The neoconservative movement began among liberal Democrats in the late 1960s as the Cold War consensus broke down over the Vietnam War. Key figures like Irving Kristol and intellectuals associated with Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson criticized the radicalization of the Democratic Party and Great Society programs. Kristol went on to ally with Ronald Reagan's presidency. Some analysts argue neoconservatism was influenced by the philosopher Leo Strauss's elitist view that a philosophical elite should guide the masses. Strauss had a negative view of capitalism and Lockean liberalism, and some interpret him and the neocons as seeing war as virtuous in molding the public.

1. Betrayal of the Old Right,
Lecture 5
The Neoconservatives, Part 1

2. Beginnings
• The neocons are a separate group from the NR
conservatives. But they also reject laissez-faire
and non-interventionism.
• The neocon movement began among liberal
Democrats.
• During the late 1960s, the Cold War consensus
was breaking down. This consensus appealed to
many Democrats beginning with Truman.

3. The Truman Consensus
• The Truman Democrats accepted and tried
to extend FDR’s New Deal.
• In foreign policy, they favored the active
pursuit of the Cold War. There was a split
on the left in the 1948 between the anti-
communist supporters of Truman and the
Henry Wallace supporters.

4. Schlesinger
• The historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., gave an
account of this point of view in The Vital Center
(1949).
• Schlesinger said that an interventionist American
state would be ideally suited to wage a battle
against fascism and communism.
• A true conservative would favor conserving the
gains of the New Deal.

5. Breakdown of the Consensus
• In the 1960s, the Cold War consensus wasn’t
working well.
• The Vietnam War was unpopular. It led to about
58,000 American deaths and it wasn’t clear what
the US national interest was in defending South
Vietnam from the North Vietnamese communists.
• Why die to preserve the credibility of American
power?

6. Breakdown Continued
• The protests became very strong and questioned
American foreign policy completely.
• Groups like the SDS called for revolutionary
change in American society. There were riots at
the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.
• In 1972, the Democrats nominate George
McGovern, who strongly criticized American
foreign policy. He called for a withdrawal from
Vietnam and a 37% reduction in defense spending.

7. Against the Critics
• Many Democrats did not like the McGovern
movement. They wanted to preserve the Cold War
consensus.
• A number of these people were associated with
Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington
He supported the New Deal and favored a strongly
anti-Soviet foreign policy. Paul Wolfowitz and
Richard Perle worked for him.
• He was strongly pro-Israel.

8. The Original Neocons
• A group of New York intellectuals became
associated with the critics of Democratic
party radicalism.
• Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, and Daniel
Bell grew up in New York. They attended
CCNY in the late 1930s and were
Trotskyites.

9. Glazer and Bell
• Glazer and Bell became sociologists. They were
journalists who became academics---both ended
up teaching sociology at Harvard.
• Both of them were more interested in domestic
policy than foreign policy.
• They didn’t reject LBJ’s Great Society entirely—
both were socialists—but they argued that many
of the programs weren’t working well.

10. Glazer and Bell Continued
• They argued that the Great Society programs
weren’t working because they didn’t address
fundamental problems of character among the
poor.
• These problems included lack of two-parent
families among blacks and high rates of out-of-
wedlock births.
• Bell argued that capitalism is self-undermining
because it leads to pleasure-seeking rather than the
virtues of hard work and enterprise.

11. G and B Concluded
• Both Bell and Glazer wrote for The Public
Interest, a magazine that attracted wide
interest because of its careful empirical
criticisms of Great Society programs.
• Neither of them ever changed from being
liberal Democrats. They eventually faded
out of the neocon movement.

12. Kristol
• The most important figure in the neocon
movement was Kristol.
• After WWII, he was associated with an
anti-Communist group called the Congress
for Cultural Freedom. He also worked for
Encounter magazine.
• Both of these received funding from the
CIA.

13. Kristol and the Neocons
• How does Kristol differ from Glazer and
Bell? Like them, he criticized the Great
Society for its lack of stress on virtuous
habits.
• After the Democratic Party didn’t go the
way he wanted, he allied with the Reagan
presidency. He became close to the NR
conservatives.

14. Kristol’s Ideas
• Kristol explicitly considered himself a neocon.
• He stressed that neoconservatism was more a style
of thought than an explicit body of doctrine.
Nevertheless, he in fact had definite ideas.
• He thought that “the idea of a welfare state is in
itself perfectly consistent with a conservative
political philosophy---as Bismarck knew a
hundred years ago.”

15. Ideas Continued
• Kristol was very much influenced by Herbert
Croly’s The Promise of American Life. This called
for a new American nationalism.
• The role of the government was to guide the
people. Kristol has little use for individual rights,
taken apart from public duties. He did not view the
American Revolution as a radical assertion of
human rights.

16. Kristol and Capitalism
• Kristol opposed socialism. He argued
against egalitarian policies. He asked, if
equality is desirable, how much equality
should we have? There isn’t a clear
criterion.
• Nevertheless, he criticized capitalism for
leading to selfishness. It must be guided by
the state.

17. Kristol and Foreign Policy
• Kristol was primarily a writer on domestic policy,
to the extent he wrote on policy issues. Many of
his essays were on the history of ideas. His wife,
Gertrude Himmelfarb, was a leading intellectual
historian.
• His approval of Croly and the new nationalism
shows his willingness to approve of an aggressive
foreign policy. The concentration on foreign
policy became much more important for the later
neocons, like William Kristol, Irving Kristol’s
son.

18. Kristol and Strauss
• Although Kristol stressed that neoconservatism
wasn’t a fixed philosophy, C. Bradley Thompson,
in Neoconservatism: An Obituary for An Idea, has
presented a strong argument that Kristol’s views
did have a philosophical source.
• This source was Leo Strauss. Kristol said that
reading Strauss was the most important
intellectual event of his life.
• Milton Himmelfarb, Kristol’s brother-in-law,
wrote about Strauss and showed a detailed
knowledge of his work.

19. Strauss and Elitism
• Interpreting Strauss is controversial, but one way
to take him is that the people must be guided by a
philosophical elite. Compared to the philosophers,
the masses aren’t really human beings. It is
justifiable to deceive the masses.
• Strauss defended natural law and Rothbard is
sympathetic to this. But the question is, what is the
content of natural law? Does this allow rule by a
philosophical elite?

20. Virtue
• Why does the public have to be guided by the
philosophers? Besides the general point that the
masses are inferior, there is an additional point
that enters the scene with the rise of capitalism.
• Capitalism encourages each person to think of his
own material interests above all else.
Acquisitiveness becomes the primary virtue. The
philosophical elite has to counteract this.

21. Strauss and Capitalism
• Strauss had a very negative view of John Locke.
He saw Locke as basically a Hobbesian. He
preached acquisitiveness as the primary virtue and
was in essence a utilitarian. Strauss downplays
Locke’s approval of natural rights.
• Strauss was a friend of the British socialist
historian R.H.Tawney, who sponsored his
academic career in England. Tawney condemned
capitalism for its fall from the more harmonious
society of the Middle Ages.

22. Virtue and War
• Although the philosophical life is the highest
possible, great power politics also has value.
• Strauss was influenced by Carl Schmitt, the
controversial German political thinker.
• War provides one means that people can develop
virtue, e.g., courage. They becoming willing to
sacrifice. This is the key to Thompson’s
interpretation of neocon foreign policy---the
neocons promote war in order to mold the public.