Neoconservatism

Neoconservatism is a social and political ideology developed by intellectuals in the United States and is characterized by a history of political transformation. The first neoconservative leaders began as socialists in the 1920s, adopted a radical anti-Stalinist position in the late 1930s and 1940s, and emerged as anti-socialist and anti-communist liberals in the 1950s. Their harsh anti-communist sentiments, accompanied by fears of radical left politics, caused an intense conflict with the radical movements of the 1960s, which brought about their shift to the right and the creation of the new ideology, known since the mid-1970s as neoconservatism. Unlike massive political movements, a small leading cadre of political intellectuals—primarily men—have built and promoted this ideology. Since the mid-1980s neoconservatives have achieved influence through affiliated think tanks and a network of journals they edit, resulting in a penetration into the national political establishment and a following in academic and intellectual communities.

Neoconservatism originated among a group of mainly Jewish scholars and critics in the 1930s known as the New York Intellectuals. After discovering the horrors of Stalin's purges in the Soviet Union, they articulated an anti-totalitarian discourse from the left, differentiating themselves from pro-Soviet socialists and liberal fellow-travelers. During the 1940s and 1950s, a younger generation joined the circle. Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Seymour Martin Lipset, Irving Howe, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Norman Podhoretz, and Midge Decter joined elders such as Sidney Hook and Diana Trilling. Increasingly rejecting socialism, they crossed over the ideological line to liberalism, becoming the leading anti-communist intellectuals of the Cold War era.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, these intellectuals contributed to the creation of an analysis of American government and society. Their sociology and political science, known as “the end-of-ideology” school, promoted an ideal of society based on liberal consensus and the elimination of Marxist and radical ideologies as causes of totalitarian revolutions. Their concept of liberal [Page 1020]pluralism implied a pragmatic, nonideological middle-class society, antithetical to Marxism and the politics of class struggle. Self-identified “democratic-socialists” such as Howe, Bell, and Lipset maintained socialist sentiments and nostalgia but distanced themselves from radical socialists. Feeling exceptionally righteous, realistic, and brave, this anti-communist liberal group developed a separate intellectual-political identity, in anticipation of another stage of more extreme anti-radical and anti-communist transformation.

The drastic sociopolitical turbulence of the 1960s and the new political-ideological context of the decade ended the anti-communist liberal consensus. The era's radical student, Black Power, anti–Vietnam War, women's liberation, gay liberation, and counter-culture movements entirely rejected the anti-communist liberal convictions. Most threatening to these intellectuals were the New Left's militant style, its anti–Cold War and anti-anti-communist rhetoric, along with its socialist-oriented and anti-establishment beliefs. The schism between the radicals and anti-communist liberals, however, came to an end in the late 1960s. The neoconservative attack against all radical manifestations of the period was more extreme than the anti-radical critique by other liberal groups. This extreme critique of radical and liberal circles helped defined neoconservatism as a new and distinct political and ideological philosophy.

Anti-communism continued to be the most important theme for neoconservatives as they advanced it in their set of journals, including Commentary, New Leader, Dissent, Partisan Review, and Encounter. Throughout the Vietnam War they did not simply reaffirm their anti-communism, but by the end of the 1960s, they critiqued radicals, liberals, and the Democratic Party mainstream as they took a more aggressive direction, emphasizing a constant communist threat to the world. They believed that American interventionism was necessary to prevent a communist victory and argued that the United States should continue serving as guarantor of world democracy.

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