As legend has it, neoconservatism as a political ideology in the United States is rooted in the 1930s at “Alcove 1” of the City College of New York cafeteria, where a group of noncommunist socialists gathered to discuss politics separately from the communists in Alcove 2. In addition to many rotating participants—including the late New York Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan—this group of anti-Stalinists who flirted briefly with Trotskyism was centered around four men subsequently known as the “The New York (Jewish) Intellectuals”: Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, Nathan Glazer, and Irving Kristol. Born in 1920 into an Orthodox Jewish family in Brooklyn, Kristol is often considered the godfather of the clan after being the first to embrace the “neoconservative” label when former comrades on the Left used it pejoratively against the Alcove 1 group amid their steady rightward drift after the Second World War. Jokingly calling himself a “liberal mugged by reality,” Kristol was in many respects the leader of this vocal, and often antagonistic intellectual force. [1]
In this context, Kristol describes his political family as being “children of the Great Depression, veterans (literal or not) of World War II, who accepted the New Deal in principle, and had little affection for the kind of isolationism that then permeated American conservatism.” By the late 1960s, he continues, “As the ‘counterculture’ engulfed our universities and began to refashion our popular culture, we discovered that traditional ‘bourgeois’ values were what we had believed in all along.” Kristol adds: “the spectrum of neoconservatism became ever broader, even as the spectrum of liberalism became ever narrower, even more dogmatically left-leaning.” [2] Thus as political migrants moving from Left to Right, neoconservatives were positioned at the center of a dynamic transformation as Stalin’s betrayal of the Soviet Union’s revolutionary heritage fractured the Communist International and splintered Marxist-Leninist parties throughout Europe and the United States. Then following World War Two, elite US foreign policymakers developed blueprints for the imperial domination of the globe in an “American century,” and subsequently produced as ideological justification an epic struggle between communist and capitalist civilizations that developed into a paradigmatic “cold war” between the “totalitarian” East and Western “free world.”
In what was viewed as a semi-autonomous “cultural cold war” fought in the realm of ideology and propaganda, “the war of ideas,” official efforts were made to cultivate the nascent “noncommunist Left” in Europe and the United States. Kristol and the New York (Jewish) Intellectuals were, in this context, on the front lines of state-sanctioned combat against the remnants of communist and socialist praxis on the New Left. Thus in 1953 Kristol co-founded and, until 1958 co-edited the British literary journal Encounter, which was later revealed to have received funding from the Central Intelligence Agency. As Kristol recollects:
Encounter was accused of being a ‘Cold War’ magazine, which in a sense was true enough. It was published by the Congress for Cultural Freedom [founded in 1950], which was later revealed to be financed by the CIA. As a cultural-political journal, it published many fine literary essays, literary criticism, art criticism, short stories, and poetry, and in sheer bulk they probably preponderated. But there is no doubt its ideological core—its ‘mission,’ as it were—was to counteract, insofar as it were possible, the anti-American, pro-Soviet views of a large segment of the intellectual elites in the Western democracies and in the English-speaking Commonwealth. [3]Prior to starting Encounter, Kristol had been from 1947-1953 the managing editor of Commentary magazine (1945-Present), by far the most significant platform for the public articulation of neoconservative ideology. [4] Leaving Encounter in the hands of his comrade Melvin J. Lasky in 1958, Kristol founded another cultural journal in 1965 along with Daniel Bell and Nathan Glazer, The Public Interest, and in 1985 created its foreign affairs equivalent The National Interest. Throughout the course of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, as Kristol and fellow New York (Jewish) Intellectuals expanded and solidified their ranks, this emerging neoconservative bloc played a foundational role in the production of anticommunist discourse and propaganda. Also pivotal to the development of this ideological constellation were individuals such as Norman Podhoretz, who served as editor-in-chief of Commentary from 1960 to 1995, and Democratic Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington (also known as “the Senator from Boeing”)--a stalwart anticommunist and pro-Israel legislator who founded the Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM) in 1972.
The CDM served as yet another major vessel for the convergence of anticommunist “cold war liberals,” and in this respect was closely affiliated with the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD). The CPD had been founded in 1950 as a military-industrial lobby organized to help launch the “cold war” propaganda campaign by publicizing the content of National Security Memorandum 68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security, which laid the justificatory groundwork for the use of political, military and socioeconomic pressure to combat the global expansion of Soviet power and communist ideology. [5] When the architect of NSC 68, Paul Nitze helped revive the CPD in 1976, it soon began serving as s central node of neoconservative articulation for the development of ruling class hegemony. [6] While Kristol was perhaps the first “official” neoconservative convert, a wave of “cold war liberals” soon began similar migrations from the Left (and the Democratic Party) to eventually merge forces with the “Reagan Revolution” led by a New Right coalition of corporate-financial elite, religious fundamentalists, and ideological “cold warriors.”
