The Neocons Have Gone From GOP Thought-Leaders to Outcasts
On February 29, Max Boot, a neoconservative columnist and then a foreign-policy adviser to Marco Rubio, wrote that if Donald Trump were to win his party’s nomination, it would “confirm everything bad that Democrats have ever said about the GOP.” In May, he pronounced the Republican Party “dead” and announced that “[Hillary] Clinton would be far preferable to Trump.” By July, he was admitting in the New York Times that Trump was the most noxious manifestation of “the party’s anti-intellectual drift.” The rise of Trump has provoked similar reactions from other neoconservatives, including David Frum, Dan Senor, James Kirchick, Michael Gerson, Jennifer Rubin, Eliot A. Cohen, John Podhoretz, Bret Stephens, Robert Kagan, and even the Republican operator William Kristol (who has tried, without success, to organize a Republican Party–in–exile). Not all these figures have endorsed Clinton, but every one has treated the Republican nominee as something much worse than a suboptimal choice or a surefire loser; Trump is, in their estimation, a threat to democracy itself and a symptom of deep rot within the party.
The fissures that led to the Republican Party’s crack-up over its crackpot nominee run along several lines. There is the demographic one, separating the young, Latinos, and college-educated women from the loyal base of older, blue-collar, white men. There is a characterological one, splitting Republicans who recoil from cruel, flamboyantly ignorant bullies and those who find these traits acceptable, even praiseworthy. Among the party’s professional class, there are Republicans who are either retired or running in blue states, then those who have a future in red-state politics. Then there is the schism within the party’s intellectual vanguard. While social and economic conservatives have remained mostly loyal, the neoconservatives have found themselves outcasts from a party they very recently led.
The original neoconservatives were a small faction of formerly liberal or left-wing intellectuals, disproportionately Jewish, who defected to the GOP in the 1970s. (One of them, Kristol’s father, Irving, famously quipped that a neoconservative was a liberal who had been “mugged by reality.”) Their complaints with the left centered on foreign policy, on how the Democratic Party had grown more dovish in the wake of Vietnam. Over time, they adapted themselves to the whole Republican litany, carving out a useful role defending supply-side economics, the conspiratorial ravings of Pat Robertson, and pretty much any lunacy attached to the party. Yet foreign affairs remained the distinctive field in which they largely dictated conservative doctrine. Neocons saw a black-and-white morality as the foundation of the American victory in World War II and then the Cold War; indeed, they believed it could be applied to every foreign conflict and, with the appropriate application of willpower and righteousness, result in the inevitable spread of democracy everywhere. Neoconservatives famously developed the master plan to defeat Al Qaeda via democratic regime change throughout the Middle East.
The fall of Baghdad represented the apogee of neoconservative influence within the party. In April 2003, Frum, who had previously been a speechwriter for the Bush administration, wrote a cover essay for National Review, the conservative movement’s flagship publication, excommunicating the isolationist paleoconservatives. At the time, it hardly seemed worth the effort, as the objects of Frum’s banishment consisted mostly of obscure cranks lacking any channels of influence. During the Bush era, neoconservatism was riding so high it had essentially grown synonymous with conservatism. Many liberals learned to read the neo- prefix as a kind of intensifier: A neoconservative seemed to mean an ultraconservative, the most fanatical and dangerous strain.
While Bush’s second-term collapse surfaced some challenges to the party’s neoconservative identity, the neocons retained their pride of place. The following two Republican presidential nominees embraced the familiar neoconservative style. They laced into Barack Obama for his alleged faintheartedness in promoting American exceptionalism and vowed to push harder against all of America’s rivals on every global front. (Russia, in Mitt Romney’s estimation, was America’s “No. 1 geopolitical foe.”)
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