‘Neoconservative’ Is Being Abused

By Zach Kessel

Thursday, August 31, 2023

 

The notion that words have meanings, and that those meanings matter, was once intuitive for the Right. One of conservatism’s foundational texts — published even before the movement coalesced in the pages of National Review during the 1950s — is Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences, in which the Southern Agrarian argued, among other things, that the West’s broad acceptance of philosophical nominalism had led society to reject absolute truth. On a larger scale, Weaver contended, the improper and cavalier use of language had degraded and corrupted civilization. The importance of language, of truth, and of the idea that words mean what they mean has since been a cornerstone of movement conservatism.

 

In our political culture, words are now losing their meanings. Many in the electoral arena have demonstrated this reality. But the most recent offender is Republican presidential candidate and pharmaceutical executive Vivek Ramaswamy. Repeatedly attacked on foreign policy during last week’s debate, Ramaswamy posted a clip of an interview on X, formerly known as Twitter, in which he claimed that he “was the only non-neocon on the stage” and that “no difference” exists between President Joe Biden, former representative Liz Cheney (R., Wyo.), and his primary opponents on issues of international affairs. Ramaswamy is not the only figure to misuse the term “neocon” lately. Last Thursday, the Heritage Foundation’s Rob Bluey used the term in a piece taking issue with National Review writers’ position on Ukraine aid and their criticism of Heritage’s own view. 

 

In the popular imagination, the word “neoconservative” and its diminutive form conjure memories of War on Terror–era interventionism associated with former president George W. Bush’s administration. Used during that time to describe a set of idealists who believed the United States should promote democracy abroad and assist fledgling nations in the development of civic institutions — “nation-building,” as it is often known — the term has become an insult applying to any right-of-center individual who supports an assertive U.S. foreign policy. The Bush-era use of the word as an insult began on the left, embedding itself into popular culture to the extent that the Rolling Stones released a song titled “Sweet Neo Con” in 2005 as a protest against Bush.

 

That conception of neoconservatism has persisted into the contemporary political era on both sides of the aisle. Running for the Republican presidential nomination in 2015, Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas) said, “If you look at President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and for that matter some of the more aggressive Washington neocons, they have consistently misperceived the threat of radical Islamic terrorism and have advocated military adventurism that has had the effect of benefiting radical Islamic terrorists.”

 

Leaving aside legitimate debates over the efficacy of American military engagements in the Middle East, Cruz’s characterization of Obama’s and Clinton’s foreign policy as aligning with neoconservatives is a stretch. After all, the chief distinction between the group of people more accurately (though, as we will see, not faithfully to the term’s original meaning) called neocons in the Bush administration and many mainstream political figures of that era is the desire to export American-style democracy to the rest of the world. Most members of the House and Senate voted for the authorization of the use of military force that began the War in Iraq, even those who would later regret that decision. But very few of them did so because they wanted to impose American-style democracy on the Middle East. Rather, they wanted to depose a dictator they saw as a threat to U.S. national security. Certainly, those like Hillary Clinton are not neocons in that sense of the word. But the term has become, like so many others in our political lexicon, a stand-in for “people with whom I disagree.”

 

What makes that interesting is that neoconservatism has no real foreign-policy platform. As Irving Kristol, the “godfather of neoconservatism,” once wrote, “there is no set of neoconservative beliefs concerning foreign policy, only a set of attitudes derived from historical experience.” That history- and results-oriented outlook is a core tenet of neoconservatism, which Kristol described as a “persuasion,” rather than an ideology. The term began life as a derogatory utterance, first appearing in a 1973 piece in Dissent magazine by democratic socialist Michael Harrington. The people of whom Harrington wrote were men and women, formerly of the Left, who had journeyed rightward during the 1960s, and Harrington’s charge was that these men and women had become fellow travelers of the Right.

 

Kristol and the other thinkers and writers with whom he associated were members of a group known as the “New York Intellectuals,” a tribe of anti-Stalinist Marxists who largely converged around the City College of New York, with some hailing from New York and Columbia universities. Other members of the cohort included such figures as Midge Decter, Nat Glazer, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Norman Podhoretz. The group’s writing could often be found in the pages of left-wing journals like Partisan Review and the aforementioned Dissent, as well as in the then-leftist Commentary magazine, which New York Intellectual Elliot E. Cohen founded in 1945.

