America's Right by Horwitz Robert B.;

Author:Horwitz, Robert B.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2013-03-17T16:00:00+00:00

4

TWO GENERATIONS OF NEOCONSERVATISM

From the Law of Unintended Consequences to the Cleansing Fire of Violence

The anti-establishment conservative movement that helped bring Ronald Reagan to power in 1980 was a coalition whose constituent parts shared considerably overlapping agendas, but there were differences. With its moralistic preoccupations, the new Christian right, which had reinvigorated the movement, paid most notice to those issues that focused on the family and dealt with what became known as “social conservatism”: abortion, homosexuality, pornography, gender roles, school curriculum, childrearing practices. True to their roots in business and the Goldwater cause, the new right’s proclivities tended toward economic libertarianism. In this respect the Reagan electoral coalition replicated the old anti-establishment fusion between traditionalism and libertarianism, now under new historical conditions. To be sure, the new Christian right also cared deeply about taxes and regulation and a too intrusive federal government. All the issues of concern to anti-establishment conservatism were united by the underlying, primary concepts of personal responsibility and virtue. Still, each part of the coalition had its priorities. And while the clever Reagan lent rhetorical attention to the issues dear to the social conservatives during his presidency, at the end of the day his administration didn’t actually enact much policy in that domain. What Reagan did do was revive anti-establishment conservatism’s old “rollback” agenda: of the federal government and of international communism.

Rollback was the preoccupation of the final element in the reinvigorated anti-establishment conservative movement: neoconservatism. Neoconservatism was an influential intellectual persuasion that entered the public arena in the 1970s with a forceful critique of government overreach and the unintended consequences of public policy. The first generation of neoconservatives, who began on the political left and moved to the right, provided anti-establishment conservatism with a new set of intellectual hooks for the political struggles in the domestic arena. In their diagnosis of Great Society programs as governmental overreach by a self-serving “New Class,” neoconservatives provided a non-religious explanation for the political ills of the 1960s and 1970s that complemented and thus legitimized the conservative evangelical critique of secular humanism. The crisis of American society was too much government and a culture out of control.

In the foreign policy arena, the neoconservatives brought new fervor to the debates of the post-Vietnam era, arguing for a bold restoration (one could say a re-masculinization) of American political and military dominance in the world. In this respect, too, the militancy of the neoconservatives resonated with the new Christian right’s belief in American exceptionalism, that God had assigned the United States a mission to extend its values to the other peoples of the world. Neoconservatives did not speak of God; rather, they spoke of “history.” It was history that bequeathed to America the universalizing status upon which it must act, calling to mind the originally religious proclamation of Manifest Destiny, that “Providence” had given the United States a mission to spread “the great experiment of liberty.”1 Forcefully endorsing the theme of America’s historical mission, the neoconservatives were probably the most important constituency in

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