The Referendum on Neoconservatism

01 Monday Nov 2004

Posted by in Weekly Standard

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It’s already over, and the neocons won.

View this article at The Weekly Standard

RARELY HAVE THE HOLDERS of any set of political views and policy preferences been so thoroughly caricatured as the “neoconservatives” of the Bush years. To critics, this group of policymakers (preeminently, in the Defense Department and the Office of the Vice President), along with their allies on the outside (preeminently, in the pages of THE WEEKLY STANDARD), is responsible for a kind of hijacking of U.S. foreign policy in the wake of 9/11. Intoxicated by American power and blinded by a utopian vision, the neoconservatives (in the critics’ telling) set the country on a disastrous and unnecessary attempt to remake the world in the image of the United States.

And for this, come November 2004, the neoconservatives must pay. The defeat of George W. Bush by his Democratic opponent–and for purposes of the critics’ argument, any Democratic opponent would do–would mean a repudiation of this neoconservative view of the world. Many Bush critics saw in Iraq a comprehensive discrediting of neoconservative policy prescriptions, including the doctrine of preemptive or preventive war, belief in the efficacy of military power in general, faith in democratization, and unilateralism. It merely remained for voters to administer the coup de grâce at the polls and the neoconservatives would be discredited once and for all.

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Electoral roulette

26 Tuesday Oct 2004

Posted by in Washington Times

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The Washington Times

If I were running a presidential campaign, I would rather have a slight lead in the polls than a slight deficit plus a theory about why my opponent’s lead either wasn’t real or didn’t matter. On the basis purely of being on the side of the more likely winner, I would now rather be in the position of the Bush campaign than of the Kerry campaign. But the race is so close that the difference in the probability of either side winning is miniscule.

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Neoconservatism’s Liberal Legacy

01 Friday Oct 2004

Posted by in Policy Review

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View this article at Policy Review, October/Novemeber 2004

This essay appears in slightly different form in Peter Berkowitz, ed., Varieties of Conservatism in America (Hoover Institution Press, 2004).

“Neoconservatism” is the name of a robust strain in American intellectual life and American politics, a strain with a very rich history. But although even some of its leading figures over the years have pronounced the end of neoconservatism usually on grounds of its merger with (or perhaps takeover of) the conservative mainstream, the term remains very much alive. This is especially true when used to describe a certain group of people who have sought to influence American public policy, most notably foreign policy in the post-Cold War era, and who, in the administration of George W. Bush, obtained that influence.

One might, therefore, begin a consideration of neoconservatism with its rich history — or, in the alternative, with its contemporary influence. I propose to do neither (though I will indeed touch upon the past and the present). Instead, I want to explore its future — specifically, the ways in which neoconservatism has evolved according to its own premises in the direction of a current and future politics dedicated to the preservation and extension of liberal order, properly understood. To get to neoconservatism’s liberal legacy, however, it is necessary to begin with liberalism’s origins in the nature of politics itself.

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Saddam miscalculated?

28 Tuesday Sep 2004

Posted by in Washington Times

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The Washington Times

The head of Iraq’s nuclear research program has spoken. Mahdi Obeidi, writing on the op-ed page of the New York Times Sunday, offers an insider account of what was going on in Iraq in the years before the U.S.-led invasion. In the absence of any compelling reason to doubt his credibility, what he says seems to offer the best answer so far to a truly vexing question: What was Saddam Hussein thinking?

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GOP well positioned

07 Tuesday Sep 2004

Posted by in Washington Times

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The Washington Times

There was a time when Democrats were better at the craft of politics than Republicans. Given the dominance of congressional Democrats for the 40-year period from 1954 forward and the overall policy impact of FDR’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, Democrats certainly knew what they were doing. But those days are gone, and against all expectations, it is the Republican Party that is better at politics nowadays.

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