The Neoconservative Trojan Horse

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The final step in the development of conservatism as it was to exist following the Cold War was the ascendency of the neoconservatives. Neo-conservatism originated as an academic movement amongst anti-Stalinist/ anti-Russian left wing academics in the late 50’s and 60’s that gradually took over American conservatism by the 1980’s.  The final conquest happened during the Reagan administration and remained unchallenged until the time of Trump apart from Ron Paul and a few others. In some respects the neo-conservatives can be hard to distinguish from the New Right but their background stands out more so than their policies. Neo-conservatives were highly educated and established institutional academics that had an existing platform, following, and broad personal and media influence. While neo-conservatives have come to be largely associated with Global American military dominance, they initially became known for their critique of failing government bureaucratic experiments.  Many of the founders of neo-conservatism were ethnically Jewish, although not in an Orthodox or traditional sense, while some of their most vocal and articulate adversaries were also Jewish like Murray Rothbard and Paul Gottfried. (17) This created a philosophical split amongst conservatism that remains very present today although not clearly understood by the average voter.

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Simply referring to neo-conservatives as awakened academic progressives doesn’t go far enough in describing their background.  They were generally “reformed” Trotskyites, which is distinctly different from a Stalinist, who also incorporated political Zionism. When Stalin won control of the Soviet Union from Trotsky after the death of Lenin the purges that followed weren’t acts of random paranoia but specifically targeted the followers of Trotsky (18). The Trotskyites were disproportionately Jewish and frequently had ties to foreign actors, especially England. The English played prominent roles in both the first and second Russian Revolution as well as the difficult to explain collapse of the White Army in the Russian Civil War that followed (18). Trotsky himself was accused and convicted of being a British spy and assassinated in Mexico in 1940.  For someone coming from this background, trying to dismantle the Soviet Union would seem fairly natural and this aligns with a subgrouping within neo-conservatism referred to as Atlantacists whose objective has always been to do just that producing manageable “statelets” out of the former super power. The common understanding of the philosophical split between Trotsky and Stalin is that Trotsky intended to pursue world revolution while Stalin accepted communism for a single country (18). This would have to be recast to portray Russia as an expanding global menace in order to justify the cold war and a state of permanent mobilization.  Whether and to what extent this recasting was justified or not was the major point of contention between the New Right of the 60’s and the Old Right and continues to divide the establishment or neo-conservative branch of the Republican Party with the more libertarian populist wing. 

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The original contingent of neo-conservative writers were fairly well known consisting of Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Bell, James Q. Wilson, and Seymour Martin Lipset whose essays appeared regularly in The Public Interest (17). Of these, Kristol was probably the most significant.  He had described a neoconservative as “a liberal who was mugged by reality”. A more libertarian leaning critic would add to this saying something like “but decided not to press charges” or “allowed the perpetrator to seek counseling” (17).  Behind the scenes was Leo Strauss, professor of political philosophy at the University of Chicago who was known in conservative academic circles in the later 50’s and 60’s and who Kristol cited as being an especially big influence on his thinking (19). Strauss’s students went on to make up major portions of the Reagan and Bush administrations. One of Strauss’s students, Harry Jaffa, was a contributor to Strauss’s major work, History of Political Philosophy. He worked in Goldwater’s campaign in 64 and has been credited with the infamous phrase, “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.” (17)

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These outcast liberals found a home at the National Review but they were distinctly different from the New Right founders who gradually displaced the Old Right there. The original founders of National Review didn’t come from tenured university positions with guaranteed income. They had no legitimacy other than what they could create for themselves. The neo-conservatives were in no way a grassroots movement and consisted of institutionalized subsidized professors and writers.  The founding neoconservatives spent their formative years as liberal or progressive Democrats and, in many cases, were Trotskyites, who had obtained tenured faculty positions at the nation’s most prominent universities (17).  They were never outsiders and, when the Reagan administration came into power, they moved their center of operations from New York to the Washington Beltway (19).

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Referring to key neo-conservatives figures as Trotskyites may seem like opinionated name calling but many were fairly open about their philosophical roots and their ultimate loyalties. In “The Neo-Conservative Persuasion: Selected Essays 1942-2009” one of the essays, “Reflections of a Trotskyist” Kristol writes openly of his roots in the Trotsky version of communism (20). In 2007 in the National Review Online Stephen Schwarz explained, “To my last breath, I will defend Trotsky who alone and pursued from country to country and finally laid low in his own blood in a hideously hot house in Mexico City, said no to Soviet coddling to Hitlerism, to the Moscow purges, and to the betrayal of the Spanish Republic, and who had the capacity to admit that he had been wrong about the imposition of a single-party state as well as about the fate of the Jewish people. To my last breath, and without apology. Let the neofascists and Stalinists in their second childhood make of it what they will.” (20)

