What Makes a Neocon Different
Brent Tantillo • October 16, 2009 • Uncategorized
I was struck when reading the Economist magazine’s obituary of Irving Kristol that they perhaps better than anybody captured what makes a neoconservative different than a paleoconservative:
Conservatism, Kristol-style, acquired a “neo”. He was always, he mused, a neo-something: neoMarxist, neoliberal, neo-Orthodox (because he believed, though he wasn’t sure in what, but never went to synagogue). “Neoconservative”, which appeared in 1973, was not his coining. It was meant as a slight, but he liked the word. It came to evoke, for outsiders, the most hawkish set of cheerleaders for the Republican Party. But that was not Mr Kristol’s original intent. “Neo” indicated less new than semi-detached—sceptical like Lionel Trilling, who had shocked him in his youth with his description of the conflict between modern culture and politics, or like Leo Strauss, from whom he had picked up the habit of looking at the modern world with the eyes of the ancient Greeks. Plato and Aristotle often featured in Mr Kristol’s essays, alongside Lord Salisbury and Adam Smith, though it was Shakespeare’s Sonnets he carried in his pocket, to remind him how to put great thoughts in the best and fewest words.
It’s important to be semi-detached, not a cheerleader for the Party, whether it be the GOP or the Democrats, because such a devotion to a party platform shows no individualism, nor ideological consistency, nor anything closely resembling rationalism. It’s true that the neocons embrace a robust foreign policy, because as the Economist points out, we’re readers of history, and we know that men aren’t angels, as a reading of Plato, Aristotle, or the Bible would clearly mete out. And perhaps that’s why the neocons are hated by many, because of our skepticism, and detachment, and because we know that the best defense is a strong offense. The death of the neocons has been written by many, including most notably Francis Fukayama, however an Iran with nukes, an incoherent strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the decline of the dollar only will lead to the need again of strong national leaders like Reagan and Bush to carry us through these ambiguous times.
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