Conservatives and neoconservatives

Public Interest, Wntr, 2004 by Adam Wolfson

NEOCONSERVATISM has become the topic of the day. But does neoconservatism really exist, and if so what is it? What exactly is "new" in neoconservatism, and how does it differ from other strands of conservative thought in America? And finally, what kind of political influence does neoconservatism wield today? Of course, it is this last question that is nowadays on everyone's mind. Yet one can hardly begin to weigh the influence of neoconservatism on the Bush White House without first reaching some understanding of what it is, and how it differs from the old conservatism.

Until quite recently, neoconservatism was thought to be a spent force. Few intellectuals anymore identified themselves as "neocons," and the label rarely surfaced in political conversation and debate or in the news media. The two leading spokesmen for neoconservatism had themselves concluded that the term had outlived its usefulness. In his 1995 book Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea, Irving Kristol asked, "Where stands neoconservatism today?" to which he answered: "It is clear that what can fairly be described as the neoconservative impulse ... was a generational phenomenon, and has now been pretty much absorbed into a larger, more comprehensive conservatism." A year later, in an address before the American Enterprise Institute, Norman Podhoretz emphatically declared that "neoconservatism is dead."

Over the last year, however, and especially during the months prior to the war in Iraq, the label of neoconservatism made its way back into our public discussions and political debates. "It is neocons ... who are the brains behind Bush's push to expel Hussein," wrote Jacob Heilbrunn in the Los Angeles Times. "Without them there would be no war talk." He was not alone in singling out the neocons. It has become the label of choice for left- and right-wing war critics. Though John Judis and Patrick Buchanan may have little in common, though Christopher Matthews and Paul Craig Roberts may not agree on much else, they all agree that the war in Iraq was somehow an outgrowth of neoconservative ideology. And the fascination with neoconservatism has hardly abated: "Neocons On The Line," blared a recent headline in Newsweek; "The Neocons in Charge" read another in the New York Review of Books. Presidential hopeful Howard Dean declared on the campaign stump that President Bush has "been captured by the neoconservatives around him."

At first I was tempted to dismiss the return of the neocon label as conspiracy mongering by the Left, or as the convenient shorthand of journalists to describe apparent fault lines within the Bush administration. Both explanations have merit, but it is also the case that neoconservatism never quite went away as claimed. Neoconservatism may in fact constitute not a generational phenomenon but one of several fundamental alternatives within conservatism taken as a whole. Generally, the neoconservative label has been applied to a particular group of intellectuals who moved from what might be called a neo-liberal politics in the 1960s and 1970s to what became known as neoconservatism. It now seems more likely that something like neoconservatism represents a natural conservative response to modernity, at least in America, one with its own distinctive qualities, its own style and substance, its own strengths and weaknesses.

The basic contours of neoconservatism most readily emerge against the backdrop of its two main conservative rivals: libertarianism and traditionalism. (I will have little to say of religious conservatives and Straussians, since they are frequently allied with neocons and have moreover helped shape the neocon impulse.) These three conservative approaches--traditionalism, libertarianism, and neoconservatism--have distinct historical and philosophic roots. Generally speaking, traditionalists look to Edmund Burke, libertarians to Friedrich Hayek, and neocons to Alexis de Tocqueville. However, each finds its origins in something more elemental. Anyone of us can't help but have a gut feeling about modern American life--its possibilities and limits, whether it is humane and decent or alienating and corrupting. Those of us who regret much of modern American life and find solace in old, inherited ways will cling to traditionalism. Others, who celebrate the new freedoms and new technologies, will turn to libertarianism. As for those who see in modernity admirable principles but also worrisome tendencies, their persuasion will be neoconservatism.

The traditionalists

In the post-World War II period, a number of exceptional thinkers sought to adapt a traditionalist, Burkean conservatism to American public life. They became known as the "new conservatives." The most prominent of them was Russell Kirk, who authored in 1953 the best-seller The Conservative Mind. An overly simple but for our purposes accurate enough way of characterizing Kirk's achievement would be to say that he initiated a turn among American conservatives away from a bourgeois Lockean philosophy and toward a mildly aristocratic Burkean one. A typical American "conservative" in the pre-World War II period was in fact a nineteenth-century liberal--a believer in laissez-faire, scientific improvements, and progress more generally. The Burke revival that Kirk helped spark in the 1950s lent to American conservatism a very different voice. No longer would it settle for being the party of "big business" or an apologist for bourgeois society. The traditionalists joined Burke in his lament that "the age of chivalry is gone," and concurred in his denunciations of the "new conquering empire of light and reason."