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The neo-conservatives were readily let into the ever-widening conservative tent by the establishment and New Right Republicans based on their assaults on liberal policies along with their institutional prominence following the old adage that “the enemy of your enemy is your friend”.   What wasn’t recognized or acknowledged, however, was that the neo-conservatives never saw the failure of the government as being systemic and never saw a need for a rollback of size or the scope of the state and this was apparent in some of their more prominent writings. Patrick Monahan’s report on the condition of the Black family in America titled The Negro Family: the Case of National Action is a good example of this. While this made many points that the liberal establishment did not accept and ultimately led to Monahan’s departure from liberal politics to the neo-conservative movement, he sees no real limitation to the power or roll of government and here sees the need for government to change culture for the national good (21 pp. 67-73). Those who were left unrepresented were the remnants of the Old Right, the Libertarians, the paleoconservatives (traditional conservatives) and the South in a broader sense; these were now people without representation, or a country, or a voice.

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The impact of the neoconservatives goes well beyond their direct influence on politics as the world view they represent has been culturally ingrained as defining conservatism and has been broadly accepted and propagated by establishment and New Right Republicans. This required a fundamentally new understanding of history and American nationalism. The traditional conservative view of history is that it is comprised of collective memories that retain old virtues and honor heritage with loyalties growing from experience (22). In its place rose a messianic view of history defined philosophically in terms of universal and abstract concepts driving Utopian dreams much in line with the “City on a Hill” theme applied to the American Nation.  While Leo Strauss was principally an academic as opposed to political figure, and his death in 1973 was prior to full assent of the neoconservatives to power under Reagan and the two Bush administrations, he is generally seen as having created this sort of new Puritan vision and propagating it through his students or followers like Harry Jaffa of Claremont, and George Will making him the spiritual father of the American Empire.

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Strauss had both students and followers with the followers breaking down into two schools, east and west coast.  The east coast Straussians were more philosophical and less political with Joseph Cropsey of Chicago and Harvey Mansfield of Harvard being two leading figures.  The west coast Straussians, whose prominent adherents include Jaffa, Larry Arnn (Hillsdale), Thomas G West, Peter Schramm (Ashland), and Charles Kesleer (also of Claremont) are highly political.  Thomas G West described his belief system as being “combative as hell .. They not only dislike liberals, leftist, Democrats, they have fights to pick with the followers of other conservative figures: Fredrick Hayek, Ayn Rand, and Wilmore Kendall” (23 pp. 7-10). To the Straussian the memory of the old anti-imperialist Right represented by Taft and Bickley, modern libertarians, and, when politically expedient, the South are as much of an enemy as neo-Marxists on the left.  Steven Smith of Yale described the ideology of the west coast Straussians as follows: “The West Coasters have created a synthesis of Strauss’s defense of the classical doctrine of natural right — the view that there is a single immutable standard of justice — with the wisdom of the American founding fathers, supplemented by Lincoln and Churchill (recently names like Calvin Coolidge and Clarence Thomas have been added to the list). Contra Strauss [emphasis added], the West Coasters have developed their own theory of American exceptionalism, arguing that the framers uniquely combined features of classical prudence with biblical morality” (24).

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While Strauss’s work is associated principally with the University of Chicago, he also transferred European thought to America in the form of phenomenology which is the philosophical study of the structures of experience and consciousness and was founded in the early 20th century by Edward Husserl.  It was then expanded at the universities of Gottingen and Munich  (25) and eventually spread to France and the US.  Although Jewish by background his religious views were ambiguous. Strauss held that neither the ancient world nor Christendom envisioned any strict limits on the power of the state leading to the elevation of the state and the statesman (22).  This was most prominently shown in their near cult-like admiration for President Lincoln and his willingness to readily act outside of the limits of his constitutional authority.  The failed war of Southern Independence along with all the subsequent American conquests would be recast as crusades to spread democracy and “freedom” based on the proposition that “all men are created equal”.  Even more extreme than the recreation of Lincoln, the progressive social activists of the 19th and early 20th century, who grew out of the progressive northern evangelical churches, would be redefined in a sort of conservative context advancing the “proposition nation”. This version of history would require the vilification of not only the South but anyone holding an anti-federalist position and the elevation of Yankee puritan ethno-religious culture that produced Progressivism as the true American cultural heritage.

