This is really interesting but I don't know if I quite follow.
I think Pierre Manent once said that the expression "neoconservative" is confusing because it makes people think both a body of ideas and a typical intellectual trajectory. (IIRC he was saying Ratzinger was a neocon in the second sense but not the first.) I think that you are making a similar distinction and are (at least in this piece) are interested in people who have been driven right by leftist effervescence. They are neo- and not paleocons, to the extent that they are, because they wind up in a position like Ratzinger's / The Free Press, not the SSPX / Alex Jones. (I'm happy to say that I'm a New Romantic who rejects futile and exhausting hyperpolitics but I guess if you don't see things this way I'm a neocon by tendency.)
Isn't the differentia specifica of neoconservatism as a body of ideas, however, commitment to an aggressive US foreign policy that will remake the world in accord with Western Values? One that isn't deluded by rhetoric about International Order and wisely knows it has to act now because it doesn't think that History is on its side? I've been really struck by Adam Tooze's running commentary that the real heirs to the neoconservatism of the early Reagan and Bush II eras are Biden and Jake Sullivan (here https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/10/war-middle-east-ukraine-us-feeble-biden-trump, and at greater length here https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-331-46-in-medias-res-a.) Maximum pressure on Iran, in support of Israel, vs. Russia in a proxy war, vs. China in a Cold War. This was frightening and dangerous in a way we Americans had difficulty taking seriously because we are so navel-gazing. It is why I've found this whole "have Democrats rejected neoliberalism" debate between Klein/Yglesias and The American Prospect bizarre. The Official Democratic Party rejected "neoliberalism" in the name of Cold War II with China, and I don't think the part of the left that's interested in electoral politics noticed or cares?
Anyway sorry for this disorganized rant, which I realize isn't as much of a comment on your post as I hoped it would be. I would never vote for Trump, I am a milquetoast social democrat left-liberal, but I don't think we Americans are sufficiently scared of the political center. This leaves me unsure exactly what political epithet to give myself.
It’s a pretty disorganized post, dw about it. I guess I think neoconservatism is one of those terms (a little like “Gnosticism” another preoccupation of mine) which really should probably just be retired as meaning too many things, but we’re more or less stuck with it. I’m mostly interested in the intellectual trajectory and the right social engineering component, but you’re probably right about the disjointedness. It’s interesting isn’t it about Biden? I haven’t quite known what to make of it all either, and definitely second the point about either the left or frankly the right noticing.
I'm going to piggyback on the directional aspect. Every party iteration, except maybe the federalists except by compromise, has had romantic turns or roots. This goes back to Jefferson, the whigs attempt to meet the dem-reps halfway all the way up to the hippies and every neocon. The reactionary aspect is always romantic but the "center" is always lockean as no constitution can be purely or even fundamentally romantic. Culturally lockean policies were pushed by federalists but they, for whatever ungodly reason, never developed and rousseau just touched everything.
You can't avoid these "essentially contested concepts." I just worry that we Americans are having an extremely intense intramural debate that is mostly about how disgusted we are by one another, and little bit about tax cuts, abortion and medicaid. At the same time our leaders are engaging in all these complicated and unpredictable improvisations in foreign policy that might blow up the world. I don't *want* Cold War II!
Yeah, I don’t talk foreign policy that much because it’s not my specialty, but I am coming from a place of skepticism about American intervention most of the time. I’d rather we move on to Detente II asap!
If you listen to the ex-neocons who strongly opposed Trump (Frum, Fukuyama, Kristol—but I think Biden and Pelosi also think this), their main worry about him is that he can't stand up to our now supposedly united enemies. This is the point on which I take the most reassurance about Trump. Maybe he will do a corrupt deal and sell us out to China for kickbacks and soybeans.
Yeah, the thing about Trump is he’s a man of many contradictions and an insectoid attention span. He might surround himself with people like John Bolton or the kind of Straussian who thinks that worrying about nuclear war is unmanly but then he wanders off to some other concern before they can start a war.
I think that's a great point - and a great article - and I'm finding the issue is more with how neoliberalism collapsed on itself as the liberal conception of reason, as instantiated by neutral global institutions, isn't realistic. These institutions never actually connect to nature over all to become neutral and global and instead only connect as far from the cultures instantiating it. If neoliberalism couldn't manage the pretence then it's no doubt foreign policy must change. They won't get rid of some of these tools but liberalism has to reimagine itself now.
I think this is really well observed. Yeah, I'm not sure the neo-paleo split obtains anymore, so there's a lot of cross-pollination. But one key thing to think about in all this is Israel: did the paleo right accept a more openly ethnonationalist Israel?
