Twilight of the neoconservatives
The movement's unlikely 20-year reign over the GOP could now be coming to an end.
by Max Fisher on March 10, 2016
In the early winter months of 1998, in a series of drab meeting rooms in the Rayburn House Office Building near the Capitol in Washington, DC, a group of dissident conservative intellectuals, a tweeded and mostly forgotten faction of foreign policy thinkers calling themselves neoconservatives, scored the first in a series of surprise political coups that would lead them to the heights of power — and, within a few years, change the world.
The meeting rooms held what House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Sen. Bob Dole called the Congressional Policy Advisory Board. Gingrich had helped lead a Republican revolution in Congress a few years earlier, but the party had struggled to offer a substantive alternative to the Clinton administration, as Dole's failed 1996 presidential campaign had shown. They had recruited a new generation of Republicans, and now, with the policy board, they would to give those recruits an ideology.
The neoconservatives were unlikely candidates for Gingrich and Dole's project. Largely creatures of policy journals and university campuses, they had lost one debate after another during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush eras. Their agenda, tailored to the Cold War, had little obvious relevance to a post-Soviet world.
But in the mid-1990s, a small group of new-generation neoconservatives had busied themselves with remaking the movement, now focused on the Middle East rather than Europe. They fought for influence in conservative journals and think tanks, for the ears of congressional leaders and, eventually, fatefully, for a dominant share of seats at the policy board's first meeting in 1998.
The policy board was a crucial victory for the neoconservatives. It brought them from the margins of Washington conversation into its power centers. It allowed them to translate their ideas from lofty abstractions into black-and-white policy proposals. And it was part of their strategy to win power not so much by persuading voters, which can take years or decades, but by a hostile takeover of GOP institutions, nudging out the realists who'd traditionally dominated their party — many of whom were conspicuously absent from the policy board.
Later that year, as Bill Clinton struggled to hold on to the presidency amid the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the neoconservatives used the policy board to convince congressional Republicans to adopt a radical idea they had formed only that year: The United States should topple the Iraqi government.
The neoconservatives' case for Iraq was abstract and highly ideological, positing not that Saddam posed a substantial threat to the United States, but rather that removing him would allow democracy and pro-American politics to organically sweep the Middle East. The specifics of their argument hardly mattered; congressional Republicans saw an opportunity to embarrass Clinton on his Iraq policy, which in Washington was widely considered a failure.They passed the Iraq Liberation Act, which declared regime change as official US policy; a reluctant but embattled Clinton signed it.
Two years later, Texas Gov. George W. Bush became president. Moved by neoconservatism's idealistic faith in democracy and perhaps sympathetic to its fixation on Iraq — Saddam Hussein had attempted to assassinate Bush's father — Bush appointed neoconservative leaders, many from the policy board, to several top positions.
The once-fringe neoconservative movement, in the space of a few short years, had seized first their party's intellectual power centers, then its legislative agenda, and now the commanding heights of American leadership itself. Against all odds, they had won.
Today, less than two decades after seizing the Republican Party, they are on the verge of losing it. The party's two leading presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, are promising to break from neoconservatism — and voters seem to be responding.
Neoconservatives are fighting back, but they're losing. Republican elites might still support them, but the voters do not seem to.
On Monday, a number of leading neoconservatives, including some who had participated in the movement's rise to power, signed on to Sen. Marco Rubio's "National Security Advisory Council." That same day, CNN learned that some of Rubio's own staffers were urging him to quit the presidential race before the mid-March primary in his home state, if only to spare him the humiliation of his expected defeat.
Many neoconservatives, perhaps sensing they had no viable candidate to express their views for them, signed an open letter denouncing Trump. Others are threatening not just to oppose Trump, but to split with the party entirely and support Hillary Clinton.
Neoconservatives can threaten to quit the Republican Party, or warn that the party is diverging from their values, but it looks increasingly like they may have it backward: that it is the Republican Party, as constituted by its voters and their policy preferences, that is rejecting neoconservatives.
That might seem surprising. But when you look at the brief history of neoconservative reign over the Republican Party, it seems inevitable. If anything, it is surprising that it took this long.
What happened? How did this movement go, in only 20 short years, from dissident faction to conquering the party to seizing the White House to collapse and an imminent return to exile? How did neoconservatives lose their hold on the party?
Neoconservatives say that Donald Trump has left them without a political party of their own. But was the Republican Party ever really theirs? Or will we one day look back at the GOP's neoconservative era as something of a fluke, in which this highly ideological movement dominated the party for only about 20 years, and led American foreign policy for only four?
