What is a Neocon?: Part II

The depoliticized 90s, the post-Cold War foreign policy pivot, the Unipolar Moment, DPG, PNAC, 9/11, the Israel-shaped elephant in the room, realism comes home to roost, and goodbye to all of that...

Caveat: as with Part 1, Part 2 of my series on the neocons is incomplete. It just isn’t possible to cover the entire subject and all of its nuances, especially as neoconservatism enters into its mature phase after 9/11 and becomes harder to distinguish from plain old mainstream conservatism. This fuzziness is perhaps best summed up by the question, “Was George W. Bush a neocon?”¹ Take a second to think on that.

The answer is yes, sort of, but also no, because if yes, then the particular origins, modes of social analysis, and ethno-religious characteristics of the neocons are no longer relevant so then what is neoconservatism exactly except the floating signifier we started from in Part 1?

I can’t resolve that problem, but I will try to offer some clarity around the topic that will at least keep the term legible, separate out its adherents from its detractors, and maybe most importantly explain how its successor ideology has transmogrified into the ruling ethos of the Global American Empire.

Part II.

After the Cold War ended in 1991, neoconservatism had become one of the most powerful forces in American politics, but without an obvious next step. For decades its foreign policy agenda had been firmly anchored to the fight against global communism, but with the collapse of the Soviet Union that raison d'être vanished and there was no longer an obvious enemy to focus its energies or cohere the right-of-center coalition that Reagan had managed to knit together during the 80s. So where were neocons supposed to pivot in the wake of Soviet collapse? And for that matter, how was the right going to redefine itself without the clarity of purpose that had shaped its agenda since the end of World War II?

Exacerbating the confusion was the fact that the domestic issues around which the neocons first raised their profile seemed increasingly “solved” or in any case thoroughly absorbed into mainstream Republican and Democratic platforms. The social and cultural upheavals of the 60s and 70s became far less salient as hippiedom forfeited its cultural ascendancy to yuppiedom and the emergent “moral majority.” Reagan’s War on Drugs and Clinton’s 1994 Crime Bill set in motion the most dramatic reduction in crime the country had ever seen, and the issue of welfare dependency, which was maybe the first and most frequent target of neoconservative critique, was effectively put to rest when Clinton passed welfare reform in ‘96.

American life was pretty good. NAFTA, which passed in ‘92 but only went into effect in ‘94, hadn’t quite yet gutted the interior. Reagan’s amnesty and the 1990 Immigration Act would have disastrous downstream consequences (which remain at the center of our politics today), but in this post-Cold War period were mostly concentrated in a few border states. A sense of optimism prevailed. Economic liberalization, suburbanization, and the “culture of narcissism” that defined the boomers had come into full maturity and resulted in a largely depoliticized society.² To the extent there were salient socio-political questions, they revolved around a totally new set of priorities, mostly driven by the Christian right. Issues like abortion, school prayer, and the sanctity of marriage supplanted earlier debates around drugs, crime, and urban decay.

In such a context, the neocons of old didn’t really have much to contribute. Not only did the neocons not care as much about these questions, their more academic, data-driven approach––so useful in debates over welfare and crime––didn’t apply as well to debates on abortion. Further, as pointed out in Part 1, if you take Alexander Bloom’s assessment seriously that the early neocons were primarily motivated by a deep-seated fear of anti-semitism,³ the 80s and 90s made that fear a literal joke. American Jews enjoyed unprecedented levels of social and cultural assimilation during this period, and the rise of Christian evangelical support for Israel in the 1980s created an unlikely but powerful alliance that reinforced Jewish security in the American political landscape. You’d be hard pressed to find a place and time in history where Jews had it so good.

With their relevance on domestic questions made more or less obsolete, and the old generation of neocons now giving way to the new generation (famously in the case of Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz to their sons, Bill and John), the neocons turned their attention to the unsettled debate over how to assert American military might in a world devoid of the Soviet threat. How the neocons are perceived now, and their reputation as reckless chickenhawks is based largely on the reorientation of their politics starting in the 90s. Where you start or which figures or writings you choose to include to make sense of this shift is an open question, and again, for the third time, I’m almost certainly leaving something out, but for the sake of “good enough” I will look at three main texts: “The Unipolar Moment” by Charles Krauthammer which was published in Foreign Affairs in 1991, the Pentagon’s Defense Planning Guide from 1992 authored by Paul Wolfowitz under the purview of Scooter Libby, and “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” by the Project for a New American Century published in September of 2000.