“Mugged by Reality”: The Neoconservative Turn

This chapter examines the neoconservative movement, liberal hawks who became increasingly disenchanted with the Democratic Party’s foreign policy, Great Society Program, and the cultural values of the New Left.[1] Neoconservatives favored a vigorous anti-communist and activist foreign policy, a strong relationship with Israel, and believed that the United States should be the global hegemon to establish international order. Abandoning the Democratic Party in the late 1960s and early 1970s, neoconservatives eventually joined the Republican Party and served in Republican administrations. Although influential in the foreign policy of these administrations, neoconservatives’ effectiveness was ultimately limited with the practitioners of realism emerging dominant in both the second terms of the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations. During periods when Republicans were not in the White House, neoconservatives promoted their ideas and policies through publications, think tank, and the mainstream media. It remains to be seen what role, if any, neoconservatives will play in the Trump administration.

In spite of the evolution and diversity of their ideas and policies, neoconservatives have four fundamental principles in their ideology: 1) a distrust of social engineering projects, such as the Johnson administration’s Great Society programs; 2) a defense of cultural and educational standards informed by western civilization and traditional social values; 3) a skepticism of international law and institutions to achieve security and justice; and 4) a belief that the United States should be the hegemonic power in international politics. This last principle, American predominance in global politics, later included the promotion of liberal democracy by the second generation of neoconservatives and was realized in the 2003 Iraq Invasion. Even though there have been severe setbacks in Iraq, neoconservatives today still adhere to an activist foreign policy of promoting liberal democracy.

In reviewing the origins, history, and evolution of neoconservatism, we will show the relationships among neoconservatives, liberals, the New Left, and traditional conservatives, raising the question whether neoconservatives fundamentally belong to the history of liberal or conservative thought. We also will see how neoconservatives’ views in foreign policy have changed from an activist anti-communist policy of containment to the promotion of liberal democracy. Finally, we will see the rise and fall of neoconservative’s influence in Republican administrations and the relationship between the Republican Party and the neoconservative movement.

Origins

In the mid- to late 1930s and early 1940s, a group of Jewish intellectuals at City College of New York would form the basis of the neoconservative movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s: Irving Kristol (1920-2009), Daniel Bell (1919-2011), Irving Howe (1920-1993), Seymour Martin Lipset (1922-2006), Philip Selznick (1919-2010), Nathan Glazer (1923-), and later the Catholic Daniel Patrick Moynihan.[2] This group was a combination of Trotskyites and others committed to left-wing politics who opposed Stalinist communism. The disillusionment of the brutality of Stalinist communist regime, which had undermined communism’s idealist goals, made this group anti-communist but not for the same reasons of traditional conservatives, who had rejected communism because it was atheistic, expansionist, and anti-free market.[3] By contrast, these Jewish intellectuals sympathized with the social and economic aims of communism but acknowledged that its implementation had yielded only violence rather than communism’s stated intentions.

After the death of President Franklin Roosevelt in 1945 and the beginning of the Cold War in 1947, liberals were divided about how to preserve and continue the reforms of the New Deal: some were willing to form a coalition with communists to work for more domestic reform and an accommodation with the Soviet Union, while others supported President’s Truman’s anti-communist foreign policy.[4] The Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) was created in 1947 by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (1917-2007), Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), Humbert Humphrey (1911-78), Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962), and others to support the Truman administration. Truman’s victory in the 1948 presidential election secured the anti-communist faction’s dominance among liberals and included the group that would later be known as neoconservatives.[5] This liberal consensus, or “vital center” as named by Schlesinger, opposed communism through deterrence, favored American global engagement through multilateral alliances, and promoted economic global integration to preserve peace, security, and prosperity.[6]

The liberal consensus also sought to preserve and expand the achievements of the New Deal’s social welfare state and expand civil rights legislation with its coalition of unions, farmers, intellectuals, African-Americans, and southern whites.[7] With socialism opposed and conservatism marginalized, New Deal liberalism was the only ideology that had mainstream intellectual and electoral support.[8] Among post-war liberal academics, a new political theory emerged where interest groups and expertise triumphed over ideology and politics.[9] This theory was articulated in Bell’s The End of Ideology (1960) where the ideologies of the Enlightenment had been exhausted and discredited by the experience of Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism and the only politics remaining was one of middle-ground compromise about the welfare state and mixed economy.[10] Politics was be dictated by bureaucratic expertise, interest groups demands, and global events like the Cold War.

The New Left

The conservative movement in America began to rehabilitate itself with a body of serious thought by Russell Kirk (1919-94), William F. Buckley (1925-2008), and a group of European emigres such as Friedrich von Hayek (1899-1992), Leo Strauss (1899-1973), and Eric Voegelin (1901-85).[11] The various strands of conservative intellectual thought and political support cohered into “fusionism” where the traditional, libertarian, and anti-communist elements of the conservative movement came together.[12] Furthermore, the expansion of the New Deal into the Great Society social welfare programs, the expansion of civil rights legislation to African-Americans, and a relaxing of law enforcement on crimes provided an opportunity for conservatives to tap into working class white frustration against the federal government.[13] Although Barry Goldwater lost by a landslide in the 1964 presidential election, the groundwork for a conservative movement was established to bloom later.[14]

If the conservative movement failed to challenge the liberal consensus, then the New Left was successful. However, initially the New Left had little impact on politics and the Democratic Party. Less a set of political doctrines or policy positions, the New Left represented attitudes of feeling alienated from their social and cultural environment and impatient about the pace of gradual reform.[15] The Port Huron Statement (1962) was emblematic of early New Left with a call to awaken the social conscience of the average American and demand social welfare reforms that eventually would be realized in the Johnson administration’s Great Society programs.[16] It was only in the mid-1960s when the New Left abandoned its commitments to non-violence and rational persuasion for revolutionary violence, mass protest, and identity politics to protest the Vietnam War, racial discrimination, and the collaboration between universities and the military.[17] The liberal consensus, and the Democratic Party, collapsed into the factions of liberals, the New Left, and working-class whites.[18]

With the escalation of the Vietnam War abroad and race and student riots at home, neoconservatives were concerned about the loss of the authority of social and political institutions and the demands of the New Left, which no longer recognized the limits of pluralist democracy. As Jeane Kirkpatrick wrote “The counter-culture was much broader than the anti-war movement with which it was associated and, I believe, constituted a sweeping rejection of traditional American attitudes, values, and goals.”[19] Jewish liberals also were concerned with the New Left’s criticisms of Israel which they saw as thinly veiled anti-Semitism.[20] The result was, as Joshua Muravchik, explained, “The[New] Left drove neoconservatives out of the Democratic Party, stolen the ‘liberal’ label, and successful affixed to us the name ‘neoconservative.’”[21] By the late 1970s these New Deal liberals were being called “new conservatives” or “neoconservatives.” The term was first used by the socialist Michael Harrington to define the ideologies of Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and others and later adopted by Irving Kristol in his 1979 article entitled, “Confessions of a True, Self-Confessed Neoconservative.’”[22]

Having abandoned its universal commitments in favor of identity politics, American liberalism under the New Left was no longer able to make decisions about serving the public interest and reflecting the country’s common values.[23] Neoconservatives saw themselves as the heirs of a liberalism that was betrayed. As Tod Lindberg puts it, “what is being conserved is our liberalism”; or, as Irving Kristol characterized neoconservatism as “reformationist. It tries to ‘reach beyond’ contemporary liberalism . . . a return to the original sources of liberal vision and liberal energy so as to correct the warped version of liberalism that is today’s orthodoxy.”[24] For Kristol, neoconservatism sought to conserve society based on liberal ideals: “What is ‘neo’ (‘new’) about this conservatism is that it is resolutely free of nostalgia. It, too, claims the future.”[25] The past presidents of Coolidge, Hoover, Eisenhower are overlooked for Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan.[26]

