Being a neocon means never having to say you’re sorry. Their lack of shame displays a concomitant lack of self-reflection. Former Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol and his ilk are still part of the media talk show circuit as foreign policy experts, and none has ever suffered any public humiliation for the litany of disasters for which they bear responsibility.
There’s an orchestrated campaign to bring back the neoconservative voices of the Bush administration, now rebranded as Democrats and opponents of the populist right.
They’re baaaack! The neoconservatives have been lurking around the Swamp, waiting for their moment. Their war wagon got rolling again with an August endorsement of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz signed by more than 200 neocon apparatchiks, who claim to believe that “another four years of a Trump presidency would irreparably damage our beloved democracy.”
That’s pretty rich coming from the cabal of utopian airheads who brought us the Iraq debacle based entirely on skewed intelligence, as well as a bloated national security surveillance state aimed, as George W. Bush opined, at fighting an endless war on terror. Recall that Dubya went so far as to claim that his administration would “rid the world of evildoers.” Perpetual war for perpetual peace. The neocon playbook defines victory as reaching the end of history by transforming all the world’s governments into liberal capitalist democracies; in other words, “woke” globalism.
It took the neocon backbenchers several paragraphs to get to their real point, which was foreign policy. They ranted about Donald Trump and J. D. Vance’s alleged intention to kowtow to “dictators” like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping. They breathlessly claim that democratic movements abroad would be “irreparably jeopardized” if Trump returns to the White House. Following the endorsement letter, former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter, former Congresswoman Liz Cheney, endorsed Harris-Walz, as did a list of former top-level GOP officials.
Notably, the neocons and their neoliberal allies are sometimes one and the same: Former State Department official Victoria Nuland, for instance, was a major player in backing the 2014 Ukrainian coup that led to the Russia-Ukraine war. Before taking posts in the Obama and Biden administrations, she previously had worked for Vice President Cheney. The neocons and neoliberals both fear and loathe the antiestablishment populism of Trump’s Make America Great Again movement.
The “very vocal and visible migration of the group of people who had been called neocons in the Republican Party” to the Democrats is “one of the most notable political developments over the last eight years,” the progressive investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald has observed. Many neocons endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020; the trend continues in 2024, driven by Harris’s aggressive foreign policy comments at the Democratic National Convention.
Harris’s remarks “affirmed the core worldview of these neocons,” Greenwald remarked, “about the U.S. role in the world, about what the United States president is obligated to do.” Before they became Republicans in the 1980s and infested the Reagan administration, many neocons were former Democrats and from hard-left family backgrounds. Yet they see the world through what Greenwald calls “a militaristic lens” and believe that war is always the answer. The GOP was once viewed as the best platform for their great global crusade. Now, as the MAGA political realignment that began in 2016 consolidates its power within the Republican Party, with former Democrats like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard endorsing Trump, the neocons view the Democrats as the best vehicle for their policies.
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