Original Neoconservatism

Michael Lind, ex-neo-con, writes about the evolution of neo-conservatism. (I was a neo-con in the 80s who left it in the 90s for the same reasons as Lind and Moynihan and many others.)

But in its origins neoconservatism was a movement of the center-left, not
of the right. Here is Nathan Glazer, co-editor with Irving Kristol of the Public
Interest, in that magazine's final issue in spring 2005, recalling the origins
of the journal in the 1960s: "All of us had voted for Lyndon Johnson in 1964,
for Hubert Humphrey in 1968, and I would wager (?) that most of the original
stalwarts of The Public Interest, editors and regular contributors, continued to
vote for Democratic presidential candidates all the way to the present. Recall
that the original definition of the neoconservatives was that they fully
embraced the reforms of the New Deal and indeed the major programs of Johnson's
Great Society ... Had we not defended the major social programs, from Social
Security to Medicare, there would have been no need for the 'neo' before
'conservative.'"

The "neoconservatism" of the 1990s, defined by support for the invasion
of Iraq and centered on Rupert Murdoch's magazine the Weekly Standard, edited by
Irving's son William Kristol, had little to do with the original impulse, as
Glazer points out: "There is very little overlap between those who promoted the
neoconservatism of the 1970s and those committed to its latter day
manifestation." While Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz set aside any
differences with the Republican right by the 1990s, other first-generation
neocons like Glazer and the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan remained true to their
New Deal/Great Society principles. Several of them told me over the years that
they thought of themselves as "paleoliberals," not "neoconservatives," a term
that was coined as an insult by the socialist Michael Harrington and embraced as
a badge of honor by Irving Kristol.

In its origins, neoconservatism was a defense of New Deal/Great Society
liberalism at home and abroad, both from the radical, countercultural left of
the era and from its own design defects. The early neocons were Kennedy-Johnson
liberals who believed that liberal reform should avoid naive utopianism and
should be guided by pragmatism and empirical social science. The '70s
neoconservatives were so focused on the utopianism of the '60s campus left,
however, that most paid too little attention to a far greater threat to their
beloved New Deal tradition, the utopianism of the libertarian right. Ultimately
Milton Friedman and other free-market ideologues did far more damage to America
than the carnival freaks of the counterculture.

The sins of the sons should not be visited upon the fathers. I hope that, in the judgment of history, the "paleoliberal" neoconservatism of the 1970s will overshadow the crude, militaristic neoconservatism of the 1990s and 2000s. For two decades, between the Johnson years and the Reagan years, neoconservatism really was the vital center that Arthur Schlesinger had called for in the late 1940s. A robust new liberalism, if there is to be one in the aftermath of the opportunistic triangulations of Clinton and Obama, cannot leapfrog back to the Progressives or New Dealers, but must begin closer to home, with the early neoconservatives, who had learned from the failures and mistakes as well as the successes of the Progressive Era, the New Deal and the Great Society.