The Public Interest

In addition to their antipathy to the New Left, neoconservatives reconsidered the social welfare reforms of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. The social disorder and urban riots of the mid- and late 1960s led to a new appreciation of the role of traditional institutions and authority in society and question the efficacy and efficiency of the government’s adoption of unproven theories and social science methods to socially engineer reforms in society. These concerns were articulated in a journal founded in 1965 by Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol called The Public Interest (1965-2005).[27] Later, other publications like Commentary (1945-) under Norman Podhoretz (1930- with editorship 1960-95) and Policy Review (1977-2013), would be academic and public venues for neoconservatives to express their ideas and policies.[28]

The Public Interest attracted academics and public intellectuals who adopted social science approaches to analyze the cause of societal problems and ills and reflected a skepticism of government intervention to solve them. James Q. Wilson (1931-2012), Glenn Loury (1948-), Charles Murray (1943-), Stephen (1934-) and Abigail (1936-) Thernstorm, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and others contributed to this journal, which laid down the intellectual foundation for neoconservative domestic policies in the 1980s and 1990s.[29] These contributors wrote how crime policy should focus on short-term symptoms rather than the underlying causes of poverty and racism (the “broken window” policy); the problems welfare policies created when they neglected the role of the family structure and social habits; and, perhaps most controversially, the negative effects of affirmative action because it stigmatized people and set up a perverse system of incentives for social advancement.

For example, Glazer’s and Moynihan’s 1963 study on ethnicity, Beyond the Melting Pot, was skeptical about the effectiveness of integrationist policies because racial prejudice was beyond the ability of the government to solve.[30] While both Glazer and Moynihan supported anti-discrimination laws, they also believed that discrimination was only one reason among many (e.g., family structure and values) that resulted in minority poverty. When the civil rights movement shifted from anti-discrimination to equality of results, neoconservatives revised their position from support to opposition.

The publication and reaction to Moynihan’s The Negro Family: A Case for National Action captured this change among neoconservatives’ views about the civil right movement.[31] The study was produced when Moynihan was Johnson’s Assistant Secretary of Labor and argued that civil rights and voting legislation was necessary but not sufficient for African-Americans to take advantage of these newly created opportunities. The structure and values of the black family, as caused by slavery, segregation, and discrimination, resulted in an absent father figure, teenage pregnancies, and juvenile delinquencies. No legislation or government program could remedy this situation.

The reaction to the report antagonized the African-American community, the civil rights movement, and the New Left because it appeared to blame African-Americans for their own situation and bolstered racist stereotypes during a time of racial unrest.[32] However, liberals, especially in the media and the universities, did not defend Moynihan from these accusations because they also feared being labeled racist and reactionary by the black militants, the civil rights movement, and the New Left. These groups had created an atmosphere of ideology rather than of thought at the universities, which James Q. Wilson describes at Harvard as:

“. . . the most serious threats to certain liberal values–the harassment of unpopular views, the use of force to prevent certain persons from speaking, the adoption of quota system either to reduce the admission of other kinds, and the politicization of the university to make it an arena for the exchange of manifestos rather than a forum for the discussion of ideas.”[33]

Neoconservatives were furious that liberals not only failed to defend Moynihan but that they had lost their nerve in defending their own liberal values, not seeing that what was being tolerated in the name of tolerance was actually undermining liberalism itself. [34]

Neoconservatives believed that individual rights were being sacrificed for group rights. By exacerbating demands for group rights rather than individual ones, the Johnson administration’s Great Society social welfare policies mobilized racial, ethnic, and social-economic groups against one another in the United States.[35] Although in the past they had supported the welfare state, neoconservatives now opposed its expansion because of its focus on groups rather than individuals as well as their costs and unlikely chance to succeed. Instead, neoconservatives wanted to improve existing programs by relocating administrative responsibility from the federal government to local authorities and the choice of individuals.[36] Neoconservatives believed that social problems could be ameliorated by government programs but these problems could never be solved. In this sense, neoconservatives accepted social and economic inequality in society and supported establishing true equality of opportunity for individuals to succeed or fail on their own.

The Democratic Party

In foreign policy neoconservatives were influenced by the writings of Reinhold Niebuhr and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., both of whom opposed communism and supported liberal democracy.[37] This consensus existed in the American foreign policy establishment from 1948 until the mid-1960s when some liberals sought to reduce American commitments overseas, particularly in the Vietnam War, for an international regime of economic interdependence and transnational law. Unlike the New Left, who opposed the Vietnam War because they believed it was a product of American imperialism, neoconservatives objected to the war because the United States made a geopolitical miscalculation about its national interest.[38] In other words, neoconservatives thought American involvement in the Vietnam War was a mistaken attempt by the United States to contain communism.

More broadly, the dispute about the Vietnam War between the New Left and neoconservatives was about the United States’ values, culture, and institutions. From the neoconservatives’ perspective, the New Left saw the United States as morally bankrupted with violence replacing civic participation and ideological purity substituting for rational discourse.[39] The failure of liberals was to understand that the dangers of the New Left would eventually lead to the collapse of American liberalism, institutions, and values. As Irving Kristol put it:

“One wonders: how can a bourgeoisie society survive in a cultural ambiance that derides every traditional bourgeoisie virtue and celebrates promiscuity, homosexuality, drugs, political terrorism–anything, in short, that is in bourgeoise eyes perverse.”[40]

Confronted with the New Left’s ideology, neoconservatives, as Norman Podhoretz recalled, began to appreciate:

“. . . the virtues of the American political system and of its economic and social underpinning. So profoundly affected were we by this new appreciation that we have been devoting ourselves ever since to defending America against the defamations of its enemies abroad and the denigrations of its critics at home. Almost every idea espoused by the neoconservatives relates back to this central impulse to defend America against the assaults of the left.”[41]

Neoconservatives wanted to make sure that the United States did not suffer, as Theodore Draper characterized, the “specter of Weimar”: the collapse of liberal society to extremist ideological movements.[42] Because they saw themselves as the true heirs of liberalism, neoconservatives struggled to maintain a role for themselves in the Democratic Party. In 1969 George McGovern and the New Left introduced new rules for the Democratic Party that gave women and ethnic and racial minorities more representation, something to which neoconservatives futilely objected because it was a form of positive discrimination against the white working class.[43] Furthermore, the neoconservatives’ support for Senator Henry M. Jackson’s (1912-83) failed bids to gain the 1972 and 1976 Democratic presidential nomination and the diminishing influence of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM) in the Democratic Party illustrated neoconservatives’ weakening power in the Party.[44] By the early 1970s, neoconservatives began to abandon their liberal credentials and the Democratic Party.

