Confronting Neoconservatism

Neo-conservatism has become both a code word for reactionary thinking in our time and a badge of unity for those in the Bush administration advocating a new imperialist foreign policy, an assault on the welfare state, and a return to “family values.” Its members are directly culpable for the disintegration of American prestige abroad, the…

Philip Green My remarks are going to be a variation on Louis Hartz’s Liberal Tradition in America, still to my mind the basic text on political culture in the United States, though it needs a lot of amendment, some of which I will offer here. If the pre-modern culture of Europe was the Ancien Regime,…

A legal coup d’etat brought the United States the most right-wing government in its history. However illegitimate the Bush Administration’s birth, though, its seizure of power marks the latest stage in a political process that is a quarter of a century old. Despite its 2000 resort to electoral fraud and legal trickery, the contemporary Right has…

Commenting on the administration’s decision to create a new drug benefit for seniors, one highly-respected liberal columnist recently observed that “political considerations seemed to be pushing George W. Bush further and further into the New Deal way of life.”[i] But Bush’s obvious ploy to pick up senior votes should be cold comfort to anyone who…

A very curious piece appeared on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times on June 7, 2003. Its author was Jenny Strauss Clay, a professor of classics at the University of Virginia, and the title was, “The Real Leo Strauss.” Highlighted in a box midway down the page were the words, “My father was a…

Near the end of the Cold War a group of neo-conservative intellectuals and policy makers began to argue that instead of cutting back on America’s vast military system, the United States needed to use its unmatched power to create a global Pax Americana. Some of them called it the unipolarist imperative. The goal of American…

As our Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once noted in an off the cuff remark, strategic truths sometimes need be defended by a “bodyguard of lies.”[i] Here Rumsfeld was thinking no doubt of Churchill’s famous quip defending Operation Fortitude, the mock invasion force aimed at Calais that drew the attention of Herr Hitler and his…