A few weeks ago on Twitter/X there was another semi-regular flare-up where people try to define what a neocon is. Shrugging your shoulders and declaring the term meaningless is perfectly reasonable, but it got me thinking that trying to earnestly answer the question and put the term in the context of the Trump Moment might be a worthwhile effort for my new Substack (which you should become a paid subscriber to immediately).
Approaching the topic of neoconservatism with any degree of thoroughness requires a very long book. There have been books about the neocons, some of them pretty good, mostly about its rise to prominence during the Cold War and up through the end of their ascendancy during the Bush years, but the meaning and consequence of the neocons has been profoundly scrambled during the Trump Era and deserves an updated account.
I don’t have the time or inclination to write a book on the subject,1 and I’m well aware that anything I can fit in a single post will exclude important details, so yes, my apologies in advance for not mentioning “that other thing.” My ambitions for this post are fairly modest. Think of this as a Wikipedia-ish article but inclusive of the thornier details that Wikipedia can’t talk about. Who are these people? Where did they come from? What distinguishes them from other kinds of conservatives? How did they get so much power and influence? And how did they screw everything up so badly?
Everyone knows the neocons were (are) mostly Jewish and were (are) foreign policy hawks,2 but beyond that the term is indeed something of a floating signifier. Still, there is no other ideological movement of the last half-century that has taken up such a large share of the political imagination, for the left as a catch-all bogeyman to describe “far-right” excess (mistakenly, since the neocons are not really right wing at all), and for the right as the scapegoat for two decades of failed military adventurism (not so mistakenly).
The left has a hard time understanding the internal nuances of the right and for them neoconservative can mean anything from “conservative I really don’t like,” to “those Jewish foreign policy obsessives you see on Fox News.” There is this idea that if you add the modifier “neo” to conservative it makes you sound like your opinion is especially well-informed. I had one experience where a liberal colleague accused Trump of being a neocon. By this he just meant, “Trump is extra bad.” There is a lot of confusion out there.
On the right, the meaning is more narrowly tailored but still with very loose boundaries. It generally refers to the collection of politicians and talking heads, including some Democrats, from Bill Kristol to Lindsey Graham to John Bolton to Victoria Nuland, who seem to always be agitating for war or regime change somewhere in the world. It can also mean “those Jewish foreign policy obsessives you see on MSNBC.” This is true, but also incomplete.
Neoconservatism has come in three waves: its origins in the 1960s through Reagan, its apex during the Bush years, and its realignment (or decline) in the Trump era.3 What it is now bears only a vague resemblance to what it began as, but its origins are nonetheless central to understanding its trajectory all the way to the present. I’ll spend this post talking about the first wave of neoconservatism. Part 2, which I’ll publish next week (hopefully), will cover the 90s to the present. Much of this history mirrors what is happening with our current political realignment in the death throes of the Great Awokening so pay close attention.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Office Hours with Lomez to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.