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.18This account served well enough for a history and analysis of neoconservatismup to 1992, but because the Cold War had been over for almost three years, mydescription had already begun to creak.It didn t quite describe what youthfulneocons would be joining when they became part of a declining neoconservativemovement in the later 1990s.Neoconservatism marked the last stage of the oldleft, being the last movement in American politics to define itself principally byits opposition to communism.It was a generational phenomenon launched bymostly Jewish liberals and old leftists, although a significant number ofprominent neocons were not Jews, notably William Bennett, Peter Berger,Francis Fukuyama, Zalmay Khalilzad, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ernest Lefever, JamesNuechterlein, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Michael Novak, Richard John Neuhaus,George Weigel, and James Q.Wilson.The sensitivity of the early neocons tobeing identified with American conservatism was distinctive to their generation;the fact that Moynihan and Berger subsequently drifted away fromneoconservatism reinforced the mistaken impression that it was a Jewishphenomenon.The old right was anxious to preserve America s racial andcultural Anglo-Saxonism, but most of the early neocons came from the firstgeneration of Jewish New Yorkers who didn t think of themselves as hyphenatedAmericans.They passionately identified with their Americanism and wereappalled when the privileged children of American suburbia shouted slogansagainst their country in the 1960s.But generational experience cannot be replicated.The second generation ofneocons was less insistent on the  neo than the first; in 1989 the Cold Warended; and the movement s third generation had little sense of joining adistinctive movement.Neoconservatism faded in the 1990s for three reasons: itwas identified with bygone debates, it was out of power, and to a considerable TROTSKY S ORPHANS 15degree it merged with the mainstream of American conservatism.Themovement s twin icons, Irving Kristol and Norman.Podhoretz, reasoned thatneoconservatism had faded by succeeding.The neocons had joined and changedAmerican conservatism, making it possible for their children to call themselves,simply, conservatives.19But that was not entirely right, either.The neocons merged into the mainstreamAmerican Republican right, but the term persisted.It referred to something thatwas still too important not to be named.The neocons had a more dramatic ideaof politics than other kinds of conservatives, one that featured a radical,expansive faith in American power.Mainstream Republican conservativesrevered Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, and Barry Goldwater, but as IrvingKristol was fond of noting, neocons never did.Their heroes were TheodoreRoosevelt (TR) and Ronald Reagan.They shared the mainstream right saffection for Reagan, but had no feeling at all for the cool, grim, or sour worthiesof the party s country club and reactionary past.TR was their idea of a goodconservative, because he was expansive, buoyant, and roaringly nationalistic.With TR, as with Reagan, the vigorously patriotic impulse was always primary.Even the realist-leaning neocons had messianic ambitions for the United States,and most neocons were idealists.Their blend of ideology, idealism, and anincreasingly frank neo-imperialism offered a coherent view of what the UnitedStates should do with its unrivaled economic and military power.Dwelling oncrisis, and also thriving on it, they had a ready-made worldview when the secondPresident Bush unexpectedly found need of one in the crisis of September 2001.After the neocons regained power and fame in the second Bushadministration, Irving Kristol revoked his requiem for the movement.Recallingits original character as a thoroughly American enterprise, Kristol reflected thatneoconservatism was the first variant of American conservatism that wasdistinctively American.It was forward-looking and outward-moving.Neoconservatives believed in cutting taxes to stimulate economic growth; theydefined the national interest in global terms; their favorite text on foreign affairswas Thucydides on the Peloponnesian War.Nothing like neoconservatismexisted in Europe, because the key to neoconservatism was its interventionist,expansive, patriotic impulse [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]