Could you venture a definition of what you are calling contemporary neoconservatism, or a few names you see as exemplars of it? Mainly I want to make sure I understand, since neoconservatism seems to me a term that has fallen out of usage in the current moment.
I generally mean it in the older sense of a left or liberal-right ideological trajectory that winds up clustering around a kind of somewhat conventionalist, "actually the received wisdom was right" style of conservatism. I think in terms of people who fully embody it Bari Weiss and the Free Press/UnHerd crowd might be a good example of what I mean. As a sensibility a few of the people I mentioned in the piece have it to some extent sometimes, as probably do I. Sorry if that doesn't answer your question!
First of all, the Trotskyist dimension is essential to understanding the original neocons, though I am shakier on the Podhoretzes and Kristols than neocon-adjacent liberals like Daniel Bell and Seymour Martin Lipset. But the process of deradicalization is central to the formation of their ethos: their gradual association of their youthful radicalism with a kind of naive, romantic messianism that they came to see as the root of totalitarianism and dangerous anti-system politics (Communism/Fascism, McCarthyism/New Left here become the ends of a horseshoe). The social substrate of that is the "making it" of often poor Jewish outsiders in WASP academia; the ex-socialist-cum-neocon reaction to the 60s is a (quite self-conscious, as recent archival work has shown!) "pulling up the ladder" moment of Jewish male academics toward other outsider groups demanding inclusion, particularly African-Americans, particularly in academia. But I think you're right that this was a process of moving from outside to inside, from periphery to center, and an embrace of an institutional ethos against ideologies seen as threats to it. (The critique of student-movement romanticism was explicit and sustained, and they used that word abundantly. There was a whole chain of equation: childish = irrational = romantic = religious = anti-modern.)
I find it needlessly confusing to call the contemporary "post-left" neoconservatism, so I'm going to stick with the former term. It depends on who you include in the "post-left," but my main takeaway from Daniel Oppenheimer's podcast on it is that it is best understood as a pretty straightforward opportunism. The left moment of 2015-2020 or so made names and brands, and its "crash" in 2020 (with the Corbyn and Bernie defeats) was a big deflation; it's harder to say "we lost" or "we tried something and it failed" than play a self-righteous blame game and turn that into a new brand. The difference, though, is that the people you mention specifically *didn't* make it into the "center"; they were already somewhat outsider academic-precariat types who lost their bid to become insiders. Angela Nagle, Aime Therese, the Red Scare people, etc, were nobodies, and attaching themselves to the left or abandoning it didn't cost them anything or change much. There was already a resentment of PMC success there, and they saw that a lot of the neo-socialists were Ivy League grad students or even, say, Google engineers, and turned that into the post-left critique that "this was all just about the PMC anyway." That's right in a dumb kind of way, stating half the obvious but ignoring the rest of the obvious. PMC socialists were very aware of issue of their education and *perceived* (if not actual) insider status, and were self-consciously attempting an experiment to create a political coalition between ourselves and a more traditional working class that was (and remains) open to certain progressive ideas. It failed, but it wasn't the blind or cynical project the post-left has built their new brands on saying it was.
The final dimension to this one I find curiously absent from many discussions of the post-left, which is the role of *liberals* in the woke moment that much of the post-left/new right is simple a reaction against. Wokeism divided liberals, for sure, but there was a hothouse moment where nearly everyone embraced it in some way. Its loudest champions in the public sphere were institutional liberal media types that were often anti-socialist or at least anti-Bernie, the Hillary and Kamala 1.0 acolytes in the press. The resistance embrace of White Fragility, the DEI craze, etc, did not come from Jacobin or the DSA! The "actual" left had a critique of neoliberal identity politics, woke capitalism, all those post-left bugbears, from the beginning. That said, the left had two issues: 1) it's a big tent that certainly did include people who embraced that rhetoric, and 2) it did so somewhat strategically (Jacobin, Bernie, etc) because it was so vilified by *liberals* for being being racist, "bro" politics. Everyone seems to have memory-holed how intensely, for a moment, woke rhetoric came from the center, the establishment, the Democratic Party, and then retrospectively blamed it on the left.
I think it was this ambiguous way that wokeism floated between liberals and the left, occupying about half of each, was what created the opening for this current anti-left culture war arrangement that unites, to some extent, the centrist liberals who won out, post-left grifters/opportunists, and the right. The post-leftists were outsiders who found a new outsider bandwagon. The right does have its real divides, too, but I'll believe the right isn't just about oligarchy and puerile lashing out at left-wing academics when I see it. As far as I'm concerned, any politics that's mainly about wokeism and a culturalist critique of how evil institutions are is, as the original neocons would have said, childish romanticism.