Continued at:
http://www.vox.com/2016/3/10/11189350/twilight-of-the-neoconservatives
The movement's unlikely 20-year reign over the GOP could now be coming to an end.
by Max Fisher on March 10, 2016
In the early winter months of 1998, in a series of drab meeting rooms in the Rayburn House Office Building near the Capitol in Washington, DC, a group of dissident conservative intellectuals, a tweeded and mostly forgotten faction of foreign policy thinkers calling themselves neoconservatives, scored the first in a series of surprise political coups that would lead them to the heights of power — and, within a few years, change the world.
The meeting rooms held what House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Sen. Bob Dole called the Congressional Policy Advisory Board. Gingrich had helped lead a Republican revolution in Congress a few years earlier, but the party had struggled to offer a substantive alternative to the Clinton administration, as Dole's failed 1996 presidential campaign had shown. They had recruited a new generation of Republicans, and now, with the policy board, they would to give those recruits an ideology.
The neoconservatives were unlikely candidates for Gingrich and Dole's project. Largely creatures of policy journals and university campuses, they had lost one debate after another during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush eras. Their agenda, tailored to the Cold War, had little obvious relevance to a post-Soviet world.
But in the mid-1990s, a small group of new-generation neoconservatives had busied themselves with remaking the movement, now focused on the Middle East rather than Europe. They fought for influence in conservative journals and think tanks, for the ears of congressional leaders and, eventually, fatefully, for a dominant share of seats at the policy board's first meeting in 1998.
The policy board was a crucial victory for the neoconservatives. It brought them from the margins of Washington conversation into its power centers. It allowed them to translate their ideas from lofty abstractions into black-and-white policy proposals. And it was part of their strategy to win power not so much by persuading voters, which can take years or decades, but by a hostile takeover of GOP institutions, nudging out the realists who'd traditionally dominated their party — many of whom were conspicuously absent from the policy board.
Later that year, as Bill Clinton struggled to hold on to the presidency amid the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the neoconservatives used the policy board to convince congressional Republicans to adopt a radical idea they had formed only that year: The United States should topple the Iraqi government.
The neoconservatives' case for Iraq was abstract and highly ideological, positing not that Saddam posed a substantial threat to the United States, but rather that removing him would allow democracy and pro-American politics to organically sweep the Middle East. The specifics of their argument hardly mattered; congressional Republicans saw an opportunity to embarrass Clinton on his Iraq policy, which in Washington was widely considered a failure.They passed the Iraq Liberation Act, which declared regime change as official US policy; a reluctant but embattled Clinton signed it.
Two years later, Texas Gov. George W. Bush became president. Moved by neoconservatism's idealistic faith in democracy and perhaps sympathetic to its fixation on Iraq — Saddam Hussein had attempted to assassinate Bush's father — Bush appointed neoconservative leaders, many from the policy board, to several top positions.
The once-fringe neoconservative movement, in the space of a few short years, had seized first their party's intellectual power centers, then its legislative agenda, and now the commanding heights of American leadership itself. Against all odds, they had won.
Today, less than two decades after seizing the Republican Party, they are on the verge of losing it. The party's two leading presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, are promising to break from neoconservatism — and voters seem to be responding.
Neoconservatives are fighting back, but they're losing. Republican elites might still support them, but the voters do not seem to.
On Monday, a number of leading neoconservatives, including some who had participated in the movement's rise to power, signed on to Sen. Marco Rubio's "National Security Advisory Council." That same day, CNN learned that some of Rubio's own staffers were urging him to quit the presidential race before the mid-March primary in his home state, if only to spare him the humiliation of his expected defeat.
Many neoconservatives, perhaps sensing they had no viable candidate to express their views for them, signed an open letter denouncing Trump. Others are threatening not just to oppose Trump, but to split with the party entirely and support Hillary Clinton.
Neoconservatives can threaten to quit the Republican Party, or warn that the party is diverging from their values, but it looks increasingly like they may have it backward: that it is the Republican Party, as constituted by its voters and their policy preferences, that is rejecting neoconservatives.
That might seem surprising. But when you look at the brief history of neoconservative reign over the Republican Party, it seems inevitable. If anything, it is surprising that it took this long.
What happened? How did this movement go, in only 20 short years, from dissident faction to conquering the party to seizing the White House to collapse and an imminent return to exile? How did neoconservatives lose their hold on the party?
Neoconservatives say that Donald Trump has left them without a political party of their own. But was the Republican Party ever really theirs? Or will we one day look back at the GOP's neoconservative era as something of a fluke, in which this highly ideological movement dominated the party for only about 20 years, and led American foreign policy for only four?
Continued at:
http://www.vox.com/2016/3/10/11189350/twilight-of-the-neoconservatives
