Neoconservatism is a political philosophy that emerged in the United States from the rejection of social liberalism and the New Left counterculture of the 1960s. It influenced the presidential administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush, representing a realignment in American politics, and the defection of some liberals to the right side of the political spectrum; hence the term, which refers to being 'new' conservatives.
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Neoconservatism is a political philosophy that emerged in the United States from the rejection of social liberalism and the New Left counterculture of the 1960s. It influenced the presidential administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush, representing a realignment in American politics, and the defection of some liberals to the right side of the political spectrum; hence the term, which refers to being 'new' conservatives.
Neoconservatism emphasizes foreign policy as the paramount responsibility of government, seeing the American role of world's sole superpower as indispensable to establishing and maintaining global order.
The term neoconservative was originally used as a criticism against liberals who had "moved to the right".Michael Harrington, a democratic socialist, coined the usage of neoconservative in a 1973 Dissent magazine article concerning welfare policy.According to E. J. Dionne, the nascent neoconservatives were driven by "the notion that liberalism" had failed and "no longer knew what it was talking about."
The first major neoconservative to embrace the term was Irving Kristol, in his 1979 article "Confessions of a True, Self-Confessed 'Neoconservative.'"
Kristol's ideas had been influential since the 1950s, when he co-founded and edited Encounter magazine.[6]. Another source was Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine from 1960 to 1995. By 1982 Podhoretz was calling himself a neoconservative, in a New York Times Magazine article titled "The Neoconservative Anguish over Reagan's Foreign Policy".
Prominent neoconservative periodicals are Commentary and The Weekly Standard. Neoconservatives are associated with foreign policy initiatives of think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), The Heritage Foundation, and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA).
History and origins:
Left-wing past of neoconservatives
Author Michael Lind argues that "the organization as well as the ideology of the neoconservative movement has left-liberal origins".[9] He draws a line from the center-left anti-communist Congress for Cultural Freedom, founded in 1950, to the Committee on the Present Danger (1950-1953, then re-founded in 1976), to the Project for the New American Century (1997), and adds that "European social-democratic models inspired the quintessential neocon institution, the National Endowment for Democracy" (founded 1983).
The neoconservative desire to spread democracy abroad has been likened to the Trotskyist theory of permanent revolution. Lind argues that the neoconservatives are influenced by the thought of former Trotskyists such as James Burnham and Max Shachtman, who argued that "the United States and similar societies are dominated by a decadent, postbourgeois 'new class.'" He sees the neoconservative concept of "global democratic revolution" as deriving from the Trotskyist Fourth International's "vision of permanent revolution." He also points to what he sees as the Marxist origin of "the economic determinist idea that liberal democracy is an epiphenomenon of capitalism," which he describes as "Marxism with entrepreneurs substituted for proletarians as the heroic subjects of history." However, few leading neoconservatives cite James Burnham as a major influence.
Critics of Lind contend that there is no theoretical connection between Trotsky's permanent revolution, and that the idea of a global democratic revolution instead has Wilsonian roots. While both Wilsonianism and the theory of permanent revolution have been proposed as strategies for underdeveloped parts of the world, Wilson proposed capitalist solutions, while Trotsky advocated socialist solutions.
[edit] Great Depression and World War II
"New" conservatives initially approached this view from the political left. The forerunners of neoconservatism were often liberals or socialists who strongly supported the Allied cause in World War II, and who were influenced by the Great Depression-era ideas of the New Deal, trade unionism, and Trotskyism, particularly those who followed the political ideas of Max Shachtman. A number of future neoconservatives, such as Jeane Kirkpatrick, were Shachtmanites in their youth; some were later involved with Social Democrats USA.[citation needed]
Some of the mid-20th century New York Intellectuals were forebears of neoconservatism. The most notable was literary critic Lionel Trilling, who wrote, "In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition." It was this liberal vital center, a term coined by the historian and liberal theorist Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., that the neoconservatives would see as threatened by New Left extremism. But the majority of vital center liberals remained affiliated with the Democratic Party, retained left-of-center viewpoints, and opposed Republican politicians such as Richard Nixon who first attracted neoconservative support.[citation needed]
Initially, the neoconservatives were less concerned with foreign policy than with domestic policy. Irving Kristol's journal, The Public Interest, focused on ways that government planning in the liberal state had produced unintended harmful consequences. Norman Podhoretz's magazine Commentary, formerly a journal of the liberal left, had more of a cultural focus, criticizing excesses in the movements for black equality and women's rights, and in the academic left. Through the 1950s and early 1960s the future neoconservatives had been socialists or liberals strongly supportive of the American Civil Rights Movement, integration, and Martin Luther King, Jr..
The neoconservatives, arising from the anti-Stalinist left of the 1950s, opposed the anti-capitalism of the New Left of the 1960s. They broke from the liberal consensus of the early post-World War II years in foreign policy, and opposed Détente with the Soviet Union in the late 1960s and 1970s.
Senator Henry M. Jackson, influential neoconservative forerunner.
Senator Henry M. Jackson, influential neoconservative forerunner.
[edit] Drift away from New Left and Great Society
Initially the views of the New Left were popular with the children of hard-line communists, often Jewish immigrants on the edge of poverty. Neoconservatives came to dislike the counterculture of the 1960s baby boomers, and what they saw as anti-Americanism in the non-interventionism of the movement against the Vietnam War.
As the radicalization of the New Left pushed these intellectuals farther to the right, they moved toward a more aggressive militarism, while becoming disillusioned with President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society domestic programs. Academics in these circles, many still Democrats, rejected the Democratic Party's leftward drift on defense issues in the 1970s, especially after the nomination of George McGovern for president in 1972. The influential 1970 bestseller The Real Majority by future television commentator and neoconservative Ben Wattenberg expressed their concerns. Many supported Democratic Senator Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson, derisively known as the Senator from Boeing, during his 1972 and 1976 campaigns for president. Among those who worked for Jackson were future neoconservatives Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, Richard Perle and Felix Rohatyn. In the late 1970s neoconservative support moved to Ronald Reagan and the Republicans, who promised to confront Soviet expansionism.
Michael Lind, a self-described former neoconservative, explained:
Neoconservatism... originated in the 1970s as a movement of anti-Soviet liberals and social democrats in the tradition of Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Humphrey and Henry ('Scoop') Jackson, many of whom preferred to call themselves 'paleoliberals.' [After the end of the Cold War]... many 'paleoliberals' drifted back to the Democratic center...
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