Neoconservatism

Neoconservative political ideas made a significant impact on global politics at the turn of the 21st century. In the 1990s, neoconservative members of the U.S. presidential administration of George W. Bush became known as fierce opponents of U.S. isolationist policy and campaigned for the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq.

Neoconservatism (neocon) took shape in the latter half of the 1970s and can be seen as a reaction to what neoconservatives (neocons) saw as the permissive, unpatriotic, and anticapitalist zeitgeist that had developed in the postwar generations in the 1960s. Neocons criticized these trends—the countermovement, or counterculture—for not being amply critical of communism and anti-Semitism, just as they scolded the Nixon and Ford administrations for pursuing détente with communist regimes, notably the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and China. They were thus motivated by both domestic and foreign policy, but in the early period, they primarily profiled themselves on domestic issues, partly as a reaction to the post-material and antiauthoritarian trends of the time and partly because they disagreed on the Vietnam War.

Neocons were mostly former liberals and leftists who were frustrated with liberal policies, “which made us feel,” said neocon godfather Irving Kristol (1995), “and made us appear to be, more conservative than we had anticipated” (p. 86). They became increasingly dissatisfied with the Democratic Party, and they found the Republican Party too defensive in advancing a value-based politics. Later, they set out to take over the Republican Party so as to redefine and update conservatism in order to make it fit for governing modern democracy in the era after the Cold War. This became part of the “culture wars,” but the debate was started much earlier by Kristol's journal The Public Interest and Norman Podhoretz's magazine Commentary. They contended that while capitalism had succeeded in producing an unprecedented improvement in people's material conditions generally as well as an equally unparalleled degree of individual liberty, it had also resulted in “cultural contradictions” whereby the erosion of authority had subverted the moral traditions underpinning individual virtue and a just society.