Neoconservatism
Neoconservatism is a political movement that combines features of traditional political and social conservatism with individualism and a qualified endorsement of free markets along with the assertive promotion of democracy and national interest, including through military means.
It began in the United States during the 1970s among liberal hawks who became disenchanted with the Democratic Party along with the growing New Left and 1960s counterculture.
Many adherents of neoconservatism became politically influential during Republican presidential administrations from the 1960s to the 2000s, peaking in influence during the presidency of George W. Bush, when they played a major role in promoting and planning the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Prominent neoconservatives in the Bush administration included Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, Richard Perle, Paul Bremer, and Douglas Feith.
Although U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had not self-identified as neoconservatives, they worked closely alongside neoconservative officials in designing key aspects of the Bush administration's foreign policy, especially in their support for Israel, promotion of American influence in the Arab world and launching the war on terror. The Bush administration's domestic and foreign policies were heavily influenced by major ideologues affiliated with neoconservatism, such as Bernard Lewis, Lulu Schwartz, Richard and Daniel Pipes, David Horowitz, and Robert Kagan.
Critics of neoconservatism have used the term to describe foreign policy war hawks who support aggressive militarism or neocolonialism. Historically speaking, the term neoconservative refers to a group of Trotskyist academics from New York who moved from the anti-Stalinist left to conservatism during the 1960s and 1970s. The movement had its intellectual roots in the magazine Commentary, edited by Norman Podhoretz, after they spoke out against the moral relativism of the New Left, and in that way helped define the movement.
Terminology
The term neoconservative was popularized in the United States during 1973 by the socialist leader Michael Harrington, who used the term to define Daniel Bell, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Irving Kristol, whose ideologies differed from Harrington's. Earlier during 1973, he had described some of the same ideas in a brief contribution to a symposium on welfare sponsored by Commentary.The neoconservative label was adopted by Irving Kristol in his 1979 article "Confessions of a True, Self-Confessed 'Neoconservative. His ideas have been influential since the 1950s, when he co-founded and edited the magazine Encounter.
Another source was Norman Podhoretz, editor of the magazine Commentary, from 1960 to 1995. By 1982, Podhoretz was terming himself a neoconservative in The New York Times Magazine article titled "The Neoconservative Anguish over Reagan's Foreign Policy".
The term itself was the product of a rejection among formerly self-identified liberals of what they considered a growing leftward, antimilitaristic turn of the Democratic Party in the 1970s. Neoconservatives perceived an ideological effort to distance the Democratic Party and American liberalism from the hawkish Cold War liberalism as espoused by former Presidents Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. After the Vietnam War, the anti-communist, internationalist and interventionist roots of this Cold War liberalism among the Left seemed increasingly brittle to the neoconservatives. As a consequence, they migrated to the Republican Party and formed one pillar of the Reagan Coalition and of the conservative movement. Hence, they became the new conservatives, supplanting the old conservatives, who were more nationalist and non-interventionist.
History
According to James Nuechterlein, prior to the formation of the movement, those who would become neoconservatives endorsed the civil rights movement, racial integration, and Martin Luther King Jr.Neoconservatism was initiated by liberals' repudiation of the Cold War and by the "New Politics" of the American Left, which Norman Podhoretz said was too sympathetic to the radical counterculture that alienated the majority of the population, and by the repudiation of "anti-anticommunism" by liberals, which included substantial endorsement of Marxist–Leninist politics by the New Left during the late 1960s. Some neoconservatives were particularly alarmed by what they believed were the antisemitic sentiments of Black Power advocates. Irving Kristol edited the journal The Public Interest, featuring economists and political scientists, which emphasized ways that government planning in the liberal state had produced unintended harmful consequences. Some early neoconservative political figures were disillusioned Democratic politicians and intellectuals, such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who served in the Nixon and Ford administrations, and Jeane Kirkpatrick, who served as United States Ambassador to the United Nations in the Reagan administration. Some left-wing academics such as Frank Meyer and James Burnham eventually became associated with the conservative movement at this time.
A substantial number of neoconservatives were originally moderate socialists who were originally associated with the moderate wing of the Socialist Party of America and its successor party, the Social Democrats, USA. Max Shachtman, a former Trotskyist theorist who developed strong feelings of antipathy towards the New Left, had numerous devotees in the SDUSA with strong links to George Meany's AFL-CIO. Following Shachtman and Meany, this faction led the SP to oppose immediate withdrawal from the Vietnam War and oppose George McGovern in the Democratic primary race and, to some extent, the general election. They also chose to cease their own party-building and concentrated on working within the Democratic Party, eventually influencing it through the Democratic Leadership Council. Thus the Socialist Party dissolved in 1972, and the SDUSA emerged that year. SDUSA leaders associated with neoconservatism include Carl Gershman, Penn Kemble, Joshua Muravchik and Bayard Rustin.
