Neoconservatism

Neoconservatism (colloquially neocon) is a political movement which began in the United States during the 1960s among liberal hawks who became disenchanted with the increasingly pacifist Democratic Party along with the growing New Left and counterculture of the 1960s. Neoconservatives typically advocate the unilateral promotion of democracy and interventionism in international relations together with a militaristic and realist philosophy of "peace through strength". They are known for espousing opposition to communism and radical politics.

Many adherents of neoconservatism became politically influential during Republican presidential administrations from the 1960s to the 2000s, peaking in influence during the presidency of George W. Bush, when they played a major role in promoting and planning the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Prominent neoconservatives in the Bush administration included Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, Richard Perle, Paul Bremer, and Douglas Feith.

Although U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had not self-identified as neoconservatives, they worked closely alongside neoconservative officials in designing key aspects of the Bush administration's foreign policy; especially in their support for Israel, promotion of American influence in the Arab world and launching the war on terror. The Bush administration's domestic and foreign policies were heavily influenced by major ideologues affiliated with neoconservatism, such as Bernard Lewis, Lulu Schwartz, Richard and Daniel Pipes, David Horowitz, and Robert Kagan.

Critics of neoconservatism have used the term to describe foreign policy war hawks who support aggressive militarism or neocolonialism. Historically speaking, the term neoconservative refers to a group of Trotskyist academics from New York who moved from the anti-Stalinist left to conservatism during the 1960s and 1970s. The movement had its intellectual roots in the magazine Commentary, edited by Norman Podhoretz, after they spoke out against the moral relativism of the New Left, and in that way helped define the movement.

The term neoconservative was popularized in the United States during 1973 by the socialist leader Michael Harrington, who used the term to define Daniel Bell, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Irving Kristol, whose ideologies differed from Harrington's. Earlier during 1973, he had described some of the same ideas in a brief contribution to a symposium on welfare sponsored by Commentary.

The neoconservative label was adopted by Irving Kristol in his 1979 article "Confessions of a True, Self-Confessed 'Neoconservative'". His ideas have been influential since the 1950s, when he co-founded and edited the magazine Encounter.

Another source was Norman Podhoretz, editor of the magazine Commentary, from 1960 to 1995. By 1982, Podhoretz was terming himself a neoconservative in The New York Times Magazine article titled "The Neoconservative Anguish over Reagan's Foreign Policy".

The term itself was the product of a rejection among formerly self-identified liberals of what they considered a growing leftward, antimilitaristic turn of the Democratic Party in the 1970s. Neoconservatives perceived an ideological effort to distance the Democratic Party and American liberalism from the hawkish Cold War liberalism as espoused by former Presidents Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. After the Vietnam War, the anti-communist, internationalist and interventionist roots of this Cold War liberalism among the Left seemed increasingly brittle to the neoconservatives. As a consequence, they migrated to the Republican Party and formed one pillar of the Reagan Coalition and of the conservative movement. Hence, they became the new conservatives, supplanting the old conservatives, who are more nationalist and non-interventionist.