# Neoconservatism The ideological tendency that began in the 1960s and 70s as a revolt of center-left intellectuals — mostly Jewish, mostly New York, many formerly Trotskyist — against the Democratic Party's drift on foreign policy, crime, welfare, and the counterculture; transformed in the 1980s into the hawkish foreign-policy wing of Reaganism; peaked in the 2000s as the architects of the [[Iraq War]] and the global "democracy promotion" project; and collapsed as a Republican force after the [[MAGA]] takeover in 2016, with most of its leading figures either leaving the party or sharply reducing their profile. Neoconservatism is often conflated with "conservative hawkishness" generally, but as a specific intellectual tradition it is more distinctive: it believed that American liberal democracy was a universal good whose global propagation was a moral obligation, and that American military power was the appropriate instrument for that propagation. This belief set it apart from [[Paleoconservatism]] (which opposed foreign entanglements), from traditional realism (which was skeptical of democratic missionary projects), and from libertarianism (which rejected interventionism on economic and philosophical grounds). Today it is an *orphan* tradition on the American right. Its successor ecosystem — *The Bulwark*, *The Dispatch*, the Never Trump diaspora — occupies a small but intellectually disproportionate niche in opposition to MAGA, increasingly allied with centrist Democrats on questions of democratic preservation. ## Core Tenets (by era) Neoconservatism's doctrines shifted substantially across its three generations. The through-line is a disposition, not a fixed program. ### First Generation (1965–1980s): Domestic Policy Skepticism - Critique of [[Great Society]] liberalism — "programs that fail" and the "law of unintended consequences" - Defense of bourgeois virtues, hard work, and the traditional family against the counterculture - Skepticism of affirmative action and race-conscious policy - Support for Israel and concern about growing Soviet threat - "A liberal who has been mugged by reality" ([[Irving Kristol]]) ### Second Generation (1980s–1990s): Cold War Hawkishness - Anti-Communist maximalism; moral clarity about the Soviet Union as "evil empire" - Democratic dissident solidarity (Natan Sharansky, [[Václav Havel]], Andrei Sakharov) - Support for insurgencies against Soviet-aligned regimes (Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Angola) - Reagan Doctrine as operational expression - Influence on Reagan-era defense buildup and arms-control skepticism ### Third Generation (1990s–2000s): Benevolent Hegemony - American "unipolarity" is a historical opportunity and moral responsibility - Democracy promotion as grand strategy, including by military means - Regime change in "rogue states" (Iraq, Iran, [[Syria]], North Korea) - Large defense budgets, forward basing, primacy over balance-of-power - The [[Bush Doctrine]] of preventive war and the [[Iraq War]] as the doctrine's implementation - *Kristol-Kagan "Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy"* (1996) and PNAC's *Rebuilding America's Defenses* (2000) as canonical statements ## Intellectual Sources ### The New York Intellectuals Many first-generation neocons came from the 1930s-40s New York Jewish intellectual milieu — often with Trotskyist or socialist pasts (Kristol, Podhoretz, Sidney Hook, Daniel Bell) who migrated right through Cold War liberalism into conservatism. This lineage gave neoconservatism its characteristic style: ideologically intense, essayistic, polemical, deeply invested in the small magazine as political form. ### Leo Strauss and the Straussians [[Leo Strauss]]'s University of Chicago seminars produced a generation of political philosophers (Allan Bloom, Harry Jaffa, [[Harvey Mansfield]]) whose students populated the second and third-generation neocon policy apparatus ([[Paul Wolfowitz]], William Kristol, [[Francis Fukuyama]]). The Straussian connection is real but often overstated — not every neocon is a Straussian, and "Straussianism" itself is internally divided (East Coast vs. West Coast / Claremont). ### Cold War Liberalism Reinhold Niebuhr, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and the anti-Communist liberal tradition of *Commentary* under Norman Podhoretz in the 1960s-70s. Neoconservatism emerged partly as the argument that the Democratic Party had abandoned this tradition — Carter and McGovern-era foreign policy was too accommodationist toward the USSR. ### Scoop Jackson Democrats The circle around Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson (D-WA) in the 1970s — including Wolfowitz, Perle, Elliott Abrams, and Jeane Kirkpatrick — bridged the Democratic anti-Communist tradition into what became second-generation Republican neoconservatism. Kirkpatrick's