Politics and Government - Neoconservatism Movement and the Ashes of Fai

The Neoconservatism Movement - Out of the Ashes of Failed Liberalism Neoconservatism is a relatively recent term, no more than thirty or forty years old. In fact, many of its members never truly accepted the term at all. And while its name may be relatively easy to pinpoint, its roots refuse to be tied to any one person, event, or movement. Rather, neoconservatism stems from a number of social and political factors. One of the largest sociopolitical factors in the development of neoconservatism revolves around the 1960s liberal movement. Himmelstein states in his book, To the Right, that a number of "factors contributed to a general crisis of confidence in American institutions and created a political opening for . . . the Right, which presented itself in the late 1970s as a ‘revitalization movement’" (6). It seems that Himmelstein is describing a progression parallel to the liberal movement of the 1960s, on a smaller scale and with an alternative ideology hindered by fewer limitations. Accordingly, Francis states, in Beautiful Losers, that "the emergence in the 1970s of the political and intellectual movement known as "neoconservatism" is generally regarded as a response to the failures of conventional liberalism to deal effectively with the challenges of that decade [i.e. 1960s]" (95). So, are we to believe that neoconservatism stems exclusively from disenchanted 1960s liberals? I rving Kristol, a noted fore-founder of the movement, attaches an even more specific label, describing neoconservatism as "the erosion of liberal faith among a relatively small . . . group of scholars and intellectuals, and the movement of this group toward a more conservative point of view," without completely conforming to the traditional Repub... ...Cited Dorrien, Gary. The Neoconservative Mind: Politics, Culture, and the War of Ideology. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993. Ehrman, John. The Rise of Neoconservatism: Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs 1945- 1994. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. Francis, Samuel. Beautiful Losers: Essays on the Failure of American Conservatism. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993. Himmelstein, Jerome L. To the Right: The Transformation of American Conservatism. Berkely: University of California Press, 1990. Kaiser, Charles. 1968 in America: Music, Politics, Chaos, Counterculture, and the Shaping of a Generation. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988. Kristol, Irving. Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea. New York: The Free Press, 1995. White, Theodore H. The Making of the President—1968. New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1969.