NEOCONSERVATISM

New Right

Neoconservatism was the most influential and distinctive social trend to emerge in the 1970s, drawing its leaders from former leftists and liberal Democrats disillusioned with the political changes and popular democracy of the 1960s. Neoconservatives, called by wits "liberals mugged by reality," railed against radicalism disguised as liberalism and defended elitism. Unlike earlier conservative Republican leaders, such as Sen. Barry M. Goldwater and President Richard M. Nixon, the most prominent neoconservatives tended to be prolific intellectual writers, such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, and William Bennett.

Moynihan

Moynihan was the most prominent of the neoconservative spokesmen and has served as Democratic U.S. senator from New York after 1977. Before entering politics he was a professor of government at Harvard University and made a national reputation as an adviser to Presidents John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Nixon, and Gerald Ford, as well as serving as ambassador to India (1973-1975) and ambassador to the United Nations (1975-1976).

Benign Neglect

This liberal Democrat became a neoconservative hero when he wrote a memo in 1970 to President Nixon suggesting a period of "benign neglect" for race issues, which led to enormous controversy when it was leaked to The New York Times. His essays and books revealed his increasing doubts about the liberal agenda, especially Beyond the Melting Pot (1963), Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding (1969), and Coping: On the Practice of Government (1974).

Bell

Another former liberal Harvard professor who joined the neoconservative cause is Daniel Bell, whose book The End of Ideology (1960) exerted wide influence in the 1960s. Originally a socialist radical, Bell moved away from leftist views in the 1950s. He developed a gloomy assessment of modern political economy in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973) and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), wherein he argued that the consumerism necessary to sustain modern capitalism undermined the work discipline necessary for its continued advancement.

A New Ideology

Bell and Irving Kristol, who collaborated in writing Capitalism Today in 1971, were trenchant social critics attempting to form a neoconservative ideology. They tried to explain and to change the persistently liberal American society by linking socioeconomic policy to explicit moral values. Like all political ideologies, neoconservatism arose in reaction to challenges to authority and institutional hierarchy. Neoconservatives were dissatisfied and even bitter about the turbulent social reforms of the 1960s, which they viewed as having destroyed refined moral values by advancing an insipid egalitarianism.

Rethinking the Great Society

The election of Nixon as president in 1968 gave neoconservatives such as Commentary editor Kristol a powerful ally in resisting social revolution of the 1960s. Kristol was one of the first intellectuals to embrace the neoconservative label disparagingly applied by leftist Michael Harrington to academics who questioned the new politics of the late 1960s. As a New York University professor with ties to the Central Intelligence Agency, Kristol supported the Nixon administration's crackdown on domestic protest and terrorism in 1971. Writing for Fortune and The Wall Street Journal and in newspaper and television interviews, Kristol warned of social disaster as the young ignored traditional values and embraced hedonism, drugs, and radicalism. These lucid jeremiads impressed conservatives in both the Republican and Democratic parties and provided an easy scapegoat for economic problems in the 1970s. Kristol, along with Nathan Glazer, launched the first academic critique of the Great Society's social programs of the 1960s. Arguing that the programs were inefficient and elitist, while still endorsing the welfare State, they urged the dismantling of the Great Society programs.

The "New Class."

Criticism of the New Left and the counterculture was common, but in the 1970s the prestigious New York literary figure Norman Podhoretz, also an editor of Commentary, began a more systematic attack. He had criticized Kennedy's New Frontier and Johnson's Great Society, and Commentary now turned on the women's movement, Ralph Nader, environmentalists, the Black Panthers, the Chicago Seven, and the "new politics" presidential campaigns of Sen. Eugene McCarthy and Sen. George McGovern. Central to such critiques was the idea that a "new class" of professional social engineers, bureaucrats, media figures, and therapists was draining the life from American society. Postulating a kind of social parasitism, neoconservatives argued that the new class undermined society in three ways: it fostered an adversarial culture which compromised established norms and traditions; it created a permanent dependent class in society among the poor, the maladjusted, and others needing social and economic assistance; and it became a drag upon the nation's economic productivity, absorbing, in the inflated estimate of neoconservative Michael Novak, 35 percent of the nation's gross national product. Conservatives such as National Review editor William F. Buckley, Jr., were surprised but pleased to find these eloquent new allies from the old Left.

