Kristol Palace Daniel Luban

Kristol Palace

Daniel Luban

http://nplusonemag.com/kristol-palace

• Benjamin Balint. Running Commentary: The Contentious Magazine That Transformed the Jewish Left into the Neoconservative Right. PublicAffairs, June 2010.
• Irving Kristol. The Neoconservative Persuasion: Selected Essays, 1942-2009. Basic Books, February 2011.
• Justin Vaïsse. Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement. Belknap Press, May 2010.

There were moments in the wake of the 2003 invasion of Iraq when you couldn’t open a newspaper or turn on a television without hearing about neoconservatives. Stories about the Bush Administration’s foreign policy would trace its intellectual origins to City College Trotskyism or Chicago Straussianism, drawing a straight line to bellicose organizations like Project for the New American Century, the neocon letterhead group that publicly lobbied for war, or the Office of Special Plans, the Pentagon intelligence shop that furnished much of the bogus information about Saddam Hussein’s WMDs. For Democrats, the obsession with neoconservatism provided a convenient alibi: if the nation had been whisked to war against its will by a conspiracy of Israel nuts, then liberal war supporters from Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Thomas Friedman and Michael Ignatieff were off the hook. It was more emotionally satisfying, too, to locate the source of the administration’s foreign policy in something sexier and more exotic than the made-in-America revanchist nationalism of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. And it was particularly appealing to intellectuals; a crew of would-be philosopher kings pulling the strings of the White House stood in invidious contrast to the inability of left-wing intellectuals to exert influence on anything of importance. The neocons themselves complained that the term meant little more than “Jewish conservative,” but they had cried wolf about anti-Semitism too many times before for anyone to take it very seriously—and surely they were complicit in fostering much of the paranoia, if only by choosing such gratuitously sinister Bond-villain names for their organizations.
But the moment didn’t last, and soon enough the public appetite for tales of neocon malfeasance faded. After all, even though neocons’ political power declined noticeably in Bush’s second term, and precipitously with the election of Obama, American foreign policy remained much the same mess that it had been during the alleged apex of neocon power. Surely, then, the story had been all wrong—or so went the new and equally exaggerated version of the conventional wisdom.
Why, then, should we still care about the neoconservatives? Instead of presenting neocons as the