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