What is a Neocon?

Part 1. Starting from the start

[Part 2 can be found here]

A few weeks ago on Twitter/X there was another semi-regular flare-up where people try to define what a neocon is. Shrugging your shoulders and declaring the term meaningless is perfectly reasonable, but it got me thinking that trying to earnestly answer the question and put the term in the context of the Trump Moment might be a worthwhile effort for my new Substack (which you should become a paid subscriber to immediately).

Approaching the topic of neoconservatism with any degree of thoroughness requires a very long book. There have been books about the neocons, some of them pretty good, mostly about its rise to prominence during the Cold War and up through the end of their ascendancy during the Bush years, but the meaning and consequence of the neocons has been profoundly scrambled during the Trump Era and deserves an updated account.

I don’t have the time or inclination to write a book on the subject,¹ and I’m well aware that anything I can fit in a single post will exclude important details, so yes, my apologies in advance for not mentioning “that other thing.” My ambitions for this post are fairly modest. Think of this as a Wikipedia-ish article but inclusive of the thornier details that Wikipedia can’t talk about. Who are these people? Where did they come from? What distinguishes them from other kinds of conservatives? How did they get so much power and influence? And how did they screw everything up so badly?

Everyone knows the neocons were (are) mostly Jewish and were (are) foreign policy hawks,² but beyond that the term is indeed something of a floating signifier. Still, there is no other ideological movement of the last half-century that has taken up such a large share of the political imagination, for the left as a catch-all bogeyman to describe “far-right” excess (mistakenly, since the neocons are not really right wing at all), and for the right as the scapegoat for two decades of failed military adventurism (not so mistakenly). 

The left has a hard time understanding the internal nuances of the right and for them neoconservative can mean anything from “conservative I really don’t like,” to “those Jewish foreign policy obsessives you see on Fox News.” There is this idea that if you add the modifier “neo” to conservative it makes you sound like your opinion is especially well-informed. I had one experience where a liberal colleague accused Trump of being a neocon. By this he just meant, “Trump is extra bad.” There is a lot of confusion out there.

On the right, the meaning is more narrowly tailored but still with very loose boundaries. It generally refers to the collection of politicians and talking heads, including some Democrats, from Bill Kristol to Lindsey Graham to John Bolton to Victoria Nuland, who seem to always be agitating for war or regime change somewhere in the world. It can also mean “those Jewish foreign policy obsessives you see on MSNBC.” This is true, but also incomplete.

Neoconservatism has come in three waves: its origins in the 1960s through Reagan, its apex during the Bush years, and its realignment (or decline) in the Trump era.³ What it is now bears only a vague resemblance to what it began as, but its origins are nonetheless central to understanding its trajectory all the way to the present. I’ll spend this post talking about the first wave of neoconservatism. Part 2, which I’ll publish next week (hopefully), will cover the 90s to the present. Much of this history mirrors what is happening with our current political realignment in the death throes of the Great Awokening so pay close attention.

Part I. The 60s, Kristol and Podhoretz, “mugged by reality,” the Cold War, Reagan, and the Post-War Right

The turmoil of the late sixties and its leftist social projects rearranged the political map and gave rise to many strange bedfellows and Frankenstein ideologies to accommodate it. The combination of militant black radicalism, the subversion of gender and sexual norms, “countercultural” revolt in the arts and media, targeted political violence, plus the codification of these trends in the overreach of the civil rights regime produced a number of social pathologies liberal moderates began to quietly turn away from throughout the mid 70s. Crime spiked. Divorce rates spiked. Church attendance plummeted. Drug use spiked. Welfare dependencies spiked. Cities fell into disrepair. Education standards plummeted. Et cetera. Et cetera. It’s all the same stuff as now, but with a little more woo and a lot more blood.

These problems also produced a wave of defections from inside the left (also like now⁴), in particular a small group of Jewish academics and public intellectuals who had been “mugged by reality,” and could no longer countenance the revolutionary zeal of their co-ideologues. Leading the exodus was former anti-Stalin Trotskyist and member of the Fourth International, Irving Kristol, the so-called "godfather of neoconservatism.” Though he quickly abandoned Marxist orthodoxy, its economics specifically, the underlying Trotskyist impulse toward moral universalism and the need for a vanguard to initiate global ideological struggle stayed more or less intact. All one needs to do to square this circle is replace “one-world communism” with “one-world liberal democracy.”

But in reality Kristol was not really focused on fighting wars overseas or exporting liberal democracy to the rest of the world. Though support for Israel was a neoconservative obsession from the start, mostly framed around shared democratic values in opposition to Soviet influence in the middle-east, the singular emphasis on foreign policy would come later. During the first wave of neoconservatism both Kristol and his neoconservative co-founder, Norman Podhoretz, a liberal “Truman-Democrat” who ran neoconservatism’s most influential media organ, Commentary magazine, spilled most of their ink on the country’s domestic problems. 