Communism

Having been “mugged by reality,” neoconservatives started a robust defense of American values, culture, and institutions and aligned themselves with the conservative movement and Republican Party.[45] In practical terms this translated into abandoning the non-partisan attitude of The Public Interest for the political ideology of “American bourgeois populism”: politics over economics, standards of excellence and virtue in culture and economics, a deference for ordinary citizens rather than intellectuals.[46] According to neoconservatives, the class of intellectuals and professionals sought social and cultural equality because they benefited from these industries and envied and despised the business class of the country. Neoconservatives consequently tried to persuade the business community of the importance of their ideas, and as a result received financial support. Organizations like the American Enterprise Institute, the Hoover Institution, and Institute for Educational Affairs were revitalized or created to promote neoconservative ideas.[47]

With the American defeat in the Vietnam War, neoconservatives became more interested in U.S. foreign policy. They supported a projection of American values, culture, and institutions abroad and rejected the New Left’s acceptance of “third-worldism” in the United Nations where the problems of the Third World were blamed on the West.[48] Neoconservatives criticized the Establishment of a New International Economic Order (1975), the Charter of Economics Rights and Duties of States (1975), and United Nation’s Resolution 3379, which stated that Zionism was a form of racism and racial discrimination.[49] Moynihan, who was the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 1975-76, blamed the moral decay of the United Nations on liberals who accepted “third-worldism.”[50] Later Kirkpatrick, who served as the U.S. ambassador (1981-5), argued that the United Nations could be useful if it served American interests, but it was now under Marxian “Third World Ideology” and therefore was fundamentally anti-American. Like the New Left in the Democratic Party, the United Nations betrayed the liberal principles on which it was founded.[51]

Besides opposing “third-worldism,” neoconservatives also objected to the foreign policy doctrine of realism of Henry Kissinger (1923-) in the 1970s.[52] Realists believed that power is the most important value in international politics, that all nations struggle for it, and therefore liberal democracy is not inherently superior to non-democratic societies and values. Realists were wary about crusading democratic idealism which they thought can be destabilizing to international politics. Kissinger, as the U.S. National Security Advisor (1969-75) and Secretary of State (1973-77) pursued a policy of détente in seeking accommodation with the Soviet Union. This goal was realized in the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks Treaties (SALT) in 1972 and 1979, which limited the number and types of nuclear weapons between the United States and Soviet Union.

Neoconservatives criticized SALT for both strategic and moral reasons: the limitations of the number of nuclear weapons the United States could possess gave the Soviet Union a nuclear advantage which it would exploit and the treaties provided legitimacy to the Soviet Union, making it and the United States morally equivalent.[53] Neoconservatives also opposed détente because they believed the Soviet Union was an ideologically expansionist state rather than, as Kissinger thought, a typical state that was motivated by power.[54] Furthermore, neoconservatives feared that détente would weakened the United States’ support of Israel and strengthen the Soviet Union support for Israel’s Arab enemies. The 1973 Arab-Israeli War appeared to confirm the neoconservatives’ fears: the United States ultimately joined the Soviet Union in cosponsoring a United Nation’s resolution for a cease-fire and threatened Israel to cut assistance if it did not agree to negotiations.[55]

Neoconservatives’ criticism of American foreign policy continued under the Carter administration which continued the policy of détente. The Coalition for Democratic Majority, the neoconservative faction in the Democratic Party, joined the hard-line anti-communist Republican organization, the Committee on the Present Danger, to revive the doctrine of containment to be at the core of the United States foreign policy.[56] After Carter was elected president, both organizations lobbied Carter to return to a doctrine of containment and presented it a list of sixty neoconservatives for appointment in the administration. Although many neoconservatives campaigned for him, Carter refused to appoint them in his administration because he wanted to continue détente and thereby further alienated neoconservatives from the Democratic Party.

While Carter later increased military spending, reinstated draft registration, and imposed trade sanctions on the Soviet Union, his administration’s credibility had been damaged beyond repair with neoconservatives due to the Iranian Revolution and Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.[57] Neoconservatives supported Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign for the presidency. Reagan promised to restore America’s national confidence and sense of purpose by expanding government powers to fight communism overseas while, at the same, deregulate markets, privatize state services, and reduce social welfare policies to simulate capitalism at home.[58] Those neoconservatives who did not campaign for Reagan nevertheless joined the Republican Party after his election, with over sixty members of the Coalition for Democratic Majority appointed to the administration, including Kirkpatrick as ambassador to the United Nations, Elliott Abrams (1948-) as Assistant Secretary of State (1981-85), and Richard Perle (1941-) as Assistant Secretary of Defense (1981-87).[59]

With the election of a conservative president to the White House, the relationship between neoconservatives and traditional conservatives came to the fore.[60] Neoconservatives’ relationship with traditional conservatives had been ambiguous, with some having benefited from neoconservatives’ access to influential journals, newspapers, and think tanks to spread traditional ideas, values, and institutions. But other traditional conservatives resented the influence of neoconservatives as well as criticized neoconservatives’ acceptance of the welfare state, activist foreign policy, and unconditional support of Israel. The conflation of these two strands of conservatism as one in the public mind also has created annoyance, if not outright antagonism, between these two groups.[61]

Culture and Capitalism

Neoconservatives supported the Reagan administration’s vigorous anti-communist and activist foreign policy, particularly in the U.S. support of “freedom fighters” in Nicaragua and Afghanistan as well as the introduction of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) to defend the United States from Soviet nuclear missiles.[62] They also approved of Reagan’s rhetoric calling the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” According to their beliefs, neoconservatives’ ideas and policies were responsible for the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

However, a closer examination of the Reagan administration foreign policy reveals that neoconservatives had influence in policy formulation and decision but it was limited.[63] Neoconservatives did not occupy any key foreign policy posts in the Reagan administration and they often disagreed among themselves. Furthermore, the realist camp in the Reagan administration ultimately emerged victorious with the ratification of 1987 the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Force Treaty and the start of talks for the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. In short, neoconservatives were influential but not dominant, especially in the second term, of the Reagan administration’s foreign policy.

Neoconservatives also championed capitalism but, unlike their neoliberal counterparts, believed its success depended upon community and virtue rather than on individual entrepreneurial freedom, free markets, private property, and free trade.[64] In publications like The Public Interest and The National Interest (1985-) Irving Kristol played a crucial role in the publication of the works of thinkers like Jude Wanniski, George Gilder, and others who laid the foundation of what later became known as “Reaganomics.”[65] The theory is that government revenue increases when tax rates are low because people will work harder when they are allowed to keep their money, and, since people make more money, there will be more for the government to tax. However, neoconservatives were worried that capitalist society without a virtuous culture would ultimately collapse because the values that sustain capitalism would be undermined by the commodification of values and the radical individualism of capitalism.[66]

Even with the United States’ success in the Cold War, neoconservatives believed this victory would be pyrrhic unless “Victorian values” could reassert themselves in American culture and higher education.[67] Criticizing multiculturalism, philosophical relativism, and Marxist politics, neoconservatives in their publications, such as The New Criterion (1982-) and First Things (1990-), and organizations, like the National Association of Scholars (1987-), advocated for a return to educational standards and behavior based on the “great books” of western civilization, traditional sexual propriety, and a deference to academic and familial authority.[68] Neoconservatives found allies with socially conservative Christian groups–the Moral Majority in the 1980s, the Christian Coalition in the 1990s–to push back against the cultural and educational values of the New Left.[69] However, their success was limited as the commanding heights of mainstream culture–entertainment, education, and media–remained a bastion for New Left values.[70]

The Next Generation

The end of the Cold War led some neoconservatives to think it was “the end of history,” as Francis Fukuyama (1952-) wrote initially in The National Interest in 1989 and later a book in 1992.[71] According to Fukuyama, there is a universal desire to live in a modern society with its technology, high standard of living, and access to the global world. Economic modernization tends to drive political participation in the creation of a middle class with its concern about education, protection of property, and individual rights. Over time, liberal democracy becomes a universal aspiration. However, this historical process is not inevitable with chance, agency, and ideas playing a role in the outcome of a regime.[72] Nevertheless, history is conceived as ultimately progressive in a teleological sense with liberal democracy as the final goal, regardless of whether it is realized.

