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By Root 1788 0

to conclusions too hastily. The “cyber-cons” that attended the Texas meeting are not starry-eyed utopians, who think that the Internet will magically rid the world of dictators. On the contrary, they eagerly acknowledge—much more so than the liberals in the Obama administration—that authoritarian governments are also active on the Internet. “Democracy is not just a tweet away,” writes Jeffrey Gedmin, the president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and another high-profile attendee at the event (a Bush appointee, he enjoys stellar conservative credentials, including a senior position at the American Enterprise Institute). That the cyber-cons happen to believe in the power of bloggers to topple those governments is not a sign of cyber-utopianism; rather it’s the result of the general neoconservative outlook on how authoritarian societies function and on the role that dissidents—both online and offline varieties—play in transforming them. Granted, shades of utopianism are easily discernible in their vision, but this is not utopianism about technology; this is utopianism about politics in general.

The Iraqi experience may have somewhat curbed their enthusiasm, but the neoconservative belief that all societies aspire to democracy and would inevitably head in its direction—if only all the obstacles were removed—is as strong as ever. The cyber-cons may have been too slow to realize the immense potential of the Internet in accomplishing their agenda; in less than two decades it removed more such obstacles than all neocon policies combined. But now that authoritarian governments were also actively moving into this space, it was important to stop them. For most attendees at the Bush gathering, the struggle for Internet freedom was quickly emerging as the quintessential issue of the new century, the one that could help them finish the project that Ronald Reagan began in the 1980s and that Bush did his best to advance in the first decade of the new century. It seems that in the enigma of Internet freedom, neoconservatism, once widely believed to be on the wane, has found a new raison d’être—and a new lease on life to go along with it.

Few exemplify the complex intellectual connections between Cold War history, neoconservatism, and the brave new world of Internet freedom better than Mark Palmer. Cofounder of the National Endowment for Democracy, the Congress-funded leading democracy-promoting organization in the world, Palmer served as Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to Hungary during the last years of communism. He is thus well-informed about the struggles of the Eastern European dissidents; he is equally knowledgeable about the ways in which the West nurtured them, for a lot of that support passed through the U.S. embassy. Today Palmer, a member of the uber-hawkish Committee on the Present Danger, has emerged as a leading advocate of Internet freedom, mostly on behalf of Falun Gong, a persecuted spiritual group from China, which is one of the most important behind-the-scenes players in the burgeoning industry of Internet freedom. Falun Gong runs several websites that were banned once the group fell out with the Chinese government in 1999. Hence its practitioners have built an impressive fleet of technologies to bypass China’s numerous firewalls, making the banned sites accessible from within the country. Palmer has penned passionate pleas—including congressional testimonies—demanding that the U.S. government allocate more funding to Falun Gong’s sprawling technology operation to boost their capacity and make their technology available in other repressive countries. (The U.S. State Department turned down at least one such request, but then in May 2010, under growing pressure from Falun Gong’s numerous supporters, including conservative outfits like the Hudson Institute and the editorial pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, it relented, granting $1.5 million to the group.)

Palmer’s views about the promise of the Internet epitomize the cyber-con position at its hawkish extreme. In his 2003 book