April 15, 2022
The Slow, Agonizing Death of Neoconservatism
By
Francis P. Sempa
Matthew Continetti, writing in Commentary, credits leading neoconservatives, such as Irving Kristol and his son Bill Kristol, with "modernizing" conservatism so that the Republican Party — which neoconservatives reluctantly joined after they lost influence with the Democrat party — could suitably govern a modern democracy. And he laments the fact that since the rise of the Tea Party movement, neoconservatives have gradually lost influence with a populist-nationalist Republican Party. Leading neoconservatives like Bill Kristol and Jonah Goldberg (then at National Review) publicly opposed Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020. As a result, neoconservatism is now a movement without a political party.
The immediate causes of neoconservatism's decline in influence within the GOP were the twin wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, begun during the George W. Bush administration. Initially, most conservatives supported the war in Afghanistan, even while some questioned the need to invade Iraq. But Bush transformed those wars into a crusade for democracy, which is when many conservatives — including William F. Buckley, Jr. — got off the bandwagon. Neoconservatives like Norman Podhoretz called the terrorist attacks of the 1970s, '80s, and '90s, culminating on 9/11 and the Iraq and Afghan wars, "World War IV" in articles in Commentary that were later collected into a book with that title.
Podhoretz is a compelling writer, and his comparison of Bush's Global War on Terror to America's hot war against Nazi Germany and Japan and its Cold War against the Soviet Union convinced many that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were part of a larger existential conflict with radical Islam. And that is how Bush portrayed them in speech after speech and in formal national security documents. The result was twenty years of "endless wars," in which American blood was shed and American treasure was expended in a futile effort to democratize those two nations. Bush's greatest cheerleaders were David Frum, Max Boot, Bill Kristol, and other neoconservatives. When the futility of those wars became obvious to anyone not blinded by ideology, these neoconservatives continued to urge greater American military efforts.
In the end, the neoconservative crusade failed, but rather than learning the harsh lessons of their failures, they doubled down and found a new crusade: Ukraine. Neoconservatives are the most vociferous supporters of doing more to preserve Ukraine's independence, often invoking the "lessons of Munich" to justify risking war with Russia.
Neoconservatives first gained influence in the GOP during the Reagan administration when most of them were still Democrats. Many of the neoconservatives were "Jackson Democrats" — that's Henry "Scoop" Jackson, perhaps the country's leading Cold Warrior and one of the few leading Democrats who did not sit out the end of the Cold War in the 1970s and '80s. In 1980, fed up with the weakness of the Carter administration, many neoconservatives supported Ronald Reagan for president, and some of them joined the administration and to their great credit helped win the Cold War. (Scoop Jackson served on Reagan's transition team.)
After the Cold War ended, as Continetti notes in his article, fissures began developing within the conservative movement and the Republican Party. The issues that caused these fissures included immigration and foreign policy. And neoconservatives increasingly felt uncomfortable with the rise of populism and cultural nationalism, especially, Continetti writes, among "non-college-educated blue collar workers disaffected from the electoral process and contemptuous of political, business, social and cultural elites," including, one may add, neoconservative elites.
Hey, at least you still have based black man on your side. 