Yes I agree with you for the most part, when I say I downplay the Trotskyism I mostly mean that I downplay the argument that specific characteristics of Trotskyism that weren’t already present in liberalism can be found in IE; the invasion of Iraq or embracing the laffer curve. Agreed about romanticism, I’m very much with you (and I think Oppenheimer) about the post left. I dabble with what I call upside down critical theory here sometimes, but usually with the goal of trying to keep the attention of a type of person who’d roll their eyes and scroll away if I cited Gramsci or Marx to make a point!
One thing I've been wondering about is to what extent the OG neoconservatives like Kristol, Himmelfarb and Podhoretz were linked up with similar movements in Europe and elsewhere, or whether this is a distinctive aspect of the latest iteration. You mention the role of immigrants, but it seems to me that much of the intellectual firepower and counter-cultural energy of especially cultural conservatism/reaction has come from outside America: e.g. right-wing provocateurs like Milo Yiannopoulos, post-left commentators like Angela Nagle, Aimee Therese and Malcom Kyeyune, pioneering heterodox publications like Quillette and Unherd, champions of nationalism like Yoram Hazony, a neocon 2.0 like Douglas Murray, reactionary feminists like Mary Harrington, Louise Perry (and JK Rowling for that matter) and neoreactionaries (Nick Land's pivot to stoking race war via an anonymous Twitter account).
On your point about literature, it is not the most promising sign that while Himmelfarb was reading the Victorians, Harrington is reading Renaud Camus.
It’s definitely distinctive to some extent, I think reflecting the totality of American cultural hegemony in this century. There’s been a backwash effect on the far right that’s neither here nor there to this post but I’ve certainly noticed-sometimes GOP pols talking about Guatemalans will make civilizational kulturkampf arguments that seem imported directly from IE; French discourses about Syrian migrants etc.
This is really interesting but I don't know if I quite follow.
I think Pierre Manent once said that the expression "neoconservative" is confusing because it makes people think both a body of ideas and a typical intellectual trajectory. (IIRC he was saying Ratzinger was a neocon in the second sense but not the first.) I think that you are making a similar distinction and are (at least in this piece) are interested in people who have been driven right by leftist effervescence. They are neo- and not paleocons, to the extent that they are, because they wind up in a position like Ratzinger's / The Free Press, not the SSPX / Alex Jones. (I'm happy to say that I'm a New Romantic who rejects futile and exhausting hyperpolitics but I guess if you don't see things this way I'm a neocon by tendency.)
Isn't the differentia specifica of neoconservatism as a body of ideas, however, commitment to an aggressive US foreign policy that will remake the world in accord with Western Values? One that isn't deluded by rhetoric about International Order and wisely knows it has to act now because it doesn't think that History is on its side? I've been really struck by Adam Tooze's running commentary that the real heirs to the neoconservatism of the early Reagan and Bush II eras are Biden and Jake Sullivan (here https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/10/war-middle-east-ukraine-us-feeble-biden-trump, and at greater length here https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-331-46-in-medias-res-a.) Maximum pressure on Iran, in support of Israel, vs. Russia in a proxy war, vs. China in a Cold War. This was frightening and dangerous in a way we Americans had difficulty taking seriously because we are so navel-gazing. It is why I've found this whole "have Democrats rejected neoliberalism" debate between Klein/Yglesias and The American Prospect bizarre. The Official Democratic Party rejected "neoliberalism" in the name of Cold War II with China, and I don't think the part of the left that's interested in electoral politics noticed or cares?
Anyway sorry for this disorganized rant, which I realize isn't as much of a comment on your post as I hoped it would be. I would never vote for Trump, I am a milquetoast social democrat left-liberal, but I don't think we Americans are sufficiently scared of the political center. This leaves me unsure exactly what political epithet to give myself.
It’s a pretty disorganized post, dw about it. I guess I think neoconservatism is one of those terms (a little like “Gnosticism” another preoccupation of mine) which really should probably just be retired as meaning too many things, but we’re more or less stuck with it. I’m mostly interested in the intellectual trajectory and the right social engineering component, but you’re probably right about the disjointedness. It’s interesting isn’t it about Biden? I haven’t quite known what to make of it all either, and definitely second the point about either the left or frankly the right noticing.
