Neoconservatives

Educational Reform Influence

The neoconservative movement has been influential in recent educational reform. Based on a free market fundamentalism, neoconservatives seek educational privatization and commercialization by replacing K–12 public schools with corporate-owned and corporate-operated schools. They believe offering options through school choice will increase effectiveness and efficiency in the educational system. They also seek to create a competitive market in deregulating teacher training and certification by allowing private for-profit training enterprises to compete with higher education institutions. Applying a business model of competition and efficiency to learning, neoconservatives believe quality will be guaranteed, as the most effective models will rise to the top. Accountability, as demonstrated through the No Child Left Behind Act, along with national standards, testing, and curriculum, will help cement the lost traditions of competition and discipline in education and ensure success, according to the neoconservatives.

Early Development

Michael Harrington, a political activist, first popularized the term neoconservative in a 1973 Dissent article, in which he applied the label to liberals of the time who had moved toward the political Right in addressing welfare issues.

Contemporary neoconservatives came into the limelight in the 1970s, but their impetus began earlier. A number of prominent neoconservatives emerged from the Jewish academic-intellectual world disillusioned with the direction of 1960s liberalism. The radical anti-Americanism espoused by some figures associated with the anti–Vietnam War movement deeply offended those later who became known as neoconservatives.

One political theorist who influenced the articulation of the neoconservative philosophy is Irving Kristol, considered the “godfather” of American neoconservatism. Kristol was the managing editor (1947–1952) of Commentary magazine, often referred to as the “neocon bible.” He was the first to formulate the movement's aspirations. In the 1970s, as liberal Democrats took political advantage of the Watergate scandal that brought down the Nixon administration, two forces emerged to foil the American liberal point of view and traditional conservatism: neoconservatives and the religious New Right.

Early differences between neoconservatives and traditional conservatives, sometimes referred to as paleoconservatives or the Old Right, were their perspectives on the welfare state, civil rights, and communism. Traditional conservatives wanted to dismantle the welfare state. Neoconservatives' approach was not to dismantle the welfare state, but to stop its expansion. This was a major shift in conservative thinking. They also supported civil rights for minorities in America. Early on, traditional conservatives opposed any federal legislation forbidding racial discrimination, but eventually they supported it.

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