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The debate between conservative Southern historian M.E. Bradford and Harry Jaffa dramatically contrasted these two incompatible perspectives as summarized by Thomas Woods: “ Bradford argued that Lincolnian rhetoric, particularly the Great Emancipator’s teleological language (e.g, his description of the United States as a nation “dedicated to a proposition”) was a recipe for ongoing revolution that a genuine conservative could not embrace.  The idea of the federal government as an engine of equality enforcement rather than as the modest, purely nomocratic agent of a confederation of sovereign states, endowed with strictly limited powers, amounted to Bradford’s judgment to a revolutionary overthrow of the original constitutional order” (22). The Straussian historical interpretation was easy for the New Right cold warriors to adopt because it aligned well with their core positions and also became a dominant position in public schools before being largely displaced by critical theory interdisciplinary materialism.

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The reduction of the study of history to little more than the history of philosophy is certainly one of the most damaging products of neo-conservatism in part because it aligns so closely with other changes in modern society. To the modern student in western society the idea that life is principally navigating theoretical philosophical questions is largely believable because that is what their lives have consisted of.  They are ignorant of the history of technology apart from their user interface on modern electronic devices and have not had to deal with either want or labor which defined so much of human history.  Taking a principally philosophical view of history is really one of the most egregious applications of “presentism” in that it causes the lives of those who came before us to be redefined in modern political terms and much of the reality in which they lived, to simply be deleted. It also created a path for a hyper-nationalistic neo-conservative historical narrative to be replaced with Frankfort School Critical Theory which defines the current culture war.

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Neo-Conservatism and Neo-Liberalism

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So between the end of World War II and the 1990’s American conservatism was dramatically redefined to look nothing like traditional conservatism through successive waves of reborn liberals who adopted and then took over conservatism.  Meanwhile, the New Left was continually drifting further towards neo-Marxism. So what can be said of the real identity of the neo-conservatives?  Pat Buchanan provided this short and pointed summary:

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The neoconservatives are not really conservatives at all. They are impostors and opportunists. They were Leftists in the 1930s, New Deal and Great Society Democrats through the 1960s, and slid to the right and the Republicans after Nixon and Reagan began rolling up forty-nine state landslides. They defected from liberalism only when they saw conservatism in the ascendancy, and they rode the Reagan revolution into power. Their heroes—Wilson, FDR, Dr. King—are men of the Left. Their tracts denouncing rivals and critics as traitors, fascists, and anti-Semites come straight out of the hard Left. Their agenda—endless struggle and war if necessary to impose secular democracy and social revolution on the Islamic world—is neo-Jacobin, out of the French, not the American Revolution – Pat Buchanan (26 p. 250)

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Professor Alexander Dugin expanded on these themes in 2024 by saying, “American neoconservative circles are in solidarity with the globalist agenda of those behind Biden.  These are former Trotskyists who hate Russia and believe that a world revolution is possible only after the complete victory of capitalism, that is, the global West on a worldwide scale.  Therefore, they have postponed this goal until the cycle of capitalist globalization is completed, hopping to return to the topic of proletarian revolution later, after the global victory of the liberal west.” (27)

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With specific regard to the relationship of neo-conservatism with Christianity, Buchanan goes on to cite James Kurth from “Western Tradition: Our Tradition”: “From their origins (be it as followers of Leon Trotsky or Leo Strauss), neoconservatives have seen the Christian tradition as an alien, even a threatening one…. The only Western tradition the neoconservatives actually want to defend is the Enlightenment…. [T]hey have wanted to advance it in the rest of the world with the establishment of a kind of American empire…. [This] is not a conservative project but a radical and revolutionary one. For the most part, it might be said that, with friends like the neoconservatives, Western civilization does not need enemies… [neoconservatives] may think that they will create a global and universal civilization, abroad and at home, but the evidence is accumulating that they instead opened the doors to the barbarians both without (e.g., Islamic terrorists) and within (pagan disregard for the dignity of human life).”  He concluded that the best defense against barbarians at home and abroad isn’t empire but defense of the Christian traditions that built Western Civilization. (26 p. 251)

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While Critical Theory was a clear threat to western culture and history, it was an obvious one that succeeded to the extent it has largely because traditional conservatives didn’t take their message at face value and chose rather to respond to their neo-Marxist critics almost as if to try to win their approval. Neo-conservatism took over the right from the inside out and redefined it.  Apart from Libertarian and Southern contingents that accurately recognized what was happening, most traditional conservatives were effectively disenfranchised and only gradually became vaguely aware of what had happened thirty to forty years after the tipping point had been passed. To the real conservative, the Republican Party from the time of the demise of the Old Right has really offered nothing other than being slightly “less bad” than the Democratic Party and perhaps offering some protection from the policies of the increasingly radicalized Left.

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Below is a link to a short video from Ron Paul done in 2011 giving a overview of Neoconservatism and Neoconservatives:

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