In this era of the “end of history,” neoconservatives were divided among themselves, with the older generation like Irving Kristol, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Nathan Glazer calling for a more limited interpretation of national interest, while the younger generation, such as William Kristol (1952-) and Robert Kagan (1958-), advocating an expansive, interventionalist foreign policy of promoting liberal democracy abroad.[73] Calling for a return to “national greatness,” younger neoconservatives rejected the Clinton administration’s wavering humanitarian intervention in Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti, and Balkans during the 1990s and criticized the administration for not articulating a national purpose in American foreign policy.[74] These neoconservatives established the think tank, Project for a New American Century (PNAC) (1997-2009), which outlined the objectives of challenging regimes hostile to American interests and values, increasing the U.S. defense budget, promoting economic and political freedom abroad, strengthening democratic alliances, and preserving America’s hegemonic role in international politics.[75]

Strangely, this second generation of neoconservatives had little, if anything, to say about the formation of new international institutions that governed and regulated global trade and investment, like the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades (GATT) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). One has to look at the first generation of neoconservatives for commentary on the international economic policy, which generally followed the positions of neoliberals.[76] But in terms of political and military foreign policy, this second generation of neoconservatives rejected liberal internationalism and supported the United States promotion of democracy abroad, even if it required regime change in Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and China, a view  articulated in publications like Commentary and The Weekly Standard (1995-2018).[77]

The Bush Doctrine

In spite of their preoccupation and expertise in foreign affairs, neoconservatives missed the threat of 9/11 to the United States. According to neoconservatives, rouge states with weapons of mass destruction, China, Russia, and regional challenges to American hegemony should be the United States’ foreign policy priorities.[78] Terrorism was barely mentioned. But when 9/11 did occur, neoconservatives quickly interpreted the event in ideological and stark existential terms, viewing the threat of radical Islam as broadly characterizing the Islamic world rather than seeing that that the ideology of radical Islam is held only by a minority of Muslims.[79] The fact that most Muslims disliked United States foreign policy (e.g., support of Israel and the House of Saud) rather than the United States itself was ignored by neoconservatives.[80] Instead neoconservatives claimed that the failure of the United States to project its power overseas during the 1990s–Saddam Hussein remaining in power in Iraq; the withdrawal from Somalia after American soldiers were killed; and the attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993, American military bases in Saudi Arabia in 1996, American embassies in Africa in 1998, and the Navy’s USS Cole in 2000–all encouraged the terrorists to attack the United States.[81]

The response of the George W. Bush administration to 9/11 was to create a new federal agency, the Department of Homeland Security; pass new legislation, the Patriot Act, to give domestic law enforcement greater power to prevent terrorism; and announce a new strategic doctrine of preventive war that would fight enemies abroad rather than rely upon containment and deterrence.[82] The result of this new strategic doctrine was the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.[83] Neoconservatives supported all these actions but especially Bush’s new strategic doctrine and the invasion of Iraq, shifting U.S. focus from al-Qaeda to Saddam Hussein.[84] These policies were the realization of neoconservative ideas of regime change, benevolent hegemony, preemption, and American exceptionalism and ultimately became known as the Bush Doctrine.[85]

One of the intellectual influences on the formulation of the Bush Doctrine was Albert Wohlstetter (1913-97) who was a teacher of Paul Wolfowitz (1943-), U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense (2001-5); Richard Perle, Chairman of Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee (2001-3), and Zalmay Khalilzad (1951-), U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan (2003-5), Iraq (2005-7), and the United Nations (2007-9).[86] Wohlstetter was an influential and controversial nuclear strategist at the RAND Corporation and later the University of Chicago. Wohlstetter believed in nuclear deterrence–countries had to worry about their vulnerability to a nuclear strike–and was skeptical about the 1968 Nonproliferation Treaty, which allowed countries having only civilian nuclear power, and the 1972 and 1979 Strategic Arms Limitation Talks Treaties, which limited American and Soviet offensive nuclear weapons but did not address the Soviet counter-force capacities.

A second but less important influence was Leo Strauss (1899-1973) whose student, Allan Bloom (1930-92) briefly taught Paul Wolfowitz.[87] Strauss was a political philosopher who spent most of his academic career at the University of Chicago where he taught students about natural rights, the relationship between reason and faith, and problems of philosophical relativism.[88] Strauss did not write directly about contemporary politics but his students politicized his writings by contending the United States was the apotheosis of the western philosophical tradition and that the cultural values of this tradition were being undermined by philosophical relativism at American colleges and universities.[89] His students also emphasized the importance of the political regime and how the regime shaped the institutions and cultural values of a society which comported with the Bush Doctrine of regime change.[90]

After the American victory in Iraq, the Bush administration had unrealistic and optimistic assumptions about the post-Saddam country that ignored the reality that regime change was a slow and difficult process and not just a matter of removing the old regime.[91] Furthermore, the mismanagement of the American occupation of Iraq, including the torture of Iraqi prisoners, and the absence of weapons of mass destruction led some neoconservatives, such as Richard Perle and David Brooks, to distance themselves from the war and even some, like Francis Fukuyama and Michael Lind, to break ranks with the neoconservatives.[92] However, most neoconservatives continued to advocate for Iraq War and its aftermath, with the 2004 reelection of George W. Bush to the presidency confirming their support.[93]

Like Ronald Reagan in his second term, George W. Bush favored the realists in his own foreign policy after his reelection with Condoleezza Rice serving as Secretary of State and neoconservatives Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith leaving government.[94] The setbacks in a post-Saddam Iraq as well as the new assertiveness of Iran and North Korea forced the Bush administration to acknowledge a decline in American power and consequently adopt a different approach to foreign policy. Although neoconservatives still had influence in the Bush administration, such as the president’s approval of increased troop strength in Iraq to restore security in order to create a space for political reconciliation, their mark in the second term of the Bush administration’s foreign policy was severely diminished.[95]

The Aftermath

There have been several analyses about the failure of the Bush doctrine with its neoconservative vision of regime change in Iraq. For example, Vaïsse attributes overconfidence and arrogance to neoconservatives after America’s victory in the Cold War as well as the second generation’s intellectual laziness in lacking regional expertise, properly understanding the nature of radical Islam, and a naivete about the power of democracy to change a society’s culture and institutions.[96] Drolet also agrees with Vaïsse’s analysis that neoconservatives’ lack of humility combined with a flawed understanding of politics–an ahistorical and acontextual account of politics with a fetishization of political culture–that led to neoconservatives’ imperial delusions.[97] Cooper, who is more sympathetic to neoconservatives, nevertheless acknowledges that their ideology about the importance of regime–and regime change–was not adequately examined by neoconservatives to see whether this premise is correct.[98]

By contrast, Halper and Clarke favor the realist school of diplomacy to address the Iraqi crisis and believe that the Iraq War ultimately was a distraction from the United States’ global war on terrorism (i.e.,, Afghanistan), leading to a rise in global negative perception of the United States.[99] Fukuyama, who had left neoconservatism, believes it is the lack of competence in the Bush administration and neoconservatives, and more broadly the United States’ foreign policy establishment, to govern global affairs and therefore should adopt a different foreign policy that is open to new, innovative, and transparent international organizations, rules, and laws.[100] But instead of reexamining their ideas and policies, most neoconservatives refused to admit their mistakes and instead focus on a “league of democracies” rather than regime change so that the world’s democracies could promote and defend their values.[101]

Neoconservatives continued to have a strong national presence in the media and think tanks with the Foreign Policy Initiative (2009-17) and Global Governance Watch (2003-7, 2009-) that criticized the Obama administration’s foreign policy.[102] During this period, neoconservatives’ major concerns were Obama’s overtures to Iran, China’s military assertiveness, and fear of a decline of American power.[103] But not being in the Obama administration, neoconservatives had no influence or impact on American foreign policy.

With the 2016 election of Donald Trump to the presidency, neoconservatives have some influence with the appointment of John Bolton (1948-) as National Security Advisor (2018-) and supported the Trump administration’s foreign policy of not certificating the Obama administration’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran, relocating the American Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, and increasing the U.S. defense budget.[104] However, the relationship has been ambiguous, partially because Trump himself lacks clear ideological and policy positions and partially because neoconservatives disdain Trump’s lack of policy expertise and personality.[105] It remains to be seen whether neoconservatives will ultimately endorse the Trump administration, selectively support it, or act as an alternative and even opposition voice.

