csua.org/u/5c3 -> www.theweeklystandard.com/content/public/articles/000/000/003/000tzmlw.asp
Journalists, and now even presidential candidates, speak with an enviable confidence on who or what is neoconservative, and seem to assume the meaning is fully revealed in the name. Those of us who are designated as neocons are amused, flattered, or dismissive, depending on the context. Even I, frequently referred to as the godfather of all those neocons, have had my moments of wonderment. A few years ago I said and, alas, wrote that neoconservatism had had its own distinctive qualities in its early years, but by now had been absorbed into the mainstream of American conservatism. I was wrong, and the reason I was wrong is that, ever since its origin among disillusioned liberal intellectuals in the 1970s, what we call neoconservatism has been one of those intellectual undercurrents that surface only intermittently. It is not a movement, as the conspiratorial critics would have it. Neoconservatism is what the late historian of Jacksonian America, Marvin Meyers, called a persuasion, one that manifests itself over time, but erratically, and one whose meaning we clearly glimpse only in retrospect.
That this new conservative politics is distinctly American is beyond doubt. There is nothing like neoconservatism in Europe, and most European conservatives are highly skeptical of its legitimacy. The fact that conservatism in the United States is so much healthier than in Europe, so much more politically effective, surely has something to do with the existence of neoconservatism. But Europeans, who think it absurd to look to the United States for lessons in political innovation, resolutely refuse to consider this possibility. Neoconservatism is the first variant of American conservatism in the past century that is in the American grain.
Such Republican and conservative worthies as Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower, and Barry Goldwater are politely overlooked. Of course, those worthies are in no way overlooked by a large, probably the largest, segment of the Republican party, with the result that most Republican politicians know nothing and could not care less about neoconservatism. Nevertheless, they cannot be blind to the fact that neoconservative policies, reaching out beyond the traditional political and financial base, have helped make the very idea of political conservatism more acceptable to a majority of American voters. Nor has it passed official notice that it is the neoconservative public policies, not the traditional Republican ones, that result in popular Republican presidencies.
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