Hot take: the new wave of scholarship on the American right—of which I am obviously very much a part—is predicated on the unspoken and I think correct assumption that *neoconservatism* was the exceptional moment in the history of conservatism, not the paleocons or the Trumpists.
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I was reading through Murray Friedman’s book yesterday, and I was floored by his conclusion that the neocons won, the paleocons lost, and that’s all there is to it, conservatism is what it is. Maybe that made sense in 2004, but in 2022—or 1992 for that matter—lol
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Where I do think there is a case to be made here is that neocons dominate the conservative establishment for about 15-20 years from the mid-1990s through to the early 2010s. But their stranglehold on institutional power was never as thorough or unchallenged as memory has it.
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The two Bush administrations, in particular, look exceptional in this framework. The elder Bush administration was already facing a challenge from the right by Buchanan in 1992. Dubya is more complicated because of 9/11 and his open identification with the Christian Right.
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But regardless that specific constellation of power in the Bush administration, with the Christian Right basically substituting for the nonexistent mass base for neoconservatism, helped out by post/9/11 jingoism, was very specific to the 2000s.
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So what explains the neocons? Probably a combination of political opportunism, institutional support, and—this is a bit trickier to prove, but I think it’s there—a more flexible and pragmatic approach to *governance* during the Reagan years.
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Neo-cons benefitted from credentialism and having respectable public-facing presentation.
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