The Neoconservatives

"Gary Dorrien also had another good book on neo-cons. I will confess right at the outset that Peter Steinfels is a friend and one of my favourite people in the world. Though it’s also the case that it’s important to take a look at a book about neoconservatism written long before the Iraq War. Justin Vaisse’s new book, which I was fortunate enough to do an event for here at Brookings, is an excellent look at neoconservatism as well. Reading Peter, though, you understand that neoconservatives were not initially primarily about foreign policy – let alone starting a war to throw Saddam Hussein out of power. Neoconservatives were originally dissident liberals. People who started out on the left and over time developed doubts about the impact of liberal social policy. “Neoconservatives were originally dissident liberals. People who started out on the left and over time developed doubts about the impact of liberal social policy” The Public Interest magazine, a great magazine that I was very devoted to until the day it died a few years back, started out as a friendly critique of liberalism, talking about the limits of social policy, Nathan Glazer’s book title. But it still had in mind that social policy and social reform was useful. Public interest, after all, is a classically progressive term, the notion that a public interest exists is, in some sense, an American progressive idea. People like Moynihan, Glazer, Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol were such important American intellectuals and Irving Kristol, in particular, was, to use the popular term about him, the godfather of so many different conservative strains and organisations that I think it’s very important to go back to that beginning and realise that they were dissenting liberals. I think neoconservatives gave conservatism one of their most powerful concepts which is the law of unintended consequences. It was used as a battering ram against all kinds of liberal programmes, saying, ‘Yes, you intended to do good but look at what in fact this programme actually did.’ In the run-up to the Iraq War I was on a panel on a TV show with Bill Kristol and I looked at him and I said, ‘You know, one of the things you neocons taught me most was about the law of unintended consequences. I can’t help but think about that in relationship to this war that we are about to start’. I think liberals do have an obligation to think about the law of unintended consequences, they do have an obligation to take a look not just at the intentions of their programmes but at the effects of their programmes. So, because there was a kind of purity about original neoconservatism, untainted by the very divisive debates since, I thought Peter’s book was very useful to put on a list like this. I’ve argued that neoconservatism is dead because I see it as existing in this nether-world between the left and the right and that neoconservatives are essentially split. Some returned to liberalism – Daniel Patrick Moynihan is a good example of that, Daniel Bell is another. Other neocons really became full-fledged conservatives. I think at the end of his life it was fair to say Irving Kristol, even though he probably continued to call himself a neocon, was a conservative. Norman Podhoretz is a conservative and the whole successor generation like Bill are full-fledged conservatives."