[Adam Simms is senior research fellow at Wagner College’s Hugh L. Carey Center for Government Reform.]

When Peter Steinfels coined the term “neoconservative” for his 1979 portrait The Neoconservatives, he profiled an eclectic group of public intellectuals identified with the Democratic Party but at odds with the legacies of George McGovern and Jimmy Carter. Most of those profiled — Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, among others — resisted the label. Moynihan later returned to the fold, winning election as a U.S. senator from New York, but Kristol and Podhoretz, widely recognized as neoconservatism’s godfathers, eventually led an exodus to Ronald Reagan and the Republicans. By 1980, given their fixation with the Soviet Union and the nuclear arms race, and their disenchantment with the welfare state and affirmative action, it had become increasingly difficult to distinguish between neo and plain ol’ conservatives.
And yet …
As Jacob Heilbrunn demonstrates in this contribution to neoconolgy, They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons, the phenomenon’s hallmark is less a consistent political credo than it is a temperament characterized by a predisposition to oppose whatever orthodoxy happens to be regnant in Washington, a craving for an enemy depicted as virtually invincible, and an unshakeable conviction that its gift of prophetic insight can save Western civilization from moral decay and self-destruction, if only everyone else will listen.

Heilbrunn is not entirely unsympathetic to neoconservatism. He acknowledges that he flirted with its critiques of American domestic and foreign policy during his undergraduate years at Oberlin College in the 1980s, and continued to do so later at The National Interest, a journal founded by Kristol, and at The New Republic, the formerly weekly (now biweekly) political magazine that served as a bridge between neocons and Wilsonian-internationalist “liberal hawks.” Liberal hawks, with whom Heilbrunn currently appears to be aligned, provided much of the intellectual cover for congressional Democrats who joined George W. Bush in going to war against Iraq when the administration hyped “intelligence” that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and was in league with al-Qaeda. A sense of having been suckered adds an engaging dash of savor to Heilbrunn’s description of the neoconservatives’ long march to power, starting out as Trotskyist sectarians in the 1930s who criticized Stalin and FDR’s New Deal with equal fervor from Alcove 1 of City College of New York’s student cafeteria to rise as second-tier policymakers in the Pentagon (Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz), State Department (Elliott Abrams) and, most disastrously, Vice President Richard Cheney’s staff (Douglas Feith, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby).

Neoconservatism now appears to have finally made it after decades in the political wilderness. But as Heilbrunn emphasizes, neocons are a temperamentally mercurial lot. Along the way, they more often than not attracted attention as bitter polemical warriors against political figures whom they accused of lacking sufficient “will” — a favorite word in their lexicon — to face down whomever and whatever they perceived as their chosen threat of the day. Heilbrunn’s account of the ebb and flow of the neocons’ relationship with Ronald Reagan provides a hint of how they may respond if and when the next administration chooses to end the Iraq folly.

During the 1980 presidential campaign, neoconservative standard bearers execrated former naval captain Jimmy Carter for lack of backbone in standing up to the Soviets and rallied en masse behind Reagan, who spent most of World War II entertaining U.S. troops at the Hollywood Canteen. Over most of the next eight years neocons vociferously supported Reagan’s programs of arming the Nicaraguan contras (with funds illegally diverted from arms sales to Saudi Arabia after Congress outlawed further disbursements to the right-wing rebels) and of installing nuclear-tipped Pershing missiles in Western Europe (in the face of massive popular opposition in Britain and West Germany). Then without blinking they turned on their champion after he proposed a mutual disarmament pact to Mikhail Gorbachev during a summit meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland. But, oh, never mind. Reagan now occupies an honored niche in neocondom’s tiny pantheon of demigods, worshiped as the winning Commander-in-Chief of “World War III” against international communism at a moment when Norman Podhoretz strives mightily to cheerlead the current C-in-C into “World War IV” against the latest enemy, “Islamofascism.”

Yet even as Podhoretz urges George W. Bush to widen the Iraq war by ordering air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities, rumblings of discontent can be detected in neocon quarters. Richard Perle is on record as saying that while he still supports the Iraq war’s objective of overthrowing Saddam Hussein, the mission has bogged down in a quagmire due to the administration’s incompetent handling of the aftermath. Others, such as Francis Fukuyama and Owen Harries, once rising stars of the movement, now distance themselves from their former patrons, decrying dangers inherent in the neocons’ unconservative Wilsonian infatuation with employing military might to spread democracy overseas.
Such disagreements give untutored observers hope that neoconservatism is showing signs of fissure and collapse. But as Heilbrunn constantly reminds readers, neocons are most comfortable when in opposition at home, most energized when they have an enemy abroad, and most passionate when indulging in the prophet’s solace of saying, “Had you only listened to me …”

If the past is prologue, and if Bush does not strike Iran before his term is up, Podhoretz & Co. may turn on the president to denounce him and his fellow countrymen, who show a declining appetite for prolonging or extending the current adventure, as short-sighted cowards lacking in “will.”