Political Brain, Brooks lampooned liberal academics as would-be coup plotters.

Paul Berman, reviewing for Tanenhaus the ex-war hawk Francis Fukuyama's second thoughts about neoconservatism, succumbed to his own obsessions with war critics. Trying to distinguish between Fukuyama's neo-Wilsonianism and his own finer visions of apocalyptic struggle, Berman became diverted by his detractors: "The Nation has become The Weekly Purge," he complained, meaning that it was holding the war's deep thinkers accountable for its costs.

Berman is now shuttling in and out of the Times Book Review and Wieseltier's literary section of The New Republic, which has become a halfway house for penitent hawks. Too full of himself for penitence, Berman devoted 28,000 words there last spring to the insidious Islamo-fascism in Western common rooms, with a snide aside about a supposed enabler, New York Review of Books contributor Ian Buruma. Berman attacked in his familiar faux-French, faux-simple style, an intellectual's equivalent of "What part of that sentence don't you understand?"

That only recalled Wieseltier's own diatribe of August 2004, in Tanenhaus's Times Book Review, against a novel by Nicholson Baker about a man who wants to kill President Bush because of the war. Wieseltier departed from the novel to excoriate liberals for demonizing Bush; he didn't mention a letter to Bush he'd signed with forty neoconservatives in 2001 urging that "the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq."

The New Republic recently published two pained elegies to American conservatism by Tanenhaus. In one, Tanenhaus insinuates himself retroactively into William F. Buckley Jr.'s early war skepticism. In another, he decides that anti-Communist crusader Whittaker Chambers escaped the "haunted air" of ideological certitude in his later years and would have dismissed Bush's Manichaean zeal "with the sly half-smile of a melancholy man who knows better."

Like other penitents, though, Tanenhaus still can't resist a little left-bashing. Quoting George Orwell's observation that English intellectuals' attraction to Stalinism "betrayed 'a secret wish...[to] usher in a hierarchical society where the intellectual can at last get his hands on the whip," Tanenhaus instructs readers that "It is no less true today. The intellectual left, most conspicuously in its Ivy League, Manhattan, and Hollywood variants, still clings to its dream of the whip handle, just as the educated right dreams of the day when the intelligentsia will be the first to feel the stinging cord." That closing gesture toward balance ("the educated right") seems only a fig leaf for a hawkish lust to catch leftists dreaming of whips.

Writers who consume themselves this way resemble George Santayana's fanatic, who redoubles his energy when he has forgotten his aim--and forgets that it is he, not his opponents, who lost the war. But to gloat would be to risk stumbling into the hawks' abyss. It would be better to urge Tanenhaus, Wieseltier et al. to rediscover Eugene V. Debs and Martin Luther King Jr., who understood that civic-republican crusades and rebellions are best when grounded in affirmations of civic trust that require a canny strength to sustain. Debs, King, Gandhi and Eastern European dissidents learned how to extend trust in ways that elicit it, even in the teeth of violent oppression. Why can't our war hawks learn it in New York and Washington?

Left and liberal wrongs acknowledged, the deeper danger now is American conservatism's inability to reconcile its keening for a sacred, ordered liberty with its obeisance to every whim of capital. Why keep blaming the consequences on enemies abroad and traitors at home or indulging a Grand Inquisitor's ritualized submission to whatever the national-security and corporate-consumer juggernauts are insinuating into our lives? Only someone denying the real dangers would give as much credibility and cachet as Tanenhaus and Wieseltier have to writers who can't stop blaming a "hate-America" left.

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