The success of neoconservatives in American politics and policy has been effective but limited. While there has been a halt to the expansion of social welfare programs in the 1980s and 1990s, the George W. Bush administration passed the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act and the Obama administration passed the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Furthermore, the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges case, the entrenchment of multiculturalism in American universities, and the left’s control of mainstream media and entertainment are contrary to neoconservatives social and educational values. Finally, neoconservative’s skepticism about international institutions and rules and a belief in American hegemony in international politics are dependent if a Republican, and one who agrees with their views, is president. In short, neoconservatives have created an idea and policy infrastructure that reflects their views but it is only one of many perspectives about American politics and foreign affairs that exist.

Although neoconservatives have changed their partisan affiliations, their roots stretch back to a New Deal liberalism and, at least for the first generation, saw themselves as the true heirs of this movement. Because of its origins, Vaïsse argues that a history of neoconservatism belongs to a history of liberalism and conservatism and that neoconservatism is both a new school of thought and a reaction to the New Left.[106] Drolet disagrees, stating that neoconservatism is “a reaction to liberal modernity and the cultural forces the latter generates.”[107] Reviewing the evolution of neoconservatism, I believe both scholars are correct: the first generation of neoconservatives were both liberal and conservative, reactionary and innovative, while the second generation of neoconservatives belong to the conservative school of thought that is different from libertarianism and traditional conservatism. Over time we will see how neoconservatism will develop in the future–whether it will continue on a new path, return to its origins, or assimilates with other ideologies. In the meantime it will be interesting to see how neoconservatives preserve, adopt, and adjust their ideas and policies in the ever-changing world of politics.

Notes

[1] I would like to thank Richard Avramenko, the Center for the Study of Liberal Democracy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Saginaw Valley State University for supporting my sabbatical which enabled me to write this chapter and co-edit this volume.

[2] Norman Podhoretz, Breaking Ranks: A Political Memoir (New York: Harper and Row, 1979); Peter Steinfels, The Neoconservatives: The Origins of a Movement (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979) and The Neoconservatives: The Men Who Are Changing America’s Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979); Irving Kristol, Reflections of a Neoconservative (New York: Basic Books, 1983); Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (New York: Free Press, 1995); Ex-Friends (New York: Free Press, 1999); “Neoconservatism: A Eulogy,” in The Norman Podhoretz Reader, Thomas L. Jeffers, ed. (New York: Free Press, 2004), 269-84; Alexander Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); Gary Dorrien, The Neoconservative Mind: Politics, Culture, and the War of Ideology (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993); Jacob Heilbrunn, They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons (New York: Doubleday, 2008); Justin Vaïsse, Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2010); Joseph Dorman, Arguing the World: New York Intellectuals in Their Own Words (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Murray Friedman, Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1-63; Alan Frachon and Daniel Vernet, L’Amérique messianique (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 2004); Adam L. Fuller, Taking the Fight to the Enemy: Neoconservatism and the Age of Ideology (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012).

[3] Daniel Bell, “First Love and Early Sorrow,” Times Higher Education Supplement (January 16, 1981). Available at http://www.pbs.org/aruging/nyintellectuals_bell_2.html and “Afterword, 1988: The End of Ideology Revisited” in The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 415; Irving Kristol, “Memoirs of a Trotskyist,” in Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (New York: Free Press, 1995), 469-80; Seymour Martin Lipset, “Out of the Alcoves,” The Wilson Quarterly 23/1 (1999): 37-48.

[4] For more about the fighting among the American political left, see John Ehrman, The Rise of the Neoconservatism: Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs 1945-1994 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 1-32; John Diggins, The Rise and Fall of the American Left (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), 145-210; Friedman, The Neoconservative Revolution, 62-79.

[5] Kristol, Reflections of a Neoconservative, x-xi.

[6] Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), 244; also see Thomas J. McCormick, America’s Half-Century: United States Foreign Policy in the Cold War and After (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1995) and Robert Latham, The Liberal Moment: Modernity, Security, and the Making of Postwar International Order (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).

[7] Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).

[8] Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (New York: Anchor Books, 1950); Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt Bruce Jovanovich, 1955); George Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (New York: Harper, 1976).

[9] Kenneth Prewitt, “Political Ideas and a Political Science for Policy,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 600/1 (2005): 14-29; Lee Trepanier, “The Relevance of Political Philosophy and Political Science” in Why the Humanities Matter Today: In Defense of Liberal Education. Lee Trepanier, ed. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017): 127-44.

[10] Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); also see Chaim I. Waxman, ed., The End of Ideology Debate (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1968).

[11] William F. Buckley, God and Man at Yale (Chicago: Regency, 1951); Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952); Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind (Chicago: Regency, 1953); Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953); Friedrich von Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960).

[12] Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement; Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States (New York: Guildford Press, 1995); also see Friedman, The Neoconservative Revolution, 80-99.

[13] Kevin Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority (New York: Anchor Books, 1970); Mary C. Brennan, Turning Right in the Sixties: The Conservative Capture of the GOP (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); John A. Andrew III, The Other Side of the Sixties: Young Americans for Freedom and The Rise of Conservative Politics (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997).

[14] Lee Edwards, The Conservative Revolution (New York: Free Press, 1999); Jonathan M. Schoenwald, A Time for Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

[15] William O’Neill, The New Left: A History (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2001); Van Goose, Rethinking the New Left: An Interpretative History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

[16] Students for a Democratic Society, Port Huron Statement, June 15, 1962. Available at https://archive.org/details/PortHuronStatement/page/n0.

[17] Goose, Rethinking the New Left; William O’Neill, Coming Apart: An Informal History of America in the 1960s (New York: Times Books, 1974).

[18] Ibid.; also see Christopher Lasch, The Agony of the American Left (New York: Knopf, 1969).

[19] Jeane Kirkpatrick, “Neoconservatism as a Response to the Counter-Culture,” in The Neocon Reader, Irwin Stelzer, ed. New York: Grove Press: 234-40.

[20] Stephen H. Norwood, Anti-Semitism and the American Far Left (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

[21] Joshua Muravchik, “Operational Comeback,” Foreign Policy (October 16, 2009). Available at https://foreignpolicy.com/2009/10/16/the-fp-memo-operation-comeback/.

[22] Michael Harrington, “The Welfare State and Its Neoconservative Critics,” Dissent (Fall 197). Available at https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-welfare-state-and-its-neoconservative-critics. Irving Kristol, “Confessions of a True, Self-Confessed Neoconservative,” Public Opinion (October/November 1979).

[23] William Kristol, “Will Obama Save Liberalism?” New York Times, January 26, 2009. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/26/opinion/26kristol.html; also see Friedman, The Neoconservative Revolution, 100-136.

[24] Tod Lindberg, “Neoconservatism’ Liberal Legacy,” Policy Review, October 1, 2004. Available at https://www.hoover.org/research/neoconservatisms-liberal-legacy; Kristol, Reflections of a Neoconservative, 75; also see Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball, eds., The Betrayal of Liberalism: How the Disciples of Freedom and Equality Helped Foster the Illiberal Politics of Coercion and Control (New York: Ivan R. Dee, 1985).

[25] Kristol, Reflections of a Neoconservative, xii.

[26] Irving Kristol, “The Neoconservative Persuasion: What It Was and What It Is,” The Weekly Standard, August 25, 2003. Available at https://www.weeklystandard.com/irving-kristol/the-neoconservative-persuasion.

[27] Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol, “What is the Public Interest?” The Public Interest (1965): 3-6; also see Irving Kristol, “Skepticism, meliorism and The Public Interest,” The Public Interest (1985): 31-42; Seymour Martin Lipset, “The Wavering Polls,” The Public Interest (1976): 70-90. Online access to The Public Interest archives are available at https://www.nationalaffairs.com/.