 

Many New York Intellectuals found themselves pushed rightward by their burgeoning anti-communist beliefs. But it was a critique of liberal domestic politics that characterized the neoconservative movement, not hawkishness on defense. Kristol, often referred to as the “godfather of neoconservatism,” used the Public Interest journal — which he and Harvard University sociologist Daniel Bell founded in 1965 before the latter’s departure and replacement by Glazer in 1973 — to warn against the unintended consequences of former President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society programs and the rise of the New Left. The neoconservatives made their initial mark on the broader movement through the Public Interest, imbuing conservatism with a sociological depth and academic seriousness characteristic of the intellectual class from which its members came. As Jonah Goldberg wrote of NR founder William F. Buckley’s appraisal of Kristol, Podhoretz, and company, “the neocons . . . brought the new language of sociology to an intellectual tradition that had been grounded more in Aristotelian thinking.” The heart of neoconservatism can be boiled down to a Kristol quote: “The legitimate question to ask about any program is ‘will it work?’”

 

The neoconservatives, unlike those on the right who came before them, did not repudiate Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Kristol once said that “in our urbanized, industrialized, highly mobile society, people need governmental action of some kind . . . they need such assistance; they demand it; they will get it.” Rather than seeking to deconstruct the welfare state entirely, those within the neoconservative milieu argued for a conservative version of what was already in place. The neoconservatives understood that the state could not change human nature, but that an evidence- and outcome-based social policy could be a force for good. “A conservative welfare state should,” Kristol wrote, “discriminate in favor of satisfactory human results, not humane intentions.”

 

This outcome-based approach characterized the legitimate members of the loose connection of individuals known as neoconservatives. In fact, insofar as any central foreign-policy doctrine existed among the group, it would have to be one stemming from Jeane Kirkpatrick’s “Dictatorships & Double Standards,” published in the November 1979 issue of Commentary. Kirkpatrick argued that, in certain countries, democracy was an untenable political system. Traditional autocrats, Kirkpatrick wrote, “do not disturb the habitual rhythms of work and leisure, habitual places of residence, habitual patterns of family and personal relations,” while their Marxist counterparts “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.”

 

The Carter administration, Kirkpatrick charged, had pressured pro-U.S. autocratic governments the world over to liberalize, which in practice meant ceding control of their countries to anti-American, Marxist revolutionaries, yet had not extended the same rhetoric toward communist states. Though the U.S. was right to support notions of liberalization and democratization within autocracies, the folly came in assuming rapid reforms would not immediately lead to a power vacuum that America’s enemies would then fill. To avoid pro-Soviet revolution, she believed, the U.S. was required to support regimes in alignment with its broader Cold-War interests. This foreign-policy doctrine brought the movement’s core observations — a belief in universal morality and an understanding that human nature cannot be perfected from above — from the domestic stage into the international arena.

 

The Bush-era intellectuals commonly referred to as neoconservatives would be more accurately described as hard Wilsonians, as Max Boot — who was often described as a neocon before his recent move leftward — wrote in 2002. “Advocates of this view embrace Woodrow Wilson’s championing of American ideals but reject his reliance on international organizations and treaties to accomplish our objectives,” Boot explained. In fact, as Matthew Continetti explained in his 2022 book The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism, some original neocons were skeptical of the nation-building mission in Iraq. Irving Kristol, he writes, “argued for a foreign policy of unilateral nationalism that had an expansive view of the national interest while avoiding any large-scale diplomatic or military commitments,” while Kirkpatrick “thought that a modest foreign policy was appropriate for the post-Cold War world” and did not believe in “democracy promotion as the central task of diplomacy.” This conflict between those initially given the name and those to whom it later came to apply only highlights neoconservatism’s lack of a uniform agenda.

 

The coterie of intellectuals who became known as neoconservatives in the 1970s have little in common with many described with that term today other than a belief in an engaged U.S. on the international stage. Republicans like Ramaswamy, who would apply that description to many lawmakers and thinkers in both of the country’s political parties, ought to understand what the word actually means. Perhaps by looking back to the neoconservatives and focusing on a results-oriented approach to our nation’s ills, the Right can become a community of ideas once again.