Return of the Neocons
Return of the Neocons
Written by Stephen Wertheim Tuesday January 8, 2019
Two
years ago, as Donald Trump ascended to the presidency, you might have
thought that, if nothing else, neoconservatives had finally been put out
to pasture. In the campaign, Trump had blasted the
neocons’ signature policy, the war in Iraq, as a “big fat mistake,” and
repudiated their ostensible program of turning nations into liberal
democracies. He paid no political price with voters, and probably the
opposite, as white evangelicals once drawn to George W. Bush’s “freedom
agenda” flocked to Trump in record numbers.
Even allowing for
Trump’s opportunism and inconsistencies, his election victory appeared
to deal a double blow to the neoconservative persuasion. It not only
broke the neocons’ hold on the Republican Party, but also, in the same
stroke, revealed that they lacked a popular constituency. There they
were, free-floating pundits, alone and exposed—neither intellectually
credible nor politically representative.
Why, given this
development, would Republican politicians respond by once again seeking
out the neocons’ counsel? Why, far less, would Democrats? And why would
much of the news media, grappling with historic levels of public
distrust, accept neoconservatives and neoconservatism as the baseline
for foreign policy analysis?
Yet exactly this has happened.
Today, neoconservatives are riding high once more, in the White House,
on Capitol Hill, in the most prominent organs of opinion. The Weekly
Standard may have shuttered, but anti-Trump neocons enjoy increasing
influence in the center of the Republican and Democratic parties and in
publications like The Atlantic and The Washington Post. Others,
meanwhile—call them neo-neoconservatives, or post-neoconservatives—are
busy making policy in the Trump administration. They’ve gone with Trump
for good reason. Although he is repudiating the export of liberal
democracy and degrading its practice at home, Trump is also reasserting
the American right’s pugnacious antipathy to “globalism.” He is acting
as many within the neocon firmament have long favored, positioning the
United States against a vicious world and fetishizing brute force in
response.
As a result, Trump has forced neoconservatives to
decide, for the first time, whether they are more against
“totalitarianism” or “globalism.” If anti-totalitarians take Trump to be
perverting what they hold dear, anti-globalist neocons have found in
Trump a kindred spirit and vehicle for power. Yet, even as they are
fracturing, neocons are flourishing. They have bypassed the political
wilderness and vaulted themselves to the vanguard on either side of the
Trump divide. A new configuration of right-wing foreign policy is coming
into view, and neocons are in the lead once more.
Fair Use Excerpt. Read the rest here.
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“The Weekly Standard may have shuttered,” 25 thousand circulation