switch to the GOP in 1980 was emblematic. ## Key Thinkers ### [[Irving Kristol]] (1920–2009) — "The Godfather" Co-founder of *[[The Public Interest]]* (1965) with Daniel Bell and *[[The National Interest]]* (1985). Coined many of the movement's defining phrases. His essay "What Is a Neoconservative?" (1979) is the canonical self-definition. Father of [[William Kristol]]. ### [[Norman Podhoretz]] (b. 1930) Editor of *[[Commentary Magazine]]* (1960–1995). The movement's most prolific polemicist and the architect of its turn from the left. Author of *Breaking Ranks*, *Ex-Friends*, *World War IV*. ### [[William Kristol]] (b. 1952) Founding editor of *[[The Weekly Standard]]* (1995–2018). Political operator as much as intellectual. Founded the [[Project for the New American Century]] (PNAC) with [[Robert Kagan]] in 1997. Now publisher of *[[The Bulwark]]* and among the most prominent Never Trump conservatives. ### [[Robert Kagan]] (b. 1958) Foreign policy theorist. Author of *Of Paradise and Power* (2003), *The Jungle Grows Back* (2018), *Rebellion* (2024). The most sustained intellectual voice for liberal internationalist hawkishness. Husband of Victoria Nuland. Left the Republican Party during Trump I. ### [[Paul Wolfowitz]] (b. 1943) Strauss student. Policy operator — Deputy Secretary of Defense under Bush II, architect of the Iraq War's postwar assumptions, author of the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance that prefigured the Bush Doctrine. ### [[Charles Krauthammer]] (1950–2018) Columnist at the *Washington Post* and [[Fox News]] commentator. Coined the "unipolar moment" (1990) and argued for its moral extension into "democratic realism." The most widely-read neocon voice in mass media. ### [[Jeane Kirkpatrick]] (1926–2006) Reagan's UN Ambassador. Author of "Dictatorships and Double Standards" (1979), which argued that traditional authoritarianisms were reformable in ways totalitarianisms were not — a foundational essay for Reagan-era foreign policy. ### [[David Frum]], [[Max Boot]], [[Bret Stephens]], [[Jennifer Rubin]] The post-2003 second tier of neocon columnists who carried the movement into the 2010s and then split, with varying degrees of loudness, from the Republican Party in the Trump era. Frum's defection (*Atlantic* senior editor) was emblematic; Boot's "I Left the Republican Party" (2018) is the canonical exit essay. ## Major Institutions - **[[Commentary Magazine]]** — The American Jewish Committee's monthly, converted into the movement's flagship under Podhoretz; now edited by John Podhoretz (Norman's son) - **[[The Public Interest]]** — Domestic-policy quarterly (1965–2005), Kristol's other vehicle - **[[The Weekly Standard]]** — Bill Kristol's political weekly (1995–2018); shut down after its break with Trump - **[[Project for the New American Century]] (PNAC)** — Think tank (1997–2006), principal advocacy vehicle for the Iraq War - **[[American Enterprise Institute]]** — Hosted many neocon scholars; a broader conservative institution but functionally the neocon policy home in the 2000s - **[[Hudson Institute]]** — Another policy home, especially in the 2010s - **[[Foundation for Defense of Democracies]]** — Post-9/11 neocon-aligned think tank, hawkish on Iran and terrorism policy - **[[The Dispatch]]** ([[Jonah Goldberg]], Steve Hayes) and **[[The Bulwark]]** (Bill Kristol, Sarah Longwell, Charlie Sykes) — The Never Trump successor infrastructure - **The Reagan Institute / [[Ronald Reagan]] Presidential Foundation** — Custodial institution for the Reaganite foreign-policy tradition; partially neocon-aligned ## Peak: PNAC, Iraq, and the Bush Doctrine The [[Project for the New American Century]] (1997–2006), co-founded by Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan, is the most consequential neoconservative institution. Its 2000 report *Rebuilding America's Defenses* argued for dramatically expanded defense spending, forward basing, regime change in Iraq, and American military primacy as grand strategy. After September 11, 2001, the PNAC agenda substantially became Bush administration policy — executed by a cluster of PNAC signatories inside the administration: Wolfowitz (DoD), Rumsfeld (DoD), Cheney (VP), Feith (DoD policy), Perle (Defense Policy Board), Elliott Abrams (NSC), Zalmay Khalilzad (ambassador). The [[Iraq War]] is the high-water mark and the beginning of the end. The war's failure to produce a democratic Iraq, to contain Iranian influence, to prevent sectarian civil war, or to deter WMD proliferation elsewhere is the single most damaging event in neoconservatism's intellectual history. Most of the movement's post-2008 energy has been spent either defending, qualifying, or regretting the war. ## Decline and the Never Trump Exodus Neoconservatism was already politically weakened before 2016 — the 2008 financial crisis, Obama's