Neoconservatism
Based on Wikipedia: Neoconservatism
In 2003, when American tanks rolled into Baghdad, the war's architects weren't traditional conservatives. They were former leftists who'd made a remarkable political journey from anti-Stalinist socialism to hawkish interventionism. They were neoconservatives, and they'd just reached the peak of their influence over American foreign policy.
The story of how this happened is one of the stranger ideological migrations in American politics.
From Trotskyists to War Hawks
Neoconservatism—colloquially called "neocon"—is a political movement that blends traditional conservatism with an aggressive promotion of democracy and American interests abroad, often through military force. But unlike most conservative movements, it didn't emerge from the right wing at all.
It began in the 1970s among liberal intellectuals who'd grown disgusted with the Democratic Party's leftward drift. These were the so-called "liberal hawks"—people who'd supported the Cold War, backed strong national defense, and believed in American power. When the New Left and the 1960s counterculture took over the Democratic Party, these hawks felt politically homeless.
Many of them had remarkably radical pasts. A substantial number were originally moderate socialists associated with the Socialist Party of America and its successor, Social Democrats USA. Some had connections to Max Shachtman, a former Trotskyist theorist who'd developed a fierce antipathy toward the New Left. This socialist background would later become ammunition for critics who accused neoconservatives of importing revolutionary fervor into American foreign policy, just redirecting it toward spreading democracy instead of socialism.
The Intellectual Godfather: Leo Strauss
The philosophical backbone of neoconservatism owes much to Leo Strauss, a German-Jewish refugee who fled Nazi Germany and taught at the University of Chicago from 1949 to 1969. Strauss wasn't a political operative—he was a political philosopher obsessed with ancient texts and the Western tradition.
Strauss believed that "the crisis of the West consists in the West's having become uncertain of its purpose." Modern liberalism, he argued, had drifted into moral relativism. His solution was a return to what he called the Great Tradition: the Greek classics, classical republican philosophy, and the Judeo-Christian heritage.
Here's where it gets interesting. Strauss rejected the philosophy of John Locke—the thinker most Americans learn as the foundation of liberal democracy. Strauss saw Locke as a bridge to twentieth-century historicism and nihilism. Instead, Strauss argued that liberal democracy should be defended as closer to the spirit of ancient Athens and Rome than other modern systems.
For Strauss, political community wasn't just about sovereignty and force. It was defined by shared convictions about justice and happiness. This emphasis on moral clarity profoundly influenced his students, who developed what scholars call "Straussian Wilsonianism"—a defense of liberal democracy as vulnerable and precious, requiring active protection in a dangerous world.
Among Strauss's intellectual descendants: Paul Wolfowitz, one of the chief architects of the Iraq War. Also Bill Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard. Also Supreme Court justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Strauss himself wrote little about American politics, but his students transformed his ideas into a philosophy of muscular American engagement abroad.
The Migration to Reagan
The neoconservative exodus from the Democratic Party accelerated through the 1970s. These intellectuals had supported civil rights, racial integration, and Martin Luther King Junior. They weren't traditional conservatives who opposed the New Deal. But they couldn't stomach what they saw happening on the left.
They were alarmed by what they perceived as the New Left's anti-Americanism, particularly in its opposition to the Vietnam War. Some neoconservatives were disturbed by what they believed were antisemitic sentiments emerging from Black Power advocates. They rejected what Norman Podhoretz called the Democratic Party's "anti-anticommunism"—a willingness to excuse or even endorse Marxist-Leninist politics.
Irving Kristol, often called the godfather of neoconservatism, edited a journal called The Public Interest from 1965 to 2005. The journal featured economists and political scientists examining how government planning in the liberal welfare state had produced unintended harmful consequences. This empirical critique of Great Society programs put Kristol and his circle increasingly at odds with Democratic orthodoxy.
In 1972, when the anti-war faction took control of the Democratic Party and nominated George McGovern, many of these liberal intellectuals backed Washington Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson instead. Jackson was a hawk—pro-defense, pro-Israel, anti-Soviet. Working for Jackson's unsuccessful campaigns were three young staffers: Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, and Richard Perle. All three would later play crucial roles in planning the Iraq War.
By the late 1970s, neoconservatives were endorsing Ronald Reagan. Reagan promised to confront Soviet expansionism, which aligned perfectly with the neoconservative worldview. They organized through institutions like the American Enterprise Institute and The Heritage Foundation, building an intellectual infrastructure to challenge the liberal establishment.
The term "neoconservative" itself was initially an insult. In 1973, socialist leader Michael Harrington used it to describe Daniel Bell, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Irving Kristol—former allies who'd broken ranks. But Kristol embraced the label in a 1979 article titled "Confessions of a True, Self-Confessed Neoconservative." The name stuck.
Dictatorships and Double Standards
The clearest statement of neoconservative foreign policy came from Jeane Kirkpatrick in a 1979 Commentary magazine essay called "Dictatorships and Double Standards." The article was a devastating critique of President Jimmy Carter's foreign policy and its embrace of détente with the Soviet Union.
Kirkpatrick made a controversial distinction. She argued there was a fundamental difference between authoritarian regimes—like right-wing military dictatorships—and totalitarian regimes like the Soviet Union. Authoritarian governments, she suggested, might evolve into democracies over time. Totalitarian communist regimes, by contrast, had never voluntarily liberalized once they achieved full control.
Traditional autocrats, she wrote, "do not disturb the habitual rhythms of work and leisure, habitual places of residence, habitual patterns of family and personal relations." Because the miseries of traditional life are familiar, ordinary people can cope. Revolutionary communist regimes, however, "claim jurisdiction over the whole life of the society and make demands for change that so violate internalized values and habits that inhabitants flee by the tens of thousands."
Her conclusion was pragmatic and cold-blooded: In some tragic circumstances, the United States should ally with authoritarian governments rather than risk their overthrow by Marxist-Leninists. Pushing for rapid democratization in traditional autocracies, as Carter had done, risked delivering those countries to even more repressive communist rule.
Kirkpatrick's essay articulated what became a core neoconservative principle: American power should be used assertively, but with realistic expectations. Democracy takes centuries to develop—Britain's road took seven centuries, she noted. American policymakers who believed they could "democratize governments, anytime and anywhere, under any circumstances" were dangerously naive.
Ronald Reagan read the essay and was so impressed he appointed Kirkpatrick as Ambassador to the United Nations. Her framework would guide American policy toward anti-communist authoritarians throughout the Reagan years.
The Bush Years: Apex and Collapse
Neoconservatives had real influence during the Reagan administration, but they reached their peak under George W. Bush. After the September 11th attacks, neoconservative ideas about American power, regime change, and spreading democracy found a receptive audience in a traumatized nation.
The Bush administration was stocked with neoconservative officials: Paul Wolfowitz as Deputy Secretary of Defense, Richard Perle on the Defense Policy Board, Douglas Feith as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Elliott Abrams handling Middle East affairs at the National Security Council. Paul Bremer would later oversee the occupation of Iraq.
Importantly, the most powerful figures—Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld—weren't self-identified neoconservatives. They were traditional Republican hawks. But they worked closely with neoconservative officials and embraced key neoconservative priorities: strong support for Israel, promotion of American influence in the Arab world, and an aggressive war on terror.
The administration was also influenced by neoconservative intellectuals outside government: Bernard Lewis, the eminent historian of Islam; Richard Pipes and his son Daniel, both hard-line anti-communists turned Middle East hawks; David Horowitz, a former radical leftist turned conservative polemicist; and Robert Kagan, who argued that Europeans lived in a Kantian paradise of perpetual peace while Americans inhabited a Hobbesian world requiring strength.
The Iraq War was the ultimate neoconservative project. It embodied their faith that American military power could transform Middle Eastern dictatorships into democracies, that the removal of a brutal authoritarian would unleash liberal impulses, that the demonstration of American resolve would cow potential adversaries.
It failed catastrophically.
The Collapse and the Critics
As Iraq descended into sectarian violence and the promised weapons of mass destruction never materialized, neoconservatism became politically toxic. Critics on both left and right used "neocon" as a term of abuse—war hawks promoting aggressive militarism, even neocolonialism.
The movement that had begun as a migration of anti-Soviet liberals now looked to many like a reckless ideology that had gotten America into an unwinnable war. Michael Lind wrote in 2004 that neoconservatism had shrunk to "a shrunken remnant of the original broad neocon coalition." Many of the "paleoliberals"—the old Scoop Jackson Democrats—had drifted back to the Democratic center once the Cold War ended.
What remained were the true believers and the literal heirs—people like William Kristol and John Podhoretz, sons of Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, carrying on their fathers' ideological project. The younger generation had never been on the left themselves, but they inherited the fervor of converts.
The Paradox of Neoconservatism
Neoconservatism remains one of the most paradoxical movements in American politics. It combines conservative social values with interventionist foreign policy. It emerged from the left but became a pillar of the Republican coalition. It champions democracy abroad while showing pragmatic tolerance for friendly autocrats. It emphasizes moral clarity while making realpolitik calculations about authoritarian allies.
The neoconservatives were right about some things. The Soviet Union was an evil empire that needed confronting, not accommodating. American power, when used wisely, can be a force for good. Democracy and human rights aren't merely Western conceits but universal aspirations.
But they were catastrophically wrong about others. Iraq proved that democracy cannot be implanted at gunpoint, that military force creates as many problems as it solves, that American power has limits, and that moral certainty is no substitute for understanding the societies you propose to transform.
The movement that began with disillusioned liberals in New York reading rooms ended with American soldiers patrolling hostile streets in Baghdad. That journey from Commentary magazine to the Green Zone tells us something important about the power of ideas in politics—and about what happens when intellectual certainty meets the messy reality of the world.