You go back and read through this stuff (stop and check the footnote⁵), tweak a few details here and there, and you can easily imagine these articles running in Free Press or Quillette or wherever today’s “classical liberals” inveigh against Wokism. This is not meant to be a criticism. Inveighing against leftist excess is always admirable, especially when done as forcefully as the early neocons. It is only to say that for anyone who does not believe history is cyclical, an afternoon in the archives is all it takes to be disabused of the notion.

The neocons were remarkably effective as social commentators. Commentary and the Public Interest (Kristol’s magazine which was even more domestic policy oriented) had massive readership and recruited a wide swath of highly accomplished figures with major institutional backing into their orbit. Just as now, the right suffered from a certain amount of status-anxiety over their lack of mainstream credibility, which the erudite and highly-credentialed neocons helped alleviate. People like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, James Q. Wilson, Nathan Glazer, Samuel Huntington, and a number of other Ivy League academics with backgrounds in economics and the social sciences––as well as the neocon founded high-brow arts and culture magazine New Criterion––inflected the right with a degree of sophistication and intellectual seriousness that among the people who covet the approval of the New York Times editorial board helped normalize conservative critiques against the left.

But this also created a rift within the right. The Old Right, more literary and philosophical by nature, raised on Edmund Burke and Chesterton rather than Marx and Freud, had significant ideological disagreements and––let’s call them––aesthetic differences with the neocons that made for an uneasy truce. The neocons’ emphasis on data, social science, and the various academic fashions of the day often put them at odds with the old right even when they were on the same side of any given issue. For example, over the question of some welfare program, a writer in Commentary would likely present an empirical argument using data to suggest the program didn’t work as intended, or the funds were being misspent, whereas the writer at National Review would be more likely to rely on first principles, arguing that expansive welfare programs violated the Constitution through federal overreach, or that welfare undermined traditional values like thrift and community charity.

Both arguments could simultaneously be true, and both might achieve the same policy goal in the short term, but there were limits to how far these two distinct analytical frameworks and approaches to government could be conjoined before coming into conflict. Importantly, for all of their biting rhetoric aimed at the era’s leftist derangements, the neocons were in the end just moderates, administrative pragmatists who rejected the “night watchman” model of government favored by the libertarian faction of the old right, and instead wanted to preserve a bureaucratically managed welfare state; they just wanted to do it better and more efficiently than their former allies on the left.

Exacerbating the rift were the obvious theological and cultural differences between the neocons and the rest of the right. The most salient fact about the neocons is that they were (are) Jewish (not all, but most of them), and what gave rise to their ideology––across every dimension, and undergirding whatever internal differences might have been layered over the top––was their fear of anti-semitism and by extension the question, “What is good for the Jews?”

Paul Gottfried and Thomas Fleming in their excellent book, The Conservative Movement, provide a quote from Alexander Bloom’s book about the early neocons, The Prodigal Sons, that is worth reproducing here in full:

“Although psychohistorical explanations have substantial, built-in limitations, it is apparent that the development of neoconservatism in the last twenty years has consisted of a reaction to one major trauma—the fear of anti-Semitism. Since, of course, not all Jewish intellectuals are neoconservatives nor are all neoconservatives Jewish, a conventional disclaimer of universality should and must be entered. Despite the caveats, however, there can be little doubt that the Holocaust constituted the seminal event not only for European Jewry but for many American Jews not far removed from their East European or German heritages.”

To this end the neocons perceived themselves as fighting a two front war. On the one hand, anti-semitism from the left came in the form of ethnic grievance politics in which Jewish interests were subservient to the interests of competing ethnic political blocs, blacks domestically (see Malcolm X, e.g.), and Arabs abroad (revolutionary Palestinian groups especially). 

On the other hand, the neocons could not bring themselves to fully embrace their newfound allies on the right either. They reserved a certain paranoia for a domestic right-wing uprising rooted in the still very much living memory of World War II. Gottfried and Fleming also point out via Isidore Silver that the neocons were hugely influenced by Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism and in particular her contention that anti-semitism’s most virulent strain is the one arising from populist, blood and soil sentiments. In the American context this meant the neocons felt they had as much to fear from an army of Roscoe Jethroes as one of Malcolm Xs. The neocons were wrong of course. Ironically, it was precisely the Roscoe Jethroes who would come to be the most ardent supporters of Israel, most eager to embrace neocons as political partners, and most readily enlist to serve the neocons’ foreign policy interests in subsequent decades, but a fog of suspicion nonetheless hung heavy over this new allegiance.⁶⁷  

On the other hand, it’s worth noting that concerns over anti-Jewish sentiment were not entirely hallucinatory. Critiques of American Jewry, and skepticism over whether the neocons could ever have a home on the American right, were a non-insignificant feature of conservative discourse. Questions over the degree to which ethno-religious differences could be tolerated, in turn led to questions over the degree to which those questions could be tolerated, which in turn led to more questions over the degree to which ethno-religious differences could be tolerated, and so on and so forth. Everything old is new again.