A substantially widened neoconservative force-field thus emerged to encompass individuals from the CPD and “Scoop Jackson’s” senatorial staff, including Richard Pipes, Richard Perle, and Paul Wolfowitz, who became players in the Reagan-Bush regime after their instrumental participation in the now infamous “Team B.” This group was organized in 1976 under the leadership of George H.W. Bush during his final days as CIA Director to provide an unofficial “competitive threat assessment” that would demonstrate continuing Soviet nuclear capabilities necessitating a rejection of détente and the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) agreements first produced under the “realist” regime of Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon. Given that Wolfowitz, Perle, and other neoconservaitves including Douglas Feith have been described sensationally as the sinister masterminds of a “‘Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal’ that hijacked U.S. foreign policy” after 9/11, [7] it is noteworthy that Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, as well as George H. W. Bush began their stormy relationships with neoconservatism in the late 1970s “cold war” context of internecine struggle between the “realist” and idealist” (pro and anti-détente) factions of the US foreign policymaking establishment.
Meanwhile, a certain web of intellectual cross-fertilization emerged between Paul Wolfowitz, when he studied at the University of Chicago and absorbed the philosophy and social theory of conservative luminaries Leo Strauss, Allan Bloom, and Albert Wohlstetter, which was infused into the ideologies of many “Scoop” Jackson aides and others in the emerging neoconservative bloc. Although the significance of this connection has been grossly overstated in many analyses of neoconservatives as “Straussians,” there was nonetheless a transmission of certain political-intellectual traditions from Strauss to Bloom to Wolfowitz and other allies in the bloc such as Francis Fukuyama, who studied under Bloom at Cornell University and served in Reagan’s State Department with I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby while Wolfowitz and Perle worked at the Pentagon.
By the time Pearle and Wolfowitz arrived on the scene, neoconservative ideology had come to represent a fierce opposition to the domestic progressive Left coupled with support for unfettered American power abroad. This phenomenon is perhaps best symbolized by Reagan’s first Ambassador to the United Nation’s (1981-1985), Jeanne Kirkpatrck, who in 1984 characterized her opponents as “San Francisco democrats” belonging to the “blame-America-first” crowd full of communist sympathizers. At the same time, she became (in)famous for having developed the “Kirkpatrick Doctrine,” which formed a major theoretical component of the Regan-Bush plan for the “rollback,” as opposed to mere “containment,” of Soviet power. Kirkpatrick had argued in a widely read 1979 article in Commentary that “A realistic policy which aims at protecting our own interest and assisting…less developed nations will need to face the unpleasant fact that, if victorious, violent insurgency headed by Marxist revolutionaries is unlikely to lead to anything but totalitarian tyranny.” [8]
Published at a moment in time when two significant anti-Soviet battlefronts were emerging in Central America and Central Asia, Kirkpatrick’s “Dictatorships and Double Standards” offered a moral rationale for supporting the “Contra” counterrevolutionaries against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, a theme soon easily extended to the Islamic warriors fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. Such forces attached to rightwing regimes, no matter how authoritarian, were always worth supporting in opposition to leftwing dictatorships whose “totalitarianism” was naturally more antithetical to American interests. Reagan therefore publicly justified his regime’s alignment with the brutal Contra terrorists through conclusions such as his 1985 argument that “The Sandinista dictatorship of Nicaragua, with full Cuban-Soviet bloc support, not only persecutes its people…but arms and provides bases for Communist terrorists attacking neighboring states. Support for freedom fighters is self-defense.” [9]
Thus having entering into the upper-echelons of political power with the resurgent anticommunist crusade under Reagan-Bush, the neoconservative bloc continued its ideological and political struggle although its influence became neutralized during the 1990s. One of the primary neoconservative goals during this time was to pressure for the overthrow (rather than containment) of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, [10] while Perle and others assisted the hard-line Zionist Likud leadership in Israel devise its plan for A Clean Break from the “land for peace” process. [11] Being better placed under Bush-Cheney than they ever were in the Reagan-Bush regime, the neoconservative bloc’s influence rose precipitously following 9/11 as the axis revolving around Wolfowitz and Perle (also known as “the prince of darkness) helped initiate the commonsensical articulation of a generational struggle against “Islamo-fascism.” Through a reformulation of the “war on terror” it had begun in the 1980s—alongside Israeli allies—targeting a Soviet sponsored “terror network” centered around the Palestine Liberation Organization, the neoconservative bloc guided policy towards the 2003 invasion of Iraq in concordance with its imperial geopolitical vision explicated by The Project for the New American Century. [12] As the “regime change” enterprise in Iraq sputtered and threaten the tenuous hegemony of “war on terror” and future plans to “remake the Middle-East,” the neoconservative bloc was instrumental to the reactivation of the Committee on the Present Danger in 2004 under the slogan: “fighting terrorism and the ideologies that drive it.” [13]
From this truncated thumbnail sketch presented in the form of a “potted history,” it should be obvious enough that, while their collectivity may indeed contain some elements of a cabal, special interest group, and counterrevolutionary vanguard—as many of their opponents have variously charged—a dispassionate critical analysis might best describe neoconservatives as the nucleus of a Gramscian historical bloc engaged steadily since the 1950s in an ideological struggle to reproduce the cultural hegemony sustaining American empire. While a number of scholars have begun accounting for the peculiar influence of neoconservatism within the context of post-9/11 policy and in light of specific historical developments, there is still a need for much further investigation into the complex processes through which the neoconservative bloc has reproduced cultural hegemony.