[28] Nathan Abrams, Norman Podhoretz and Commentary Magazine: The Rise and Fall of the Neocons (London: Continuum, 2010).  Online access to Commentary is available at https://www.commentarymagazine.com/; Online access to Policy Review archives are available at https://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review.

[29] Some of the articles written in The Public Interest were expanded into published books, such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding (New York: Free Press, 1970) and The Politics of Guaranteed Income (New York: Vintage, 1973); Nathan Glazer, Affirmative Discrimination (New York: Basic Books, 1975); James Q. Wilson, Thinking About Crime (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985); Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy: 1950-1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1984).

[30] Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, and Irish of New York (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1963).

[31] Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: A Case for National Action (Washington D.C.: Office of Policy Planning and Research, U.S. Department of Labor, 1965).

[32] Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancey, The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967).

[33] James Q. Wilson, “Liberalism versus Liberal Education,” Commentary (June 1972): 50-55.

[34] Irving Kristol, “Teaching In, Speaking Out: The Controversy Over Vietnam,” Encounter (August 1965): 65-70; Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Irving Kristol, eds., Confrontation: The Student Rebellion and the Universities (New York: Basic Books, 1968).

[35] Irving Kristol, Two Cheers for Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 171; see Nathan Glazer, “The Limits of Social Policy,” Commentary (September 1971): 51-59.

[36] For example, Eveline M. Burns, “Where Welfare Falls Short,” The Public Interest (Fall 1965): 82-95; Gilbert Y. Steiner, “Reform Follow Reality: The Growth of Welfare,” The Public Interest (Winter 1974): 47-65; Marc F. Plattner, “The Welfare State vs. The Redistributive State,” The Public Interest (Spring 1979): 28-48; Bradley R. Schiller, “Welfare: Reforming Our Expectations” The Public Interest (Winter 1981): 55-65; Nathan Glazer, “Towards a Self-Service Society?” The Public Interest (Winter 1983): 66-90; Charles Murray, Losing Ground; Michael Harrington, The New American Poverty (New York: Henry Holt Publishing, 1984); Steven Kelman, “’Public Choice’ and Public Spirit,” The Public Interest (Spring 1987): 80-94.

School choice is a particular policy that neoconservatives have supported where responsibility falls to local authorities and individuals. See David K. Cohen and Eleanor Farrar, “Power to the Parents?–The Story of Education Vouchers,” The Public Interest (Summer 1977): 72-97; Myron Lieberman, Privatization and Education Choice (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989) and “School Choice Schism,” The Public Interest (Spring 2002): 122-25; John E. Chubb and Terry M. Moe, Politics, Markets, and American Schools (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institute, 1990); Christine Roch, Mark Schneider, Melissa Marschall, and Paul Teske, “School Choice Builds Community,” The Public Interest (Fall 1997): 86-90; Brian Elliott and David MacLennan, “Education, Modernity, and Neo-Conservative School Reform in Canada, Britain, and the U.S.” British Journal of Sociology of Education 15/2 (1994): 165-85.

[37] George H. Quester, American Foreign Policy: The Lost Consensus (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 1982); Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “Reinhold Niebuhr’s Long Shadow,” New York Times (June 22, 1992). Available at https://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/22/opinion/reinhold-niebuhr-s-long-shadow.html; also see Diggins, The Rise and Fall of the American Left, 145-210; Kristol, Reflections of a Neoconservative, x-xi.

[38] Michael Gerson, The Neoconservative Vision: From Cold War to Culture Wars (Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1997): 112-16; Irving Kristol, “Facing the Facts in Vietnam,” The New Leader (September 30, 1963) and “We Can’t Resign as Policeman of the World,” New York Times Magazine (May 12, 1968); Nathan Glazer, “The New Left and its Limits,” Commentary (July 1968): 31-40.

[39] Nathan Glazer, Remembering the Answers: Essays on the American Student Revolt (New York: Basic Books, 1972); Jeane Kirkpatrick, “The Revolt of the Masses,” Commentary (February 1973): 58-62 and “Neoconservatism as a Response to the Counter-Culture,”; also see O’Neill, The New Left and Coming Apart; Goose, Rethinking the New Left.

[40] Irving Kristol, “Urban Civilization and its Discontents,” Commentary (July 1970): 34-35.

[41] Norman Podhoretz, “New Vistas for Neoconservatives,” Conservative Digest 15 (1989): 56-7

[42] Theodore Draper, “The Specter of Weimar,” Commentary (December 1971): 43-50.

[43] Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1972 (New York: Antheneum Publishers, 1973), 17-33, 283-87.

[44] Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 198. For about Senator Jackson’s presidential bids, see Robert G. Kaufman, Henry M. Jackson: A Life in Politics (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 223-41, 301-40; For more about the CDM, see Justin Vaïsse, Neoconservatism, 86-100.

[45] The reference “mugged by reality” is from Irving Kristol’s quote, “[a neoconservative] is a liberal who has been mugged by reality. A neoliberal is a liberal who got mugged by reality but has not pressed charges.” Douglas Murray, Neoconservatism: Why We Need It (San Francisco: Encounter, 2006), 89.

[46] Kristol, Reflections of a Neoconservative, xii-xiv.

[47] James A. Smith, The Idea Brokers: Think Tanks and the Rise of the New Policy Elite (New York: Free Press, 1991); Murray Friedman, The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 133; Paul Gottfried, Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American Right (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 59-68; Irving Kristol, The Problem of Doing Good: Irving Kristol’s Philanthropy (Washington D.C.: Hudson Institute, 2010).

[48] Norman Podhoretz, “The Culture of Appeasement,” Harper’s (October 1977). Available at https://harpers.org/archive/1977/10/the-culture-of-appeasement/; Gerson, The Neoconservative Vision, 167-8.

[49] P.T. Bauer, “Western Guilt and Third World Poverty,” Commentary (January 1976): 31-39; Daniel Patrick Moynihan, A Dangerous Place (New York: Little, Brown, 1976), 158; Gerson, The Neoconservative Vision, 158.

[50] Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “The United States in Opposition,” Commentary (March 1975): 31-45.

[51] Jeane Kirkpatrick, The Reagan Phenomenon–and Other Speeches on Foreign Policy (Washington D.C.: American Enterprise Institute Press, 1982), 111-12.

[52] Henry Kissinger, A World Restored: Europe After Napoleon (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1973); Diplomacy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994); and “Between the Old Left and the New Right,” Foreign Affairs 78/3 (1999): 99-116.

[53] Irving Kristol, Commentary Symposium, “America Now: A Failure of Nerve?” Commentary (July 1975): 16-98; Norman Podhoretz, “Making the World Safe for Communism,” Commentary (April 1976): 31-42; Dana H. Allin, Cold War Illusions: America, Europe, and Soviet Power, 1969-1989 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976), 31-42.

[54] Irving Kristol, “My Cold War,” in Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (New York: Free Press, 1995), 481-6.

[55] Walter Laqueur, “Kissinger and the Politics of Détente,” Commentary (December 1973): 46-53; also see McCormick, America’s Half Century, 179-80.

[56] Lipset, American Exceptionalism, 194; Jerry Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis: The Committee on the Present Dangers and the Politics of Containment (Boston: South End Press, 1983); Vaïsse, Neoconservatism, 180-219.

[57] Diamond, Roads to Dominion, 197-200.

[58] Norman Podhoretz, “The Neo-Conservative Anguish Over Reagan’s Foreign Policy,” New York Times Magazine (May 2, 1982): 30-31; Fred Halliday, The Making of the Second Cold War (London: Verso, 1986); William A. Niskanen, Reaganomics: An Insider’s Account of Policies and the People (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

[59] Sanders, Peddlers, 9; Friedman, The Neoconservative Revolution, 137-60; Vaïsse, Neoconservatism, 203-8.