Norman Podhoretz's magazine Commentary, originally a journal of liberalism, became a major publication for neoconservatives during the 1970s. Commentary published an article by Jeane Kirkpatrick, an early and prototypical neoconservative.
Rejecting the American New Left and McGovern's New Politics
As the policies of the New Left made the Democrats increasingly leftist, these neoconservative intellectuals became disillusioned with President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society domestic programs. The influential 1970 bestseller The Real Majority by Ben Wattenberg expressed that the "real majority" of the electorate endorsed economic interventionism but also social conservatism and that it could be disastrous for Democrats to adopt liberal positions on certain social and crime issues.These liberal intellectuals rejected the countercultural New Left and what they considered anti-Americanism in their pacifist activism against the Vietnam War. After the anti-war faction took control of the party during 1972 and nominated George McGovern, these liberal intellectuals endorsed Washington Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson for his unsuccessful 1972 and 1976 campaigns for president. Among those who worked for Jackson were the incipient neoconservatives Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, and Richard Perle.
Neoconservatism can also be traced back to political and social conflicts of the late 1960s, particularly the 1967 Six-Day War in the Middle East and the 1968 New York City teachers' strike. These events contributed to a political realignment among these liberals, many of whom became disenchanted with segments of the left that they viewed as increasingly radical or intolerant, including the use of anti-Semitic themes in political discourse. During this period, these figures began to adopt more conservative positions while also developing a stronger identification with Jewish interests, a combination that later influenced neoconservatism’s generally pro-Israel orientation.
During the late 1970s, neoconservatives tended to endorse Ronald Reagan, the Republican who promised to confront Soviet expansionism. Neoconservatives organized in the American Enterprise Institute and The Heritage Foundation to counter the liberal establishment. Author Keith Preston named the successful effort on behalf of neoconservatives such as George Will and Irving Kristol to cancel Reagan's 1980 nomination of Mel Bradford, a Southern Paleoconservative academic whose regionalist focus and writings about Abraham Lincoln and Reconstruction alienated the more cosmopolitan and progress-oriented neoconservatives, to the leadership of the National Endowment for the Humanities in favor of longtime Democrat William Bennett as emblematic of the neoconservative movement establishing hegemony over mainstream American conservatism.
In another article, Michael Lind also wrote:
Leo Strauss and his students
, a professor at Clemson University, claims that most influential neoconservatives refer explicitly to the theoretical ideas in the philosophy of Leo Strauss, although there are several writers who claim that in doing so they may draw upon meaning that Strauss himself did not endorse. Eugene Sheppard notes: "Much scholarship tends to understand Strauss as an inspirational founder of American neoconservatism". Strauss was a refugee from Nazi Germany who taught at the New School for Social Research in New York and the University of Chicago.Strauss asserted that "the crisis of the West consists in the West's having become uncertain of its purpose". His solution was a restoration of the vital ideas and faith that in the past had sustained the moral purpose of the West. The Greek classics, political philosophy and the Judeo-Christian heritage are the essentials of the Great Tradition in Strauss's work. Strauss emphasized the spirit of the Greek classics and Thomas G. West argues that for Strauss the American Founding Fathers were correct in their understanding of the classics in their principles of justice.
For Strauss, political community is defined by convictions about justice and happiness rather than by sovereignty and force. A classical liberal, he repudiated the philosophy of John Locke as a bridge to 20th-century historicism and nihilism and instead defended liberal democracy as closer to the spirit of the classics than other modern regimes. For Strauss, the American awareness of ineradicable evil in human nature and hence the need for morality, was a beneficial outgrowth of the pre-modern Western tradition. O'Neill notes that Strauss wrote little about American topics, but his students wrote a great deal and that Strauss's influence caused his students to reject historicism and positivism as morally relativist positions. They instead promoted a so-called Aristotelian perspective on America that produced a qualified defense of its liberal constitutionalism. Strauss's emphasis on moral clarity led the Straussians to develop an approach to international relations that Catherine and Michael Zuckert call Straussian Wilsonianism, the defense of liberal democracy in the face of its vulnerability.
Strauss influenced The Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, William Bennett, Newt Gingrich, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, as well as Paul Wolfowitz.