Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction: American Jews in an Age of Conservatism
- 1 Jews and the Making of the Cosmopolitan Culture
- 2 The Premature Jewish Neoconservatives
- 3 Forgotten Jewish Godfathers
- 4 The Liberal Civil War
- 5 The Modernization of American Conservatism
- 6 The Liberal Meltdown
- 7 The Rise of the Neoconservatives
- 8 Neoconservatives and the Reagan Revolution
- 9 Nicaragua: The Cold War Comes to This Hemisphere
- 10 Irving Kristol and a New Vision of Capitalism
- 11 The Neoconservative Assault on the Counterculture
- 12 Jews and the Christian Right
- 13 Epilogue
- Notes
- Index
13 - Epilogue
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction: American Jews in an Age of Conservatism
- 1 Jews and the Making of the Cosmopolitan Culture
- 2 The Premature Jewish Neoconservatives
- 3 Forgotten Jewish Godfathers
- 4 The Liberal Civil War
- 5 The Modernization of American Conservatism
- 6 The Liberal Meltdown
- 7 The Rise of the Neoconservatives
- 8 Neoconservatives and the Reagan Revolution
- 9 Nicaragua: The Cold War Comes to This Hemisphere
- 10 Irving Kristol and a New Vision of Capitalism
- 11 The Neoconservative Assault on the Counterculture
- 12 Jews and the Christian Right
- 13 Epilogue
- Notes
- Index
Summary
What is the legacy of neoconservatism? If we date this movement to the late 1940s and early 1950s, as I do, it is now almost sixty years old. What brought it into existence and held it together for decades was the crusade against the spread of international communism. With the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991, it appeared to have ended. Indeed, Norman Podhoretz, writing in the March 1996 issue of Commentary, declared that it had “disappeared into the broader conservative movement.”
Its obituary, however, was premature. The destruction of New York's World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, alerted Americans to the threat of international terrorism and gave neocons a new lease on life. They were among the first to recognize the imminent danger long before 9/11, and they were among the strongest advocates of the invasion of Iraq. As we have seen, angry critics accused them of pushing a naïve and inexperienced president into an unnecessary imperial adventure.
The role of the neoconservatives in influencing the Bush administration's policies has undoubtedly been exaggerated. Such figures as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, former national security adviser and now Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, and, of course, the president himself are not neoconservatives but rather advocates of a strong national defense, and they are capable of making up their own minds.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Neoconservative RevolutionJewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy, pp. 223 - 242Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005