[60] Paul Gottfried, Conservatism in America, 43-76, 93-113; Friedman, The Neoconservative Revolution, 132-36.

[61] The split between traditional and neoconservatives continued after the conclusion of the Cold War with the traditional conservatives opposing American intervention in the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 Iraq Invasion as well as objecting the expansion of the federal government under George W. Bush administration (e.g., 2002 Homeland Security Act; 2003 Medicare Modernization Act). For more, see Ibid.

[62] Friedman, The Neoconservative Revolution, 161-76; Jay Winik, On the Brink: The Dramatic, Behind-the-Scenes Saga of the Reagan Era and the Men and Women Who Won the Cold War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996); Frances FitzGerald, Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the Cold War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000); Jesus Velasco, Neoconservatives in U.S. Foreign Policy under Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush: Voices behind the Throne (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2010).

[63] Vaïsse, Neoconservatism, 186-97.

[64] Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1978); Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol, eds., Capitalism Today (New York: Basic Books, 1972); Irving Kristol, Commentary Symposium, “Capitalism, Socialism, and Nihilism,” Commentary (April 1978): 29-72; For more about the relationship between neoliberals and neoconservatives, see Jean-François Drolet, American Neoconservatism: The Politics and Culture of a Reactionary Idealism (London: Hurst and Company, 2011), 91-122.

[65] June Wanniski, The Way The World Works (New York: Gateway Books, 1978) and “Taxes, Revenues, and the ‘Laffer Curve,’” The Public Interest (Winter 1978): 3-16; Irving Kristol, “Ideology and Supply-Side Economics,” Commentary (April 1981): 48-56; George Gilder, Wealth and Poverty (New York: Basic Books, 1981) and “A Supply-Side Economics of the Left,” The Public Interest (Summer 1983): 29-43; also see Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1991); Friedman, The Neoconservative Revolution, 181-204; Gerson, The Neoconservative Vision, 204-6; Vaïsse, Neoconservatism, 203-6. The National Interest was founded by Irving Kristol in 1985 with a focus on foreign policy and international politics. Its archives are available at https://nationalinterest.org/.

[66] Bell, The Cultural Contradictions; Irving Kristol, “When Virtue Loses All Her Loveliness–Some Reflections on Capitalism and ‘The Free Society,” The Public Interest (Fall 1970): 3-12; Two Cheers for Capitalism and “Adam Smith and the Spirit of Capitalism,” in Neoconservatism, 258-299.

[67] Kristol, Neoconservatism, 486; Gertrude Himmelfarb, The New History and the Old (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987) and The Demoralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values (New York: Knopf, 1995).

[68] Hilton Kramer, The Revenge of the Philistines: Arts and Culture, 1972-1984 (New York: Free Press, 1985); Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987); James Q. Wilson, The Moral Sense (New York: Free Press, 1993) and “Cultural Meltdown,” The Public Interest (Fall 1999): 99-104; Diane Ravitch, The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn (New York: Knopf, 2003).

[69] Friedman, The Neoconservative Revolution, 205-23.

[70] For example, see Time Groseclose, Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2011) and Neil Gross, Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). First Things and The New Criterion also features criticisms of American art, culture, and entertainment as advocating New Left values. First Things is available at https://www.firstthings.com/ and The New Criterion is available at https://www.newcriterion.com/.

[71] Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History,” The National Interest (Summer 1989): 3-18 and The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).

[72] For more about the debate about Fukyuama’s thesis, see Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 53-61.

[73] Jeane Kirkpatrick, “A Normal Country in a Normal Time,” The National Interest (Fall 1990): 40-43; Irving Kristol, “Defining Our National Interest,” The National Interest (Fall 1990): 16-25; Nathan Glazer, “A Time for Modesty,” in America’s Purpose: New Visions of US Foreign Policy, Owen Harries, ed. (San Francisco: Institute of Contemporary Studies, 1991), 133-41; William Kristol and Robert Kagan, “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs 75/4 (1996): 18-32 and Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy (San Francisco: Encounter, 2000); David Brooks, “A Return to National Greatness,” The Weekly Standard (March 3, 1997). Available at https://www.weeklystandard.com/david-brooks/a-return-to-national-greatness; Robert Kagan, “America’s Crisis of Legitimacy,” Foreign Affairs 83/2 (2004): 65-87 and “A Matter of Record,” Foreign Affairs 84/1 (2005): 170-73; also see Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, “The Sources of American Legitimacy,” Foreign Affairs 83/6 (2004): 18-32.

[74] Robert Kaplan, “The Coming Anarchy,” Atlantic Monthly 273/2 (1994): 44-76 and Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (London: Atlantic Books, 2003); Donald Kagan and Frederick W. Kagan, While America Sleeps: Self-Delusions, Military Weakness, and the Threat to Peace Today (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000); Paul Wolfowitz, “Remembering the Future,” The National Interest (Summer 2000): 67-73; Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 74-111.

[75] Project for the New American Century, “Statement of Principles,” (June 1997). Available at http://www.newamericancentury.org. PNAC would be succeeded by the think tank, The Foreign Policy Initiative (2009-17). The archives are available at https://web.archive.org/web/20130609011554/http://newamericancentury.org/ and https://foreignpolicyi.org/.

[76] Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, 43-45.

[77] The archives of The Weekly Standard are available at https://www.weeklystandard.com/.

[78] Kagan and Kristol, Present Dangers and Commentary Symposium, “America Power–For What? A Symposium” (January 2000). Available at https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/american-power-for-what/.

[79] Eliot Cohen, “World War IV: Let’s Call the Conflict What It Is,” Wall Street Journal (November 20, 2001). Available at https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1006219259392114120; Norman Podhoretz, “World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win,” Commentary (2004): 17-54 and World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism (New York: Doubleday, 2007); Charles Krauthammer, “In Defense of Democratic Realism,” The National Interest (Fall 2004). Available at https://nationalinterest.org/article/in-defense-of-democratic-realism-699. For a contrary view, see Oliver Roy, The Failure of Political Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996) and Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Universal (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); also see The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004).

[80] United Nations Development Programme, Arab Human Development Report 2002: Creating Opportunities for Future Generations (New York: United Nations Publication, 2002); Max Boot, “Exploiting the Palestinians: Everyone’s Doing It,” Weekly Standard, January 28, 2003; Barry Rubin, “The Real Roots of Arab Anti-Americanism,” Foreign Affairs 81/6 (2002): 73-85.

[81] Donald Kagan and Frederick W. Kagan, While America Sleeps; Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power, Vaïsse, Neoconservatism, 232-39.

[82] James Mann, The Rise of the Vulcans: The History of the Bush’s War Cabinet (New York: Viking, 2004); Alexander Moens, The Foreign Policy of George W. Bush: Values, Strategy, and Loyalty (New York: Routledge, 2004); John T. Soma, Maury M. Nichols, Stephen D. Rynerson, Lance A. Maish, Jon David Rogers, “Balance of Privacy vs. Security: A Historical Perspective of the USA PATRIOT Act,” Rutgers Computer & Technology Law Journal 31/2 (Winter 2005): 285-346; Amitai Etzioni, How Patriotic Is the Patriot Act? Freedom versus Security in the Age of Terrorism (New York: Routledge, 2005); Jack Goldsmith, The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007);  George W. Bush, Decision Points (New York: Crown Publishing, 2010); Susan N. Herman, Taking Liberties: The War on Terror and the Erosion of American Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Christos Boukalas, Homeland Security, its Laws and its State: A Design of Power for the 21^st Century (New York: Routledge, 2014).