Business Conservatives

Stagflation, the combination of inflation and rising unemployment, in the 1970s prompted many other writers, such as Nathan Glazer, Bennett, and Kirkpatrick, to reject Democratic Party politics, liberalism, and popular democracy as solutions for American social, economic, and political issues. In a world of scarce or more-costly energy and raw materials and a slower rate of economic growth, neoconservatives objected to rising taxes, increasing government regulations, and expanding public expenditures which drained investment capital from the private sector. Many proponents of these positions were not actually neo-conservatives but long-standing conservative businessmen located in the right wing of the Republican Party. Businessmen such as Henry Salvatori, Holmes Tuttle, and Taft Schreiber, established think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, sponsored academics such as Milton Friedman and George Gilder, and financed political candidates, such as Goldwater. An unlikely spokesman for their views was Ronald Reagan, a movie actor who supported Goldwater for president in 1964. Reagan rode the neoconservative tide to win two four-year terms as governor of California (1967-1975) and election as president in 1980 and 1984.

CONSUMER PROTECTION

Consumer protection became an important social trend by the early 1970s. Ralph Nader, a Washington, D.C., lawyer in the Department of Labor, became interested in the safety of American automobiles in 1958 while a student at Harvard Law School. In 1965 he left government service and published a best-selling book, Unsafe at Any Speed, which was critical of automobile industry designs and standards. Nader was especially concerned with the safety of the Chevrolet Corvair, a popular compact car with a rear engine, which was reputed to be unsafe at high speeds.

By the 1970s Nader had expanded the scope of his concerns. Nader's campaign for safe, reliable products—cars, food, natural gas—aroused much national interest. He won greater attention in 1970 when General Motors (GM) settled a lawsuit for $425,000 and the president of GM apologized publicly for using GM detectives harass Nader and to violate his privacy.

Nader assembled "Nader's Raiders"—a group of talented young volunteers who researched a wide variety of health and safety issues and used class-action lawsuits to inform the public, educate legislators, and influence government agencies about consumer issues. Nader's Raiders were responsible for passage of the 1966 National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, the 1967 Wholesale Meat Act, the 1968 National Gas Pipeline Safety Act, the 1968 Wholesale Poultry Products Act, the 1969 Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act, and the 1971 reorganization of the Interstate Commerce Commission.

Ralph Nader's work inspired a multitude of federal, state, and local groups who sought to protect consumers. These advocates distrusted government regulatory agencies, which often seemed to be mere lobbies for industries. Most states reacted to this new public concern in product safety with consumer protection laws. Some states passed "lemon laws" mandating refunds for defective used cars. The consumer-protection movement was characteristic of the frustration and disillusionment many Americans felt with governmental oversight and business ethics during the decade.

Sources:

Hays Gorey, Nader and the Power of Everyman (New York: Grosser & Dunlap, 1975);

Thomas Whiteside, The Investigation of Ralph Nader: General Motors vs. One Determined Man (New York: Arbor House, 1972).

Kirkpatrick

Two younger neoconservatives who achieved prominence in the 1970s were Jeanne Kirkpatrick and William Bennett. Kirkpatrick was a liberal Democrat and professor of political science at George-town University (1967-1981). Her human rights views became neoconservative policy in 1979 when she stressed the difference between right-wing authoritarian regimes friendly to U.S. interests and totalitarian Communist regimes. She also wrote about the problem of naivete in President Jimmy Carter's foreign policy, attracting much Republican support, and later served as ambassador to the United Nations (1981-1985).