I'm going to piggyback on the directional aspect. Every party iteration, except maybe the federalists except by compromise, has had romantic turns or roots. This goes back to Jefferson, the whigs attempt to meet the dem-reps halfway all the way up to the hippies and every neocon. The reactionary aspect is always romantic but the "center" is always lockean as no constitution can be purely or even fundamentally romantic. Culturally lockean policies were pushed by federalists but they, for whatever ungodly reason, never developed and rousseau just touched everything.
You can't avoid these "essentially contested concepts." I just worry that we Americans are having an extremely intense intramural debate that is mostly about how disgusted we are by one another, and little bit about tax cuts, abortion and medicaid. At the same time our leaders are engaging in all these complicated and unpredictable improvisations in foreign policy that might blow up the world. I don't *want* Cold War II!
Yeah, I don’t talk foreign policy that much because it’s not my specialty, but I am coming from a place of skepticism about American intervention most of the time. I’d rather we move on to Detente II asap!
If you listen to the ex-neocons who strongly opposed Trump (Frum, Fukuyama, Kristol—but I think Biden and Pelosi also think this), their main worry about him is that he can't stand up to our now supposedly united enemies. This is the point on which I take the most reassurance about Trump. Maybe he will do a corrupt deal and sell us out to China for kickbacks and soybeans.
Yeah, the thing about Trump is he’s a man of many contradictions and an insectoid attention span. He might surround himself with people like John Bolton or the kind of Straussian who thinks that worrying about nuclear war is unmanly but then he wanders off to some other concern before they can start a war.
I might be misunderstanding. What're the foreign policy innovations you mean which aren't neoliberal?
It is actor's vocabulary, if you like. Sullivan very explicitly connected the turn against what's called "neoliberalism"—an embrace of industrial policy, the rejection of free trade—with the idea that multilateral institutions had eaten the middle class's lunch, and support for a very aggressive turn against China: https://www.archivebuttons.com/articles?article=https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n21/adam-tooze/great-power-politics.
I think that's a great point - and a great article - and I'm finding the issue is more with how neoliberalism collapsed on itself as the liberal conception of reason, as instantiated by neutral global institutions, isn't realistic. These institutions never actually connect to nature over all to become neutral and global and instead only connect as far from the cultures instantiating it. If neoliberalism couldn't manage the pretence then it's no doubt foreign policy must change. They won't get rid of some of these tools but liberalism has to reimagine itself now.
I think this is really well observed. Yeah, I'm not sure the neo-paleo split obtains anymore, so there's a lot of cross-pollination. But one key thing to think about in all this is Israel: did the paleo right accept a more openly ethnonationalist Israel?
You'd know that better than I, although the sense I've gotten is "yes, to a certain extent."
Could you venture a definition of what you are calling contemporary neoconservatism, or a few names you see as exemplars of it? Mainly I want to make sure I understand, since neoconservatism seems to me a term that has fallen out of usage in the current moment.
I generally mean it in the older sense of a left or liberal-right ideological trajectory that winds up clustering around a kind of somewhat conventionalist, "actually the received wisdom was right" style of conservatism. I think in terms of people who fully embody it Bari Weiss and the Free Press/UnHerd crowd might be a good example of what I mean. As a sensibility a few of the people I mentioned in the piece have it to some extent sometimes, as probably do I. Sorry if that doesn't answer your question!
That does clarify things a bit!
First of all, the Trotskyist dimension is essential to understanding the original neocons, though I am shakier on the Podhoretzes and Kristols than neocon-adjacent liberals like Daniel Bell and Seymour Martin Lipset. But the process of deradicalization is central to the formation of their ethos: their gradual association of their youthful radicalism with a kind of naive, romantic messianism that they came to see as the root of totalitarianism and dangerous anti-system politics (Communism/Fascism, McCarthyism/New Left here become the ends of a horseshoe). The social substrate of that is the "making it" of often poor Jewish outsiders in WASP academia; the ex-socialist-cum-neocon reaction to the 60s is a (quite self-conscious, as recent archival work has shown!) "pulling up the ladder" moment of Jewish male academics toward other outsider groups demanding inclusion, particularly African-Americans, particularly in academia. But I think you're right that this was a process of moving from outside to inside, from periphery to center, and an embrace of an institutional ethos against ideologies seen as threats to it. (The critique of student-movement romanticism was explicit and sustained, and they used that word abundantly. There was a whole chain of equation: childish = irrational = romantic = religious = anti-modern.)