This never got fully worked out since whatever the differences between neocons and the old right (and for that matter the new right, a coalition of conservative forces that would be largely defined as the evangelical right in the coming decades), were papered over by Ronald Reagan and the more urgent matter of the Cold War and defeating Communism once and for all. On that issue, the entirety of the right was aligned. Ronald Reagan, with his well earned reputation for coalition building, successfully united these diverse forces by leveraging widespread animosity toward leftist excess—which attracted many working-class voters to the Republican Party—and embracing a hyper-aggressive foreign policy exemplified by neocons like Jeanne Kirkpatrick, his leading foreign policy advisor, whose belligerence toward America’s perceived enemies would shape U.S. military strategy all the way up through the Global War on Terror.

For the time being, the coalition appeared rather strong. Credit where it’s due, the Reaganites won the Cold War and the era of leftist excess in culture and politics was (at least temporarily) put to bed. The neocons played a major role in these successes and their efforts were duly rewarded with increasingly prominent positions in the GOP power centers, in think tanks, in op-ed pages, and at the White House and the Pentagon in particular. The neocons had made good on their promise to fight the commies at home and fight the commies overseas and the vast majority of Republican voters were more than happy to count them as their own.

But the ideological tensions between the neocons and their coalition partners were never entirely resolved, even under Reagan. Neoconservatism, for all its intellectual rigor and policy sophistication, remained a fundamentally alien presence within the conservative movement, tethered to its ethno-religious origins and latent Trotskyism more-so than any ideological tentpole it shared with the rest of the right (especially in the absence of the the communist threat).

The neocons would have to answer whether they believed the United States should be viewed as a distinct nation composed of a distinct people with distinct interests, or as an ideological vanguard in a permanent global struggle for liberal democracy. Moreover, could the neocons coexist within an intellectual milieu where critiques of Jewish-centered politics could be fairly leveled, or would there be a prohibition on such topics, leading to stale thinking, dogmatism, and ultimately bad decision making, as is the case for any topic on which people cannot speak freely? Would the paradox between the treatment of democracy as a near religious precept on the one hand, and the elitist, anti-populist tendencies on the other, ever come to a head? Would their posture of moderate pragmatism at home ever come into conflict with their revolutionary moralism abroad? Would their commitment to political centrism eventually lead them to isolation and eventual obsolescence?

(You see where this is going…)

As I mentioned at the outset, and it bears repeating here, this essay only scratches the surface. The history of neoconservatism is dense, its influence sprawling, and its contradictions worthy of a more detailed examination. In Part 2, I’ll try to do some of that, going beyond the honeymoon period of the Cold War consensus and into the period where the neocons truly came to define themselves as the architects of an interventionist foreign policy that would squander all of their good will in the aftermath of 9/11.

I’ll also try to explain how this failure eventually devolved into the tragi-comic spectacle of the Global American Empire and its misguided and often bizarre obsession with “Human Rights.”

Subscribe and stay tuned.

1. I do however run a publishing company and if you would like to write a book on neoconservatism, I am all ears.

2. Not everyone will even agree about this. David Brooks tried to argue in 2013 that the neoconservatism was a domestic policy project. Maybe, sort of, for a time, but Brooks is intentionally muddying the water to excuse the neocons’s foreign policy disasters of the Bush years.

3. We are pretty obviously entering into a 4th wave of neoconservatism where the split from the Republican party gets formalized. The neocon impulse will probably get redirected toward China in the years ahead, but who knows.

4. This was almost a perfect mirror of the left of center crack-up that transpired in the wake of Oct. 7th and brought a number of moderate liberal Jews in line to vote for Trump. The political trajectory of Bill Ackman is almost a perfect one-to-one trajectory of early neocons. 

5. I encourage you to pause and go read the article in the link. This is from Commentary’s 1970 December issue, which became a kind of rallying cry for the formerly moderate anti-Soviet magazine’s full throated war against the Counter Culture. You might be surprised by what you see.

You might also read what is probably Norman Podhoretz’s most famous essay for Commentary, “My Negro Problem—And Ours,” from 1963. These will give you a pretty decent glimpse into the mood of the neoconservative mind.

6. A notable example of this tension, and one that sums up the underlying conflict between neocons and certain factions of the more populist right was the treatment of Joe Sobran, a well-regarded Catholic writer at National Review whose criticisms of Jewish influence within the right, and specifically its insistent Zionism (see John Judis, “The Conservative Wars,” New Republic), became the subject of fevered denouncements and recriminations and led to Sobran’s eventual ouster from NR in the early 90s.

7. Another good example of this tension is the 1992 film My Cousin Vinny, which I recently rewatched, and is very funny, but nonetheless portrays the provincial southerner as unreasonably hostile and bloodthirsty in his attempt to scapegoat a couple of New York outsiders desperate to prove their innocence. Yankee/confederate tension is nothing new, of course, but the defendant duo of Gambini and Rothenstein, with their vulgarity and lack of manners, are more specifically stand-ins for the Ellis Islander coming to terms with his Ordeal of Civility. You will not be surprised to learn that the writer, producer, and director of the film are all Jewish.