Bennett

William Bennett was a philosophy and law professor at the University of Texas and Boston University and president (1976-1981) of the National Humanities Center, a scholarly research institute in North Carolina. He earned his neoconservative reputation as a critic of liberal education programs and by advocating a return to a classical humanities curriculum in public schools. The back-to-basics approach to schools proved very attractive to neoconservative critics of recent liberal educational reforms. Bennett later served as chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities (1982-1985), as secretary of education (1985-1988), and as director of the Federal Office of Drug Control Policy (1989-1990).

The New Right

Neoconservatism, however, did not focus only on politics and economics; in many ways it was a cultural movement extremely critical of the countercultural changes in lifestyle, sexual standards, and family life. With only loose ties to the major political parties and profound concerns about contemporary social trends, the neoconservatives found powerful allies in the Fundamentalist Protestant churches which became politically active in the 1970s. Promoted by popular television evangelists and organized by the Moral Majority, the New Religious Right opposed the liberal influences and secularism it found inimical to American values. Like neoconservatives, Fundamentalists reacted against the turmoil of the 1960s. Often called born-again Christians, they reflected one aspect of the spiritual quest of many Americans in the era. Protestant churches, especially in the South and West, enjoyed increased membership after the 1960s. In a 1970 Gallup poll only 4 percent said that religion was influential in their lives, but by 1976, 44 percent not only acknowledged the importance of religion in their lives, but 65 percent had more confidence in the church than in any other institution. Fundamentalist and Evangelical sects preached an inspirational Christian faith that not only attracted many rural and suburban white conservatives but also many former hippies.

Evangelicals

Ruth Carter Stapelton, President Carter's sister, won a large Evangelical following in her North Carolina church. The Gift of Inner Healing, her popular 1976 book, did much to publicize the born-again Christian movement. Southern Baptists were especially interested in charismatic preaching, the gift of tongues, and faith healing by the power of the Holy Ghost. President Carter, who taught a Sunday school class in his Plains, Georgia, hometown, spoke publicly of his pride in being born-again.

Televangelists

Television evangelists such as Jimmy Swaggart, Oral Roberts, Jim Bakker, Billy Graham, and Jerry Falwell had an estimated audience of twenty-four million weekly viewers who contributed millions each year to their crusades. Pat Robertson founded the Christian Broadcasting Network in 1960, and from 1968 to 1986 he was the host of The 700 Club, a popular conservative television talk show. Jerry Falwell broadcast his televangelist program on three hundred stations by 1971, attributing the breakdown of sexual standards and family values to a larger moral decline. Millions of Americans responded to this religious awakening, and President Carter won two-thirds of the born-again votes in 1976.

Moral Majority

In 1979 Jerry Falwell organized the Moral Majority to press for laws reflecting conservative Christian values and to oppose abortion, homosexuality, pornography, and the Equal Rights Amendment. Four million Moral Majority members advocated prayer in schools, teaching biblical creationism, and increased military budgets. This special-interest lobby exerted great influence on neoconservatives and the Republican Party.

GRAY PANTHERS

The Gray Panthers was a lobby founded by Margaret E. ("Maggie") Kuhn to save the elderly, an expanding population. Life expectancy in the United States rose to 69.5 years for white men and 77.2 for white women. The American population over 65 years of age increased 20 percent in the decade, and 12 million people joined the American Association of Retired Persons. In response to sitins and picket lines by the Gray Panthers lobby and public concern that the Social Security Administration would be bankrupt, Congress passed laws to end age discrimination and to increase the age of mandatory retirement from 65 to 70 in 1978.

Sources:

Gabriel J. Fackre, The Religious Right and Christian Faith (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1982);

Peter Steinfels, The Neo-Conservatives (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979).