I find it needlessly confusing to call the contemporary "post-left" neoconservatism, so I'm going to stick with the former term. It depends on who you include in the "post-left," but my main takeaway from Daniel Oppenheimer's podcast on it is that it is best understood as a pretty straightforward opportunism. The left moment of 2015-2020 or so made names and brands, and its "crash" in 2020 (with the Corbyn and Bernie defeats) was a big deflation; it's harder to say "we lost" or "we tried something and it failed" than play a self-righteous blame game and turn that into a new brand. The difference, though, is that the people you mention specifically *didn't* make it into the "center"; they were already somewhat outsider academic-precariat types who lost their bid to become insiders. Angela Nagle, Aime Therese, the Red Scare people, etc, were nobodies, and attaching themselves to the left or abandoning it didn't cost them anything or change much. There was already a resentment of PMC success there, and they saw that a lot of the neo-socialists were Ivy League grad students or even, say, Google engineers, and turned that into the post-left critique that "this was all just about the PMC anyway." That's right in a dumb kind of way, stating half the obvious but ignoring the rest of the obvious. PMC socialists were very aware of issue of their education and *perceived* (if not actual) insider status, and were self-consciously attempting an experiment to create a political coalition between ourselves and a more traditional working class that was (and remains) open to certain progressive ideas. It failed, but it wasn't the blind or cynical project the post-left has built their new brands on saying it was.
The final dimension to this one I find curiously absent from many discussions of the post-left, which is the role of *liberals* in the woke moment that much of the post-left/new right is simple a reaction against. Wokeism divided liberals, for sure, but there was a hothouse moment where nearly everyone embraced it in some way. Its loudest champions in the public sphere were institutional liberal media types that were often anti-socialist or at least anti-Bernie, the Hillary and Kamala 1.0 acolytes in the press. The resistance embrace of White Fragility, the DEI craze, etc, did not come from Jacobin or the DSA! The "actual" left had a critique of neoliberal identity politics, woke capitalism, all those post-left bugbears, from the beginning. That said, the left had two issues: 1) it's a big tent that certainly did include people who embraced that rhetoric, and 2) it did so somewhat strategically (Jacobin, Bernie, etc) because it was so vilified by *liberals* for being being racist, "bro" politics. Everyone seems to have memory-holed how intensely, for a moment, woke rhetoric came from the center, the establishment, the Democratic Party, and then retrospectively blamed it on the left.
I think it was this ambiguous way that wokeism floated between liberals and the left, occupying about half of each, was what created the opening for this current anti-left culture war arrangement that unites, to some extent, the centrist liberals who won out, post-left grifters/opportunists, and the right. The post-leftists were outsiders who found a new outsider bandwagon. The right does have its real divides, too, but I'll believe the right isn't just about oligarchy and puerile lashing out at left-wing academics when I see it. As far as I'm concerned, any politics that's mainly about wokeism and a culturalist critique of how evil institutions are is, as the original neocons would have said, childish romanticism.
Yes I agree with you for the most part, when I say I downplay the Trotskyism I mostly mean that I downplay the argument that specific characteristics of Trotskyism that weren’t already present in liberalism can be found in IE; the invasion of Iraq or embracing the laffer curve. Agreed about romanticism, I’m very much with you (and I think Oppenheimer) about the post left. I dabble with what I call upside down critical theory here sometimes, but usually with the goal of trying to keep the attention of a type of person who’d roll their eyes and scroll away if I cited Gramsci or Marx to make a point!
I would love to read a post by you about the crossroads between literature and politics
Timely topic and interesting observations!
One thing I've been wondering about is to what extent the OG neoconservatives like Kristol, Himmelfarb and Podhoretz were linked up with similar movements in Europe and elsewhere, or whether this is a distinctive aspect of the latest iteration. You mention the role of immigrants, but it seems to me that much of the intellectual firepower and counter-cultural energy of especially cultural conservatism/reaction has come from outside America: e.g. right-wing provocateurs like Milo Yiannopoulos, post-left commentators like Angela Nagle, Aimee Therese and Malcom Kyeyune, pioneering heterodox publications like Quillette and Unherd, champions of nationalism like Yoram Hazony, a neocon 2.0 like Douglas Murray, reactionary feminists like Mary Harrington, Louise Perry (and JK Rowling for that matter) and neoreactionaries (Nick Land's pivot to stoking race war via an anonymous Twitter account).
On your point about literature, it is not the most promising sign that while Himmelfarb was reading the Victorians, Harrington is reading Renaud Camus.
It’s definitely distinctive to some extent, I think reflecting the totality of American cultural hegemony in this century. There’s been a backwash effect on the far right that’s neither here nor there to this post but I’ve certainly noticed-sometimes GOP pols talking about Guatemalans will make civilizational kulturkampf arguments that seem imported directly from IE; French discourses about Syrian migrants etc.