[83] Mary Buckley and Robert Singh, The Bush Doctrine and the War on Terrorism: Global Responses, Global Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2006); Stanley A. Renshon and Peter Suedfeld, eds., Understanding the Bush Doctrine: Psychology and Strategy in an Age of Terrorism (New York: Routledge, 2007); Terry H. Anderson, Bush’s Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

[84] Ibid.; also see Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads; Robert G. Kaufman, In Defense of the Bush Doctrine (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2007); Vaisse, Neoconservatism, 239-79; François Drolet, American Neoconservatism, 147-59; Danny Cooper, Neoconservatism and American Foreign Policy: A Critical Analysis (New York: Routledge, 2011).

[85] Mann, The Rise of the Vulcans, 234-358; Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, 66-94; Halper, America Alone, 138-56; Vaïsse, Neoconservatism, 244-55; Drolet, American Neoconservatism, 147-59; Cooper, Neoconservatism and American Foreign Policy, 142-51; Buckley and Singh, The Bush Doctrine and the War on Terrorism, 12-31; Stanley A. Renshon, “The Bush Doctrine Reconsidered,” in Renshon and Suedfeld, Understanding the Bush Doctrine, 1-38; Jacks S. Levy, “Preventive War and the Bush Doctrine,” in Renshon and Suedfeld, Understanding the Bush Doctrine, 175-201; Jesus Velasco, Neoconservatives in U.S. Foreign Policy.

[86] Albert Wohlsetter, Fred Hoffman, R.J. Lutz, and Henry S. Rowen, Selection and Use of Strategic Air Bases (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, R-266, 1954); Albert Wohlstetter, Legends of the Strategic Arms Race (Washington, DC: United States Strategic Institute, USSI Report 75-1, September 1974); Henry S. Rowen and Albert Wohlsetter, US Non-Proliferation Strategy Reformulated (Los Angeles, CA: PAN Heuristics, August 29, 1979); Albert Wohlsetter, Robert Wohlstetter, Gregory S. Jones, and Henry Rowen, Towards a New Consensus on Nuclear Technology (Los Angeles, CA: PAN Heuristics, 1979); Albert Wohlstetter, “Can We Afford SALT?,” The New York Times, March 25, 1979. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/1979/03/25/archives/foreign-affairs-can-we-afford-salt.html.

[87] Gerhard Spörl, “The Leo-conservatives,” The New York Times, August 4, 2003. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/04/international/europe/the-leoconservatives.html.

For misperceptions about Strauss’ influence on neo-conservatism, see Mark Lilla, “Leo Strauss: The European,” The New York Review of Books, October 21, 2004. Available at https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2004/10/21/leo-strauss-the-european/; “The Closing of the Straussian Mind,” The New York Review of Books, November 4, 2004. Available at https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2004/11/04/the-closing-of-the-straussian-mind/.

[88] Leo Strauss, Natural Rights and History; also see Heinrich Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Thomas Pangle, Leo Strauss: An Introduction to His Thought and Intellectual Legacy (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2006); Paul Gottfried, Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

[89] Harry V. Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1959); A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming Civil War (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000); Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind.

[90] Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, 25-29; Drolet, American Neoconservatism, 53-90.

[91] Halper, America Alone, 201-29; Vaïsse, Neoconservatism, 255-70; Drolet, American Neoconservatism, 147-59; Cooper, Neoconservatism and American Foreign Policy, 125-52.

[92] David Brooks, “For Iraqis to Win, the U.S. Must Lose,” New York Times (May 11, 2004). Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/11/opinion/for-iraqis-to-win-the-us-must-lose.html; Richard Perle, “Ambushed on the Potomac,” The National Interest (January-February 2009). Available at https://nationalinterest.org/article/ambushed-on-the-potomac-2953; Michael Lind, “A Tragedy of Errors,” The Nation (February 5, 2004); Available at https://www.thenation.com/article/tragedy-errors/; Francis Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads.

[93] Robert Kagan and William Kristol, “The Right War for the Right Reasons,” Weekly Standard (February 23, 2004). Available at https://www.weeklystandard.com/robert-kagan-and-william-kristol/the-right-war-for-the-right-reasons; Krauthammer, “In Defense of Democratic Realism.”

[94] Halper, America Alone, 201-29; Vaïsse, Neoconservatism, 255-70; Drolet, American Neoconservatism, 147-59; Cooper, Neoconservatism and American Foreign Policy, 125-52.

[95] Ibid.; Frederick W. Kagan, Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq (Washington D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, January 5, 2007). Available at http://www.aei.org/publication/choosing-victory-a-plan-for-success-in-iraq/.

[96] Vaïsse, Neoconservatism, 260-66.

[97] Drolet, American Neoconservatism, 151-59; also see Jason Blakely, “Nihilism as Rightwing Political Rhetoric,” Theory and Event, forthcoming.

[98] Cooper, Neoconservatism and American Foreign Policy, 10-12; 72-99.

[99] Halper, America Alone, 227-31,

[100] Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads, 111-13, 155-94.

[101] Robert Kagan, “The Case for a League of Democracies,” Financial Times (May 13, 2008). Available at https://www.ft.com/content/f62a02ce-20eb-11dd-a0e6-000077b07658; also see Drolet, American Neoconservatism, 147-59; Vaïsse, Neoconservatism, 266-70.

[102] The Foreign Policy Initiative is at https://foreignpolicyi.org/; the Global Governance Watch is at https://www.globalgovernancewatch.org/.

[103] Douglas Murray, Neoconservatism: Why We Need It; Charles Krauthammer, “Hope and Change–But Not for Iran,” Jerusalem Post (June 21, 2009). Available at https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-Ed-Contributors/Hope-and-change-but-not-for-Iran and “Decline is a Choice” Weekly Standard (October 19, 2009). Available at https://www.weeklystandard.com/charles-krauthammer/decline-is-a-choice-270813; Robert Kagan, “Obama Siding with the Regime,” Washington Post (June 17, 2009). Available at http://carnegieendowment.org/2009/06/17/obama-siding-with-regime-pub-23285; Paul Wolfowtiz, “Think Again Realism,” Foreign Policy (August 27, 2009). Available at https://foreignpolicy.com/2009/08/27/think-again-realism/; also see Cooper, Neoconservatism and American Foreign Policy, 153-65.

[104] Curt Mills, “Are the Necons Finally with Trump?” The National Interest (October 17, 2017). Available at https://nationalinterest.org/feature/after-the-neocons-finally-trump-22767; Julie Hirschfield Davis, “Jerusalem Embassy is a Victory for Trump and a Complication for Middle East Peace,” New York Times (May 14, 2018). Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/14/us/politics/trump-jerusalem-embassy-middle-east-peace.html; Michael D. Shear and Jennifer Steinhauer, “Trump to Seek $54 Billion Increase in Military Spending,” New York Times (February 27, 2017). Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/27/us/politics/trump-budget-military.html. For Bolton’s views, see John Bolton, Surrender is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008).

[105] Max Boot, “There is No Escape from Trump,” Commentary (March 3, 2016). Available at https://www.commentarymagazine.com/foreign-policy/donald-trump-foreign-policy-no-escape/; Jacob Heilbrunn, “The Neocons vs. Donald Trump,” New York Times (March 10, 2016). Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/13/opinion/sunday/the-neocons-vs-donald-trump.html; Sebastian Gorka, “Trump is Not a Neoconservative and Never Will Be,” The Hill (April 16, 2018). Available at https://www.realclearpolitics.com/2018/04/16/trump_is_not_a_neoconservative_and_never_will_be_439862.html. For a contrary view about Trump’s lack of ideological and policy consistency, see Marc Benjamin Sable and Angel Jaramillo Torres, Trump and Political Philosophy: Patriotism, Cosmopolitanism, and Civic Virtue (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

[106] Vaïsse, Neoconservatism, 276-79.

[107] Drolet, American Neoconservatism, 8; also see 189-207.

This excerpt is from Walk Away (Lexington Books, 2019); also see see “Analytical Marxism and the Meaning of Historicism: Reflections on Kai Nielsen and G. A. Cohen” and David Beer’s review.

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