Twilight of the Neoconsand What Should Come Next | Opinion [Video]

The journalist Irving Kristol once remarked that a neoconservative is “a liberal who was mugged by reality.” Like many early neocons, Kristol was a Marxist who became disillusioned with both the anti-democratic nature of Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union and the unanticipated consequences of liberal social policies in the United States. The writers and academics who abandoned Marxism to found the neoconservative movement were deeply concerned with political freedom and the moral decline of American society. While strongly supporting the separation of church and state, they saw religion as the social cement holding families, communities, and nations together. We owe these early neocons a great deal for they played an important role in checking the excesses of 1960s counterculture.

Yet it is in foreign policy that the neocons have left their most lasting mark. Many prominent neocons began life as Democratswho supported the war in Vietnam. They rejected their party’s anti-war …