Let's run over Lionel Richie with a tank...

[phamos]

Jeane Kirkpatrick died. She was a woman. She wasn't Jewish. And she thought "democracy" was sometimes overrated. And yet she was still a neocon! And a big-deal one, too. Which is why the word is so hard to pin down a lot of the time. Here's some of what I've written about Jeane Kirkpatrick in my thesis:

While the neoconservatives were disgusted by the realpolitik of Henry Kissinger and the Nixon-Ford years of detente, they were even more horrified by the human rights language of the Carter administration. In their eyes, Carter had everything perfectly backwards, coddling left-wing totalitarian governments while denouncing right-wing authoritarians who had previously been seen as vital allies in the fight against Communism. The relevant concept to the neocons was not a blanket support of democracy but a fervent anti-Communism that overrode broader human rights concerns. Jeane Kirkpatrick wrote the most famous explication of the neoconservative opposition to Carter’s foreign policy in Commentary in 1979. Her article, “Dictatorships and Double Standards”, decried the lack of support, even outright hostility, that the Carter administration showed perennial allies such as the Shah of Iran. In her eyes, equating authoritarian governments on the right with the Communist totalitarianism of such countries as Cuba was a grave error. In addition, refusing to aid the government of Nicaragua against the encroachment of the left-wing revolutionary Sandinistas represented Carter’s misunderstanding of larger issues at play. The revolutions in Nicaragua and Iran were not simply a matter of democracy, of letting the people of these countries “choose their own government,” as Kirkpatrick quotes Carter. She claimed that there were no instances “of a revolutionary ‘socialist’ or Communist society being democratized,” while “right-wing autocracies do sometimes evolve into democracies – given time, propitious economic, social and political circumstances, talented leaders, and a strong indigenous demand for representative government.” Therefore, the only way to stem the encroaching Communist tide was to support embattled right-wing regimes, as only they had the potential to, in time, follow the United States’ democratic lead.
Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign was heartening to the neoconservatives. His tough-talking rhetoric was firmly anti-Communist and anti-Soviet, a repudiation of Carter’s policies. When Reagan won the presidency, a number of neoconservatives were appointed to positions in his administration, notably Kirkpatrick as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and Elliott Abrams in a variety of positions, most notably Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs between 1982 and 1985. But despite the retroactive admiration today’s neocons profess for Reagan, the positions to which most of them were appointed had relatively low influence. They were outnumbered and outgunned by realists like Secretaries of State Al Haig and George Schultz. “The essential causes for the chasm that emerged between Reagan and the strict letter of neo-conservatism were two: the manner in which the president’s rhetoric translated into actual policy, and who the real decision makers were in the president’s defense establishment.” Even Kirkpatrick and Abrams would not have passed muster by any litmus test applied by today’s neocons. “Their objectives in putting policy on the ground were more limited than the ideals of liberation and rollback advocated in Commentary. Both shared the conviction that spreading democracy was a gradual process. As Abrams told the editor of Foreign Policy, ‘the task of believers in democracy is not to impose democracy on a world bitterly opposed to it, but rather to help fulfill the expectations that every people acknowledges for itself.’”
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[After the fall of the Iron Curtain] it was obvious that neoconservatism would have to create a new paradigm to guide their political efforts, or grow obsolete...Jeane Kirkpatrick, always wedded to the idea that democracy needed to develop slowly over time, reiterated that position in the face of a growing sentiment of democracy promotion: “While it is not the American purpose to establish ‘universal dominance,’ in the provocative formulation of Charles Krauthammer – not even the universal dominance of democracy – it is enormously desirable for the United States and others to encourage democratic institutions wherever possible…It is not within the United States’ power to democratize the world, but we can and should make clear our views about the consequences of freedom and unfreedom. We can and should encourage others to adopt democratic practices.” But as older neoconservatives such as Kirkpatrick and Kristol called for a re-evaluation of America’s national interest, the younger generation began its ascent with the first hints of an expansive view of what American foreign policy could and should be in the 1990s and beyond.

Of course, I will always fondly remember Jeane Kirkpatrick as the woman that Bill the Cat ran off with in the early 80s in Bloom County, because I was reading a lot of comic strips that went way over my head at the time. I thought jokes about Caspar Weinberger were funny because he had a goofy name! Well, honestly, that was a big part of it...