The Specter of Neoconservatism

For some critics of conservatism, the neoconservatives are a sort of bogeyman to which they often attribute conservatisms' flaws and failings. This portrait is often unfair, despite neoconservatism emerging as the dominant strain with conservatism.

This episode provides a basic overview of neoconservatism's origin and debunks certain myths about them. It explains that domestic policy, not foreign policy was its original main concern, for example. And how neoconservative foreign policy today is largely a bipartisan, mainstream consensus view in many cases.

The neoconservatives had a number of consequential wins, such as their intellectual underpinning of Mayor Giuliani's turnaround of New York City. However, there are fair critiques that can be leveled at them, including their disproportionate secularism and a weak sense of America as a historic nation that underpinned failures in Iraq and elsewhere.