NEOCONSERVATISM

NEOCONSERVATISM was primarily an intellectual movement of Cold War liberal Democrats and democratic socialists who moved rightward during the 1970s and 1980s. The term was apparently coined in 1976 by an opponent, the socialist Michael Harrington. By and large, neoconservatives either repudiated the label or accepted it grudgingly. Nonetheless, the term usefully describes an ideological tendency represented by a close-knit group of influential political intellectuals. In the early 1980s, the short-hand designation "neocon" was a standard part of the American political vocabulary.

Most of the leading neoconservatives were in their forties or early fifties when they began their ideological transition. Many were Jewish and several prided themselves on being "New York intellectuals" no matter where they lived at the moment. All of the leading neocons engaged in cultural politics by writing books or articles, but they came from varied professional backgrounds. Foremost among them were the sociologists Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Peter Berger, and Seymour Martin Lipset; the Commentary magazine editor Norman Podhoretz and his wife, the writer Midge Decter; the political activists Ben Wattenberg, Penn Kemble, and Carl Gershman; the foreign policy specialists Walter Laqueur, Edward Luttwak, and Robert Tucker; the traditionalist Catholic academics Michael Novak and William Bennett; and the art critic Hilton Kramer. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick straddled the realms of scholarship and politics. No one was more important to the movement's rise to prominence than the intellectual entrepreneur Irving Kristol, who sometimes joked that he was the only self-confessed neoconservative.

Many of the older neoconservatives had briefly been radical socialists in their youth. By the 1950s, they affirmed centrist liberalism in philosophy and practice. The sociologists Bell, Glazer, and Lipset formulated an influential interpretation of American politics in which a pragmatic, pluralist center was besieged by parallel threats from "extremist" ideologues: Communists and "anti-Communists" on the left and a "radical right" represented most visibly by Senators Joseph McCarthy and Barry Goldwater. This position did not preclude nudging the center slightly leftward. In the early 1960s, for example, Podhoretz at Commentary published articles holding the United States partly responsible for the start of the Cold War.

The future neocons began to reevaluate liberalism, which was itself in flux, in response to the domestic turmoil and international crises of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Great Society antipoverty programs seemed utopian in conception or flawed in implementation. "Affirmative action" especially violated their belief, often reinforced by their own experiences, that success should come through merit. New Left demonstrators not only disdained the civility they cherished, but also disrupted their classrooms. Feminist and gay activists challenged the bourgeois values they considered essential underpinnings of a democratic order. Although few future neoconservatives supported the Vietnam War, many believed that the United States lost more than it gained from detente with the Soviet Union. Jewish neoconservatives were especially upset by the growing anti-Semitism within the black community and the increasing criticism of Israel by the left. All of these trends, they contended, were at least tolerated by the "new politics" wing of the Democratic Party that won the presidential nomination for Senator George McGovern in 1972.

These disaffected liberals moved rightward with varying speed. As early as 1965, Kristol and Bell founded Public Interest magazine to critically examine the flaws in Great Society programs. Appointed ambassador to the United Nations by Republican President Gerald Ford in 1975, Moynihan defended both American foreign policy and Israel's legitimacy. Bell and Glazer endorsed McGovern in 1972. The next year, however, both joined Lipset, Podhoretz, Decter, Kirkpatrick, Novak, and Wattenberg in creating the Coalition for a Democratic Majority in order to save their party from the "new politics." The future neoconservatives overwhelmingly favored Senator Henry Jackson, a staunch cold warrior, friend of Israel, and supporter of the welfare state, for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976.

Jimmy Carter, who won the nomination and the election, soon disappointed the neoconservatives. Despite their concerted efforts, none received a high-level appointment in his administration. Moreover, Carter enthusiastically practiced affirmative action, remained committed to detente, and sympathized with Third World nationalism. Jewish neoconservatives complained that he pressed Israel harder than Egypt while negotiating peace between the two countries in 1978 through 1979. Such behavior was only part of a foreign policy that looked like weakness or a "new isolationism" at best, "appeasement" at worst. Writing in Commentary in 1979, Kirkpatrick claimed that Carter not only overlooked human rights abuses by the Soviet Union, but also drove from power "friendly authoritarians" like the Shah of Iran, who were then succeeded by full-fledged "totalitarian" regimes.