[1] See: Joseph Dorman, Arguing the World: The New York Intellectuals in Their Own Words, (University of Chicago Press, 2001)l; Mark Gerson, The Neoconservative Vision: From the Cold War to Culture Wars (New York: Madison Books, 1997); Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, American Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order (NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 2004), Irving Kristol, Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (New York: The Free Press, 1995) James Nuechterlein, “Neoconservatism & Irving Kristol,” Commentary, August 1984; Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); Ruth Wise, “The New York (Jewish) Intellectuals,” Commentary, November, 1987.
[2] Kristol, Neoconservatism, x.
[3] Kristol, Neoconservatism, 481.
[4] Founded by the American Jewish Committee at the end of World War Two, Commentary describes itself as “America’s premier monthly magazine of opinion and a pivotal voice in American intellectual life.” As its website explains: “Since its inception in 1945, and increasingly after it emerged as the flagship of
neoconservatism in the 1970’s, the magazine has been consistently engaged with several large, interrelated questions: the fate of democracy and of democratic ideas in a world threatened by totalitarian ideologies; the state of American and Western security; the future of the Jews, Judaism, and Jewish culture in Israel, the United States, and around the world; and the preservation of high culture in an age of political correctness and the collapse of critical standards. See: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/abouthistory.cfm (accessed December 14, 2007).
[5] See: “NSC 68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security.” Federation of American Scientists, April 14, 1950. http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsc-hst/nsc-68.htm (accessed December 14, 2007). Coinciding with the outbreak of the Korean War, this document added an ideological component to George Kennan’s realist “containment theory” pertaining solely to the geopolitical aspects of anti-Soviet struggle. At the same time, NSC 68 was the product of a radical bureaucratic reshuffling of the US foreign policy establishment that, in the National Security Act of 1947, effectively created an “imperial presidency” empowered to conduct war and espionage in secret both at home and abroad.
[6] Reagan, who once identified as a New Deal Democrat during his days as an actor, joined the second CPD in 1979 in the midst of his Republican presidential primary campaign. In this process, he built a coalition with many of future advisors including Richard Pipes, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz (all former “Scoop” Jackson aids), Max Kampelman, Eugene Rostow, Eliot Abrams; and cabinet officers including National Security Advisor Richard V. Allen, Secretary of State George Shultz, CIA Director William Casey, and UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick.
[7] Dana Milbank, “Colonel Finally Saw Whites of Their Eyes” Washington Post, October 20, 2005,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/19/AR2005101902246.html (accessed December 14, 2007).
[8] Jeane Kirkpatrick, “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” Commentary, November 1979, 45.
[9] See: “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the State of the Union,” Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, February 6, 1985, http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1985/20685e.htm (accessed December 14, 2007).
[10] See: “Letter to President Clinton on Iraq,” The Project for the New American Century, January 26 1998, http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm (accessed December 15, 2007).
[11] See: Richard Perle, et al, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” (Jerusalem: The Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, 1996), 1, http://www.iasps.org/strat1.htm (accessed December 15, 2007).
[12] See: Thomas Donnelly, Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century, (Washington DC: A Report of the Project for the New American Century, September 2000). See:
“Publications/Reports,” http://www.newamericancentury.org/publicationsreports.htm; and “Letter to President Bush on the War on Terrorism,” Project for the New American Century, September 20, 2001, http://www.newamericancentury.org/Bushletter.htm, (accessed December 15, 2007).
[13] See: http://www.committeeonthepresentdanger.org/ (accessed December 14, 2007).
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