withdrawal from Iraq, and the Republican grassroots' growing skepticism of foreign adventurism had reduced its influence inside the GOP. Trump's 2016 primary victory accelerated the decline into a rupture. Key breaks: - **"Against Trump" issue of *National Review*** (January 2016) — not strictly neocon but overlapping; Bill Kristol was a signatory - **Bill Kristol's PAC funding primary challengers and third-party efforts** (2016, 2020, 2024) - **Max Boot, "I Left the Republican Party"** (*Washington Post*, July 2018) - **David Frum, *Trumpocracy*** (2018) and his continuing tenure at *The Atlantic* - **Jennifer Rubin** moving from *Washington Post* center-right columnist to explicitly anti-Trump Democrat-aligned - **Robert Kagan** publicly registering as a Democrat during Trump I - **The closure of *The Weekly Standard*** (December 2018) — the most symbolic institutional death - **Founding of *The Bulwark*** (2018) as the Never Trump successor outlet - **Founding of *The Dispatch*** (2019) by Jonah Goldberg and Steve Hayes What remains of neoconservatism inside the Republican Party is a hawkish residue — support for Israel and aggressive Iran policy — that has been absorbed by MAGA's personalist-retribution framework rather than driven by democracy-promotion arguments. The *universalist* dimension of neoconservatism (democracy as grand strategy) has no home in contemporary Republican politics. ## Relationship to Adjacent Ideologies ### vs. [[Paleoconservatism]] The fundamental split on the American right for decades. Paleocons (Buchanan, Francis, Lew Rockwell, [[Paul Gottfried]]) opposed foreign interventionism, mass immigration, and what they saw as neocon hostility to the historical American nation. The Buchanan-Kristol feud of the 1990s foreshadowed the eventual MAGA/Paleocon victory over the neocon wing in 2016. ### vs. Realism (Brzezinski, Kissinger, Mearsheimer, Walt) Realists argued that neocon democracy-promotion misunderstood how states actually behave, that American primacy was finite, and that moralized foreign policy produced disaster in places like Iraq. Mearsheimer and Walt's *The Israel Lobby* (2007) was the sharpest paleo-realist critique of neoconservatism as specifically Israel-driven. Neocons regarded realists as morally obtuse and strategically defeatist. ### vs. Libertarianism (Cato, Ron Paul) Libertarians opposed neocon interventionism on constitutional and cost grounds. [[Ron Paul]]'s 2008 and 2012 campaigns were vehicles for anti-neocon libertarianism inside Republican primaries — direct precursor to some of Trump's anti-war rhetoric. ### vs. [[MAGA]] / Trumpism MAGA is the successful Republican rebellion against neoconservative foreign policy. Trump's explicit attack on the Iraq War during the 2016 primary — calling it "a big, fat mistake" and attacking [[Jeb Bush]] on the debate stage — was unimaginable Republican rhetoric two election cycles earlier. The MAGA victory is the neocon defeat. ### vs. Christian Right / Religious Conservatism Historically allied but not the same. Neoconservatism was largely a secular Jewish intellectual movement that allied with the Christian Right for shared opposition to the counterculture and for shared support of Israel. The alliance has frayed in the MAGA era as Christian Nationalists have become more ambivalent about Israel (per [[Andrew Torba]] etc.) and as neocons have left the GOP. ### vs. [[Catholic Post-Liberalism]] The post-liberals are, in many ways, a specifically anti-neoconservative intellectual formation. Deneen's *[[Why Liberalism Failed]]* is partly a critique of the neocon premise that liberal democracy is a universal good. Post-liberals see neocons as the last true believers in the liberal project that post-liberalism diagnoses as exhausted. ## Legacy Despite its political collapse, neoconservatism's institutional legacy is substantial: - **Defense and foreign policy** — Forward basing, drone warfare, counter-terrorism apparatus, and democracy-promotion NGOs (NED, IRI, NDI) remain largely neocon-designed, even under administrations that reject neocon framing - **Policy intellectual culture** — AEI, Hudson, FDD, and the broader think-tank ecosystem continue to operate within neocon-inflected assumptions about American global role - **Never Trump Republicans** — *The Bulwark*, *The Dispatch*, and the exile diaspora have become unusually influential per capita during [[Trump II]], providing much of the conservative-coded opposition to MAGA - **Pro-Israel policy** — Still durable across both parties, though increasingly strained on the progressive left ## See Also - [[Paleoconservatism]] - [[MAGA]] - [[National Conservatism]] - [[Catholic Post-Liberalism]] - [[Leo Strauss]] - [[Claremont Institute]] - [[Iraq War]] - [[Project for the New American Century]] - [[The Unholy Alliance]] - [[Christian Zionism]]