By 1980, the increasingly visible neoconservative network had formulated a comprehensive critique of American politics, culture, and foreign policy. Essentially they updated the pluralist theory of the 1950s to account for recent social changes and to justify their own turn rightward. According to this interpretation, the Democratic Party—and much of American culture—had been captured by "ideologues" whose ranks now included social radicals, black nationalists, self-indulgent feminists, and proponents of gay rights. These extremists scorned the values cherished by most Americans, that is, faith in capitalism, hard work, sexual propriety, masculine toughness, the nuclear family, and democracy. Indeed, disdain for democracy explained both their snobbish rejection of middle-class life at home and their sympathy for communist or Third World tyranny abroad. Such views had wide currency not because they appealed to ordinary Americans, but because they were disseminated by a powerful "new class" of academics, journalists, and others in the cultural elite.

Although a caricature in many respects, this interpretation of American life and recent politics attracted the attention of Republicans seeking to build a majority coalition. Ronald Reagan courted the neoconservatives during the 1980 presidential campaign and subsequently recruited many of them into his administration. Kirkpatrick was appointed ambassador to the United Nations, Novak served as lower level diplomat there, and Gershman headed the newly created National Endowment for Democracy. Second-generation neocons from the political rather than the intellectual world held important midlevel positions. Richard Perle, a former aide to Henry Jackson, became assistant secretary of defense. Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, Podhoretz's son-in-law, helped to formulate policy toward Central America and played a major role in the Iran-Contra scandal. Other neocons served on government advisory boards dealing with education and foreign policy. Outside of the Reagan administration, neo-conservatism thrived in the more conservative climate of the 1980s. In 1981, Decter organized the Committee for the Free World, an international collection of writers, artists, and labor leaders dedicated to mounting a cultural defense against the "rising tide of totalitarianism." The next year, Kramer founded New Criterion magazine to defend high culture and aesthetic modernism against leftist detractors. Kristol began publishing National Interest in 1985 to analyze foreign policy from a "realist" perspective. The centrist New Republic and many mainstream newspapers welcomed articles by neoconservatives.

Success brought division and controversy. Moynihan, elected senator from New York in 1976, drifted back into the ranks of liberal Democrats. Kristol thought the Reagan administration was too harsh on the welfare state. Leading the most avid cold warriors, Podhoretz denied that the Soviet Union was becoming more democratic in the late 1980s and chided Reagan for pursuing detente in fact if not in name. The most bitter debates arrayed neoconservatives against traditionalist conservatives (who sometimes called themselves paleocons). These two intellectual factions within the Reagan coalition were separated by background, worldview, and questions of patronage. The neoconservatives were disproportionately Jewish, accepted much of the welfare state, and enthusiastically endorsed efforts to defeat international communism. The paleocons were devoutly Christians, opposed activist government in principle, and expressed reservations about both internationalist foreign policy and the cultural impact of capitalism. Tensions became apparent in 1981 when Reagan chose neocon William Bennett instead of a traditionalist to chair the National Endowment for the Humanities.

By 1986, traditionalists were accusing neoconservatives of excessive devotion to Israel. Neocons countered with some warrant that paleoconservatives harbored anti-Semites in their ranks. These factional disputes obscured the fact that neoconservatives fitted better into a coalition led by Ronald Reagan, a former liberal Democrat, who still celebrated the New Deal and wanted above all to win the Cold War.

