What the Heck Is a Neocon?
by Max Boot
Wall Street Journal
The original neocons were a band of liberal intellectuals who rebelled against the Democratic Party's leftward drift on defense issues in the 1970s. At first the neocons clustered around Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a Democrat, but then they aligned themselves with Ronald Reagan and the Republicans, who promised to confront Soviet expansionism.
So is "neoconservatism" worthless as a political label? Not entirely. In social policy, it stands for a broad sympathy with a traditionalist agenda and a rejection of extreme libertarianism.
On economic matters, neocons...embrace a laissez-faire line, though
they are not as troubled by the size of the welfare state as libertarians are.
But it is not really domestic policy that defines neoconservatism. This was a movement founded on foreign policy, and it is still here that neoconservatism carries the greatest meaning...
One group of conservatives believes that
we should use armed force only to defend our vital national interests, narrowly defined. They believe that we should remove, or at least disarm, Saddam Hussein, but not occupy Iraq for any substantial period afterward.
The idea of bringing democracy to the Middle East they denounce as a mad, hubristic dream likely to backfire with tragic consequences. This view, which goes under the somewhat self-congratulatory moniker of "
realism," is championed by foreign-policy mandarins like
Henry Kissinger,
Brent Scowcroft and
James Baker III.
[Neocons] ...think, however, that "
realism" presents far too crabbed a view of American power and responsibility.
