Neoconservatism

Neoconservatism is an American intellectual and political movement, originating in the late 1960s among former liberal and (in some cases) Trotskyist intellectuals, that combined three commitments: a defence of liberal-democratic political institutions against the New Left’s critique of them, a scepticism of the Great Society’s redistributive social programmes on grounds of unintended consequences, and an assertive Cold War foreign policy that treated American military and political leadership as a precondition of an ordered international system.

The movement’s most influential vehicles were the journals Commentary (under Norman Podhoretz from 1960) and The Public Interest (founded 1965 by Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell). Its political ascendancy ran from the late 1970s through the early 2000s, peaking in the George W. Bush administration’s foreign policy. The Iraq War of 2003 and its aftermath reshaped the public meaning of the term, and several founding figures distanced themselves from policies carried out under its banner.

Key Takeaways

• An American intellectual movement, originating in the late 1960s among former liberal and Trotskyist intellectuals, that combined a defence of liberal-democratic political institutions, scepticism of Great Society social programmes, and an assertive Cold War foreign policy.
• Founding figures include Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Daniel Bell, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Nathan Glazer, and the philosophical reference points of Leo Strauss and Albert Wohlstetter.
• The Iraq War (2003) and its aftermath reshaped the public meaning of the term; some founding figures repudiated parts of the post-2001 programme that had been carried out in the name of neoconservatism.

History And Context

The intellectual setting matters. The mid-to-late 1960s in the United States produced a confluence of three things: the partial collapse of mid-century liberal consensus over the Vietnam War; the rise of a New Left that treated the institutions of liberal democracy as instruments of class or racial power; and the visible difficulties of the Great Society programmes in producing the social outcomes their architects had projected. A cohort of intellectuals who had been at the centre of mid-century liberal social thought — Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Nathan Glazer, Norman Podhoretz, Sidney Hook — found themselves, by the early 1970s, defending positions that the moving centre of liberalism had abandoned.

The label “neoconservative” was applied first as a polemical charge by the democratic socialist Michael Harrington in 1973 and then accepted (at first reluctantly) by some of those it described. The Public Interest became the policy-oriented vehicle; Commentary the broader cultural and political one. The Coalition for a Democratic Majority (1972) and later the Committee on the Present Danger (1976) gave the movement institutional presence in foreign-policy debates.

The Reagan administration drew heavily on the neoconservative bench: Jeane Kirkpatrick at the United Nations, Elliott Abrams at the State Department, William Bennett at Education and later as Drug Czar, Paul Wolfowitz in defence policy. The post-Cold War 1990s produced the Project for the New American Century (1997), which articulated the foreign-policy programme later associated with the early George W. Bush administration.

The Conservative Position

Three substantive claims have been characteristic of the movement.

First, on domestic policy: that the redistributive social programmes of the Great Society produced unintended second-order effects that the original architects had not anticipated and that, by the late 1960s, were visibly worse than the conditions the programmes were intended to address. The argument runs through Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report on the Black family, James Q. Wilson’s work on policing and crime, and the broader social-policy work in The Public Interest. The position is not opposition to the welfare state as such but a sustained empirical scepticism of the technocratic confidence in social engineering.

Second, on cultural politics: a defence of liberal-democratic institutions, of bourgeois moral norms, and of the legitimacy of mainstream political authority against the New Left’s critique. Norman Podhoretz’s Breaking Ranks (1979) is the autobiographical statement; Irving Kristol’s Two Cheers for Capitalism (1978) the theoretical one. The position treats cultural conservatism not as an extension of religious traditionalism but as the defence of the secular institutional preconditions of a free society.

Third, on foreign policy: that the United States bears a particular responsibility for the maintenance of an international order favourable to liberal democracy, that this responsibility is not satisfied by passive defence, and that American power should be deployed to advance democratic political conditions abroad as well as to deter their enemies. The argument runs through Albert Wohlstetter’s strategic writing, Jeane Kirkpatrick’s “Dictatorships and Double Standards” (Commentary, 1979), and the post-Cold War PNAC documents.

Differing Positions

The Iraq War decisively reshaped the term’s public meaning. Neoconservative writers (William Kristol, Robert Kagan, Charles Krauthammer) defended the war’s premises and (in some cases) its execution. Critics from within conservatism (Pat Buchanan and the paleoconservatives, the realist tradition of George F. Kennan and his successors) treated the war as the predictable outcome of the foreign-policy doctrine. Several founding figures (Irving Kristol’s son William Kristol publicly; Francis Fukuyama in America at the Crossroads, 2006) reassessed elements of the programme.

Within American conservatism more broadly, the rise of national conservatism after 2016 (Patrick Deneen, Yoram Hazony, the Compact and American Affairs circles) treats neoconservatism as the philosophical mistake whose foreign and economic consequences the broader movement is now repudiating. Defenders of the original synthesis (Wilfred McClay, Yuval Levin in some respects) treat the post-2016 critique as conflating the early movement with its later foreign-policy distortions.

The relationship to Strauss is real but commonly overstated. Several first- and second-generation neoconservatives studied with Strauss or with his students; the intellectual influence is genuine on questions of regime, founding, and American purpose. The popular treatment of neoconservatism as Straussian foreign policy is a significant overreading; Strauss himself wrote almost nothing on contemporary foreign affairs.

References

1. Irving Kristol, Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (New York: Free Press, 1995), introduction and chs. 1, 16.
2. Justin Vaïsse, Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), chs. 1, 4, 7.
3. Francis Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), chs. 1–3.
4. Norman Podhoretz, Breaking Ranks: A Political Memoir (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), pts. III–IV.