The neoconseratives sprang from the very heart of Democratic America. Most of them lived in New York or Boston and most made their living in academia. But these were not traditional Harvard men, lantern-jawed and blue-blooded. Most of them were Jewish, virtually all of them the children of immigrants; some grew up in homes where Yiddish was spoken as much as English. The key members of the group - Irving Kristol, Danial Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset and Nathan Glazer - all attended City College of New York together in the 1930s at a time when college provided a first-rate education for New Yorkers who were too poor and too Jewish to attend the Ivy League. The neocons were modernists to a fault. They didn’t go around expressing nostalgia for lost glories of medieval Christendom, nineteenth-century capitalism of the Old South. Most of them had been Marxists of one sort or another in their youth. But as they grew older they embraced old-fashioned liberalism - the liberalism of meritocratic values, reverence for high culture and vigorous mixed economy. It was betrayal of this liberalism (as they saw it) by the Left that then turned them into neocons.
The neocons hated what was happening to America’s universities, the institutions that had lifted them out of the ghetto. How could the high priests of America’s temples of reason stand idly by while students trashed university property? How could people who were supposed to care about intellectual standards agree to the introduction of quotes? Criticizing the war in Vietnam was all very well, but how could these over privileged brats burn the American flag? How could they argue that America was always wrong and its critics always right? Knee-jerk anti-Americanism was particularly offensive to people whose families escaped the Holocaust only because they emigrated to America.
These thinkers provided an enormous boost to the Right...... Crucially, the neocons spoke the language of social science. Conservatives had long insisted that government programs weakened the natural bonds of society, without ever being about to prove it. The neocons showed the social problems were much harder to understand then they appeared - and that social engineering of the Great Society sort was plagued by perverse consequences. Welfare payments can reinforce dependency. Preferential treatment may harm its supposed beneficiaries by shielding them from competition. Overzealous egalitarianism can undermine educational institutions such as New York’s City College and reduce social mobility. The neocons were muckrakers of the Right, discrediting government just as the original muckrakers had discredited the robber barons.
The neocons also dwelt on the importance of the sort of informal institutions that other social scientist ignored. In 1965, a young official in the Department of Labor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, caused a sensation with a paper-immediately dubbed the Moynihan Report, though his name did not appear on the original document-that suggested that the problems of the urban black poor stemmed, in large measure, from the collapse of the black family. Other neocons showed that a society’s “little platoons” - its voluntary institutions- are much more vital to its health then ambitious government programs. And they warned that disorder was a much bigger threat to social well-being then permissive liberals might imagine. In other works, they dressed traditional conservative insights in the language of social science.
The neocons did not need to win every argument. Merely by raising dissenting voices the punched a hole in the liberal establishment’s claim to possess a monopoly on expertise. Hitherto liberals had enjoyed perhaps the most valuable resource policy makers can possess: the impression that they represented objective scientific wisdom. This isn’t just our opinion, they could argue; this scientific orthodoxy. The neocons ended this convenient fiction.
The neocons also added a cutting edge to the Right’s criticism of liberal foreign policy. One spur was the United Nations’ growing hostility to Israel (which increased after Israel occupied Palestinian territory in the wake of the 1967 war). They also became increasingly convinced that the United States was losing the Cold War. Arms control was mutating into appeasement. The Soviet Union was building on communism’s victory in Vietnam. The American establishment was paralyzed by “Vietnam syndrome.” If the National Review broke the isolationist’ grip on the Right, the neocons helped push the bulk of the movement far more firmly into the internationalist camp.
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This was an excerpt to the book “The Right Nation” written by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. It is a very good book and has a very balanced view. I would subject anybody that is interested in the modern Right movement to read it (critic or supporter of the right).
In short, neocons are the think tanks and brains. At one time most worked for the Democrats, but changed sides, as described above. If a President (Democrat i.e. Clinton used them or most likely a Republican) wants info, ideas, or needs to create a nicely packaged policy, they go to the neocons located at the think tank called AEI (American Enterprise Institute). The AEI will do all the leg work and will change it to fit the politician. They are privately funded through donations and their services are free of charge to those that will listen.
If I have time this evening, I’ll type some more on the subject.