By the early 1990s at the latest, a coherent neoconservative movement no longer existed, even though many erstwhile neocons remained active. As the Cold War ended and memories of the volatile 1960s faded, the serious scholars among them returned to scholarship. Bell, Glazer, and Lipset in particular wrote thoughtful analyses of American society. Moynihan served in the Senate until 2001. The most polemical neocons, notably Podhoretz and Kramer, persisted in attacking feminism, gay activism, and the alleged triumph of "political correctness" in higher education. Yet, after years of ideological cross-fertilization, such polemics were virtually indistinguishable from those of traditionalists. Second-generation neocons increasingly emphasized foreign policy, rarely defended the welfare state, and thus fit easily into the Republican coalitions that elected Presidents George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush. Irving Kristol's son William, who served as chief-of-staff to Vice President Dan Quayle and then edited the conservative magazine Weekly Standard, joked that any neoconservative who drifted back to the Democrats was a "pseudo-neocon." Although neoconservatism as a distinctive intellectual enterprise congealed and dispersed in less than two decades, the neocons provided a serious intellectual rationale for the Reagan administration's policies and helped to reorient the broader conservative movement that remained influential into the twenty-first century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bloom, Alexander. Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Dorrien, Gary J. The Neoconservative Mind: Politics, Culture, and the War of Ideology. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993.

Ehrman, John, The Rise of Neoconservatism: Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs 1945–1994. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995.

Gottfried, Paul, and Thomas Fleming. The Conservative Movement. Boston: Twayne, 1988.

Kristol, Irving. Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea. New York: Free Press, 1995.

Lora, Ron, and William Henry Longton, eds. The Conservative Press in Twentieth-Century America. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999.

Peele, Gillian. Revival and Reaction: The Right in Contemporary America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Steinfels, Peter. The Neoconservatives: The Men Who Are Changing America's Politics. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979.

Leo R.Ribuffo

See alsoConservatism ; Liberalism ; New York Intellectuals ; andvol. 9:The New Right: We're Ready to Lead .

Neoconservatism

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Neoconservatism is a term that emerged in the 1970s to describe a set of positions on U.S. domestic and foreign policy developed by a somewhat amorphous but identifiable group of political journalists and social scientists who previously had identified with the political left, often with the Trotskyist left, but had subsequently moved to the right as a reaction to the political and cultural struggles of the 1960s. The conversion of many of these figures from left to right is one of the senses of neo. By the time of the presidency of George W. Bush (2001–2009), neoconservatism, by then into its second generation and detached from its leftist origins, had become identified primarily with foreign policy, particularly with respect to the administration’s response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and to the motivations behind the decision to go to war with Iraq.

Although the label is said to have originated with the American social democrat Michael Harrington, who used it as a term of opprobrium, the first prominent self-described neoconservative was Irving Kristol, who had been the cofounder, with the English poet Stephen Spender, of the liberal anti-Communist (and, it turned out, surreptitiously Central Intelligence Agency–funded) journal Encounter. Along with the sociologist Daniel Bell, Kristol in 1965 founded the journal the Public Interest, which established what would become the neoconservative tone on domestic politics. This consisted largely of empirical and theoretical criticisms of government programs, grouped under the heading of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, aimed at alleviating racial discrimination and poverty. In 1985 Kristol founded another journal, the National Interest, which signaled the increasing neoconservative interest in and influence upon foreign policy. Over time neoconservatives also became well entrenched in Washington, D.C., think tanks, most notably the American Enterprise Institute, where Kristol became a fellow in 1988.

The budding neoconservatives first distinguished themselves from traditional conservatives by their application of social science methods to the criticism of government policies that they deemed partly misguided in intent and wholly detrimental in consequence. Their principal themes were determined by reactions to the turmoil, and increasing militancy, of the civil rights movement in American society at large and campus unrest over civil rights, educational policies, and the Vietnam War in particular. Neoconservatives came to see the U.S. system as on the cusp of a crisis generated by the affluence produced by a successful capitalism. That affluence threatened to undermine itself by eroding its implicit, generally overlooked moral foundations, including the virtues of deferred gratification and self-discipline. Predominantly the products of immigrant families and of public education, the neoconservatives balked at the perceived decline in individual initiative born of strong family encouragement and what they saw as the loss of civic consciousness and civilized behavior in a self-indulgent, permissive culture. Government programs aiming at economic redistribution through such practices as minority quotas, preferential hiring, and welfare payments only aggravated the problems where they did not directly contribute to them.

