Neoconservatism

Neoconservatism was an intellectual movement of cOLD war liberals between 1968 and 1991 that opposed Black Power and gender-racial quotas.

“Neoconservatism” was the phrase coined by liberal Roman Catholic writer Peter Steinfels to characterize a group of formerly liberal and leftist intellectuals who opposed student radicalism in the late 1960s and the 1970s. The neoconservatives were defined by these common attributes: 1) they were all liberal Democrats who had supported Johnson in 1964 and Humphrey in 1968; 2) they all had opposed Joseph McCarthy but ardently supported the cold war; and 3) they all acquired prestigious establishment intellectual credentials before the rise of student radicalism and the New Left in the late 1960s. Their ethno-religious affiliation was mostly Jewish, with some Roman Catholics, and just a few Protestants. In contrast to other conservative intellectuals, that is, those who were conservative from a young age, the neoconservatives comprised no members from the South, few from the Midwest or West, and few who were religiously traditional. They tended to be urbane academics and writers from the Northeast metropolitan corridor.

The neoconservatives clustered around the following magazines and newspapers: Commentary, The Public Interest, The National Interest, The American Scholar, The American Spectator, The New Criterion, The Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Times. Occasionally neoconservatives authored articles for the conservative National Review and the neoliberal New Republic. Norman Pod-horetz, editor of Commentary, and Irving Kristol, editor of The Public Interest, played important roles in shaping neoconservatism as it emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A remarkably large proportion of the neoconservatives were disciples and friends of the emigre German formalist political philosopher Leo Strauss, and the COLD WAR liberal literary critic Lionel Trilling. Most were employed by the publications listed above or at Ivy League faculties.

The neoconservatives were shocked by the rise of political radicalism in the 1960s. Since many of the neoconservatives were Jewish, they were especially incensed by the New Left’s embrace of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The neoconservatives used their formidable polemical skills to defend American society against these radical antinomian movements.

Irving Kristol, a New York University professor and former coeditor of Commentary, was the acknowledged “Godfather” of neoconservatism. Kristol used his contacts with Wall Street businessmen to create foundations that subsidized magazines and intellectuals promoting the neoconservative point of view. Kristol came to believe earlier than most neoconservatives that the Democratic Party had been captured by the New Left, and he became a Republican in 1970. He regularly advised Richard M. Nixon’s administration. Kristol’s friend, Evron Kirkpatrick, a Georgetown University political scientist and longtime adviser to Hubert Humphrey, also gave up on the Democrats, voting for Nixon in 1972 and Ford in 1976.

Despite Kristol’s and Kirkpatrick’s example, most neoconservatives remained Democrats. For example, Norman Podhoretz, the formerly leftist editor of Commentary, and his wife, Midge Decter, promoted their friend, political scientist and government official Daniel Patrick Moyni-han as the man who would redeem the Democratic Party. Moynihan became ambassador to the United Nations in 1975 and then used this position to win nomination as New York’s U. S. Senate candidate in 1976. He faced incumbent conservative Republican Senator James Buckley, William F. Buckley, Jr.’s brother. While Irving Kristol supported Buckley, other neoconservatives supported Moynihan. Despite Podhoretz’s desperate urging, Moynihan declined to challenge James Earl Carter, Jr.’s 1980 renomination.

Most neoconservatives voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976, soon broke with Carter and embraced the candidacy of Republican Ronald W. Reagan in 1980. Neoconservatives enjoyed notable success in the Reagan administration. Jeane Kirkpatrick became UN ambassador; Richard Perle, an aide to Democratic senator Henry Jackson, served as a Pentagon official; William Bennett, a Kristol protege, became secretary of education. With the end of the cold war, the neoconservatives split politically, most becoming Republicans, but a substantial plurality endorsed the election of Democratic president William J. Clinton in 1992.

Neoconservatives continued to shape conservative thinking during the Clinton administration through established publications and through a new publication, The Weekly Standard, begun in 1995 by William Kristol. The son of Irving Kristol and historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, Kristol served as chief of staff to education secretary William Bennett in the Reagan administration and as chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle in the first Bush administration. Kristol is the editor for The Weekly Standard and a political commentator for the cable network Fox News Channel, and he is chairman of the Project for the New American Century, a think tank established in 1997 to develop coherent strategies for U. S. global leadership. Neoconservatives were accused of exerting undue influence in foreign policy during the George W. Bush administration. Neoconservative Paul Wolfowitz, as deputy secretary of defense in the Bush administration, played a key role in shaping policy for the Iraq War.

See also conservative movement; Libertarian Party.

Further reading: Gary Dorrien, The Neoconservative Mind: Politics, Culture and the War of Ideology (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994); Irving Kristol, Neoconservatism, Selected Essays, 1949-1995 (New York: Free Press, 1995).

—Christopher M. Gray