Springtime for Neocons

Springtime for Neocons

10/27/14

Jacob Heilbrunn

The Presidency, Domestic Politics, United States

Perhaps no one has inadvertently done more to revive the fortunes of the neocons and liberal hawks than President Obama.

IN MAY 1968, Richard Hofstadter published an essay about the Vietnam War in the New York Times Magazine. It was called “Uncle Sam Has Cried ‘Uncle!’ Before.” Hofstadter had earned fame for works such as The American Political Tradition and Anti-Intellectualism In American Life that upended traditional interpretations of American history. The two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning historian was also a colleague and close friend of Lionel Trilling, Jacques Barzun and Daniel Bell at Columbia University. It was a moment when the voice of the New York intellectuals carried, even as the paladins of the New Left assaulted everything that they cherished.

In the Times, Hofstadter now offered a characteristically revisionist (and insightful) reflection about American foreign policy:

The American people, like their leaders, have very little familiarity with losing national enterprises. Although they have been uncommonly uneasy about the war in Vietnam almost from the beginning, they are equally uneasy with the idea of national failure, and an American “defeat” seems to many of them unthinkable and absurd.

But it wasn’t. Contrary to popular mythology, Hofstadter argued, the United States had never enjoyed a smooth rise to global dominance. Instead, pretty much like any other nation, it had experienced periodic setbacks and defeats.

Read full articlehttp://nationalinterest.org/feature/springtime-neocons-11512