Whereas traditional conservatives and libertarians emphasized the need to cut back on government programs in general and to exercise fiscal responsibility in balancing the federal budget, the neoconservatives tended to support expansive government action on two fronts: domestically, in an aggressive assault on what they deemed to be the pernicious moral decline in the United States; and externally, in a muscular foreign policy predicated upon the expansion of U.S. military power and ideological warfare. Moral values, as they understood them, thus stood at the center of both policy dimensions and tended to overshadow, where they did not replace, specific policy proposals. While they shared conservatives’ demands for tax cuts, neoconservatives were much more tolerant of budget deficits than their predecessors. They also categorically rejected traditional American conservatism’s disdain for foreign involvements, pushing instead for an aggressive foreign policy previously associated with anti-Communist liberals. These differences constitute the second sense of neo. Neoconservative thought, with its emphasis on social morality, is thus distinguished from Thatcherism as well as the broader trend in neoliberalism to extend market relations into all aspects of political and social life. It is also obviously opposed to libertarianism, with its “anything goes” attitude toward individual desires. But these differences also explain how neoconservatives, who were predominantly of Jewish origin, found common cause with Christian fundamentalists on some issues such as marriage and pornography, because the two groups shared the view that government should place morality at the center of its purposes and programs.

The first notable political evidence of neoconservative influence could be seen in the administration of Ronald Reagan (1981–1989), particularly in Reagan’s rejection of the policy of détente with the Soviet Union and emphasis on challenging the USSR through a military buildup and the promotion of anti-Communist insurgencies worldwide. Most famously, Reagan’s characterization of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” often has been ascribed to the neoconservative emphasis upon introducing moral language into foreign policy. It was the alleged success of Reagan’s foreign policy in bringing the Soviet Union to its knees that inspired the second generation of neoconservatives, led by Irving Kristol’s son, William Kristol, founder and editor of the Weekly Standard, to challenge the foreign policy positions taken by George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton for embracing a form of moral relativism and realism rather than the forceful assertion of American values as a fundamental aspect of U.S. national interests. Underlying the neoconservative challenge was the idea that reviving a moral language in foreign policy would reverberate domestically. This challenge bore fruit in the younger Bush’s policies and rhetoric after September 11.

By time of the 2006 midterm elections, the neoconservative project of asserting American values in the Middle East had been seen largely as a disaster because of the war in Iraq, though various neoconservative figures who had been in or around the administration blamed the failures on the execution of the war by others, including President Bush and his secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, rather than on the merits of the neoconservative policy behind it. But the identification of neoconservatism with a failed moralizing foreign policy may ultimately prove to be neoconservatism’s Achilles’s heel.

SEE ALSO Bush, George W.; Central Intelligence Agency, U.S.; Conservatism; Foreign Policy; Fundamentalism; Fundamentalism, Christian; Great Society, The; Iraq-U.S. War; Liberalism; Militarism; Neoliberalism; Reagan, Ronald; September 11, 2001; Terrorism; Thatcher, Margaret; Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; Welfare State

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fukuyama, Francis. 2006. America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press.

Kristol, Irving. 2003. The Neoconservative Persuasion. Weekly Standard 8 (August 25).

Kristol, William, and Robert Kagan. 1996. Toward a NeoReaganite Foreign Policy. Foreign Affairs 75 (4): 18–32.

Thompson, Michael J., ed. 2007. Confronting the New Conservatism: The Rise of the Right in America. New York: New York University Press.

Nicholas Xenos