neocon

Neoconservatism (colloquially neocon) is a political movement which began in the United States during the 1960s among liberal hawks who became disenchanted with the increasingly pacifist Democratic Party along with the growing New Left and counterculture of the 1960s. Neoconservatives typically advocate the unilateral promotion of democracy and interventionism in international relations together with a militaristic and realist philosophy of "peace through strength". They are known for espousing opposition to communism and radical politics.

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 and war hawks who support aggressive militarism or neocolonialism. Historically speaking, the term ''neoconservative'' refers to Americans 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. They spoke out against 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.
*Cited in:
*Reprinted as chapter 11 in Harrington's 1976 book ''The Twilight of Capitalism'', pp. 165–272. 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 turn of the Democratic Party in the 1970s. Neoconservatives perceived in the new left liberalism an ideological effort to distance the Democratic Party and American liberalism from Cold War liberalism as it was espoused by former Presidents such as 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 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 Neo-conservatives.

History

According to James Nuechterlein, prior to the formation of the movement, all future 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 New Left, which Norman Podhoretz said was too sympathetic to the counterculture and too alienated from 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'' (1965–2005), 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 (SP) and its successor party, the Social Democrats, USA (SDUSA). 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. (Most of the left-wing of the party, led by Michael Harrington, immediately abandoned the SDUSA.) 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.

The neoconservatives rejected the countercultural New Left and what they considered anti-Americanism in the non-interventionism of the activism against the Vietnam War. After the anti-war faction took control of the party during 1972 and nominated George McGovern, the Democrats among the neoconservatives 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. 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 (2004) article, Michael Lind also wrote:

Leo Strauss and his students

C. Bradley Thompson, a professor at Clemson University, claims that most influential neoconservatives refer explicitly to the theoretical ideas in the philosophy of Leo Strauss (1899–1973), 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 (1938–1948) and the University of Chicago (1949–1969).

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 ( classical republican and modern republican), 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 (1991) 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 (2009) 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. Catherine H. Zuckert, Michael P. Zuckert, ''The Truth about Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy and American Democracy'', University of Chicago Press, 2008, p. 4ff. 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 (2008) call Straussian Wilsonianism (or Straussian idealism), 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.

Jeane Kirkpatrick

A theory of neoconservative foreign policy during the final years of the Cold War was articulated by Jeane Kirkpatrick in "Dictatorships and Double Standards", published in '' Commentary Magazine'' during November 1979. Kirkpatrick criticized the foreign policy of Jimmy Carter, which endorsed détente with the Soviet Union. She later served the Reagan Administration as Ambassador to the United Nations.

Skepticism towards democracy promotion

In "Dictatorships and Double Standards", Kirkpatrick distinguished between authoritarian regimes and the totalitarian regimes such as the Soviet Union. She suggested that in some countries democracy was not tenable and the United States had a choice between endorsing authoritarian governments, which might evolve into democracies, or Marxist–Leninist regimes, which she argued had never been ended once they achieved totalitarian control. In such tragic circumstances, she argued that allying with authoritarian governments might be prudent. Kirkpatrick argued that by demanding rapid liberalization in traditionally autocratic countries, the Carter administration had delivered those countries to Marxist–Leninists that were even more repressive. She further accused the Carter administration of a "double standard" and of never having applied its rhetoric on the necessity of liberalization to communist governments. The essay compares traditional autocracies and Communist regimes:

Kirkpatrick concluded that while the United States should encourage liberalization and democracy in autocratic countries, it should not do so when the government risks violent overthrow and should expect gradual change rather than immediate transformation. She wrote: "No idea holds greater sway in the mind of educated Americans than the belief that it is possible to democratize governments, anytime and anywhere, under any circumstances ... Decades, if not centuries, are normally required for people to acquire the necessary disciplines and habits. In Britain, the road o democratic governmenttook seven centuries to traverse. ... The speed with which armies collapse, bureaucracies abdicate, and social structures dissolve once the autocrat is removed frequently surprises American policymakers".

1990s

During the 1990s, neoconservatives were once again opposed to the foreign policy establishment, both during the Republican Administration of President George H. W. Bush and that of his Democratic successor, President Bill Clinton. Many critics charged that the neoconservatives lost their influence as a result of the end of the Soviet Union.

After the decision of George H. W. Bush to leave Saddam Hussein in power after the first Iraq War during 1991, many neoconservatives considered this policy and the decision not to endorse indigenous dissident groups such as the Kurds and Shiites in their 1991–1992 resistance to Hussein as a betrayal of democratic principles.

Some of those same targets of criticism would later become fierce advocates of neoconservative policies. During 1992, referring to the first Iraq War, then United States Secretary of Defense and future Vice President Richard Cheney said:

A key neoconservative policy-forming document, '' A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm'' (commonly known as the "Clean Break" report) was published in 1996 by a study group of American-Jewish neoconservative strategists led by Richard Perle on the behest of newly-elected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The report called for a new, more aggressive Middle East policy on the part of the United States in defense of the interests of Israel, including the removal of Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and the containment of Syria through a series of proxy wars, the outright rejection of any solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict that would include a Palestinian state, and an alliance between Israel, Turkey and Jordan against Iraq, Syria and Iran. Former United States Assistant Secretary of Defense and leading neoconservative Richard Perle was the "Study Group Leader", but the final report included ideas from fellow neoconservatives, pro-Israel right-wingers and affiliates of Netanyahu's Likud party, such as Douglas Feith, James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks Jr., Jonathan Torop, David Wurmser, Meyrav Wurmser, and IASPS president Robert Loewenberg.

Within a few years of the Gulf War in Iraq, many neoconservatives were endorsing the ousting of Saddam Hussein. On 19 February 1998, an open letter to President Clinton was published, signed by dozens of pundits, many identified with neoconservatism and later related groups such as the Project for the New American Century, urging decisive action to remove Saddam from power.

Neoconservatives were also members of the so-called " Blue Team", which argued for a confrontational policy toward the People's Republic of China (the communist government of mainland China) and for strong military and diplomatic endorsement of the Republic of China (also known as Taiwan), as they believed that China will be a threat to the United States in the future.

Early 2000s: Administration of George W. Bush and Bush Doctrine

The Bush campaign and the early Bush administration did not exhibit strong endorsement of neoconservative principles. As a presidential candidate, Bush had argued for a restrained foreign policy, stating his opposition to the idea of nation-building. Also early in the administration, some neoconservatives criticized Bush's administration as insufficiently supportive of Israel and suggested Bush's foreign policies were not substantially different from those of President Clinton.

Bush's policies changed dramatically immediately after the 11 September 2001 attacks.

During Bush's State of the Union speech of January 2002, he named Iraq, Iran and North Korea as states that "constitute an axis of evil" and "pose a grave and growing danger". Bush suggested the possibility of preemptive war: "I will not wait on events, while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons".

Some major defense and national-security persons have been quite critical of what they believed was a neoconservative influence in getting the United States to go to war against Iraq.

Former Nebraska Republican U.S. senator and Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel

HOME


Content is Copyleft
Website design, code, and AI is Copyrighted (c) 2014-2017 by Stephen Payne


Consider donating to Wikimedia



As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases