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.
