Was “neoconservatism” a reaction to détente?

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

I think it probably came along for the ride as part of that anti-détente movement, but it is a long way from traditional "jacksonian" mistrust of foreign powers (Which can easily be channeled towards isolationism instead of interventionism) and the military adventurism and nation building that would come to define neoconservatism.

One thing I would argue that did happen was that the "realists" via their association with détente came to be marred as "establishment", "moderate" or "liberal" and thus set the stage for the neocons to assert themselves as the "true conservatives" during the 2000s. One calls to mind the intransigence on the part of the Bush people regarding their foreign policy line and the distance between those that W surrounded himself with and the types that worked with Bush 41.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

There's a lot of continuity, and it's just semantics, but the neoconservatism of the '90s was a successor to the Reagan Doctrine that sought to maintain "benevolent global hegemony" with what Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan referred to as "a Neo-Reaganite foreign policy of military strength and moral clarity". Reagan was reacting to a policy of Détente widely believed to have failed after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan while the neocons saw themselves as proactive in their opposition to Clinton era reductions in military spending, conversely seen by the public as common sense with the Soviet Union gone. They were pretty pessimistic about building off their idol's success because it seemed like nothing could galvanize a country divided by hot-button '90s Culture War issues, save for what a 2000 defense review described as a "catastrophic and catalyzing event- like a new Pearl Harbor".

Yet at the same time, Reagan's actual approach in action was hardly what I would term to be "neoconservative", though obviously every neoconservative would attach themselves to Reagan's legacy as part of what prior to Trump anyway, was a broad based latching onto Reagan's legacy to legitimize various positions that in a number of cases went beyond what Reagan would have deemed acceptable. Hence the old line that "Reagan couldn't survive a primary today".

The neocons were certainly part of this "True conservative" dynamic and milked it for all it was worth until they ended up on the outs themselves.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Neoconservatism was originally known as 'neoliberalism' before that was appropriated for economic issues.

The reason for this was because many of these 'neoliberals' nee neoconservatives started off as liberals. Many were hired as staffers by Washington State U.S Senator Henry 'Scoop' Jackson who ran for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1976.

He was regarded as the co-front runner along with Arizona Congressman Mo Udall after both Senators Ted Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey declined to run and before Jimmy Carter's campaign took off.

'Scoop' Jackson was an activist liberal who extended this view to foreign policy arguing for military intervention to expand democracy around the world.

So, that's why it was initially called 'neoliberalism' as opposed to the general liberal policy of not using the military in an offensive way.

It's kind of interesting he had so much support given the level of inflation that was blamed on the 'guns and butter' combination of both the Great Society and the Vietnam war, given that he was guns and butter on steroids.

Although I don't think she worked for him, the highest profile 'neoliberal' nee neoconservative at that time must have been Jeane Kirkpatrick, a one time Democrat, who was appointed by President Reagan as U.S Ambassador to the United Nations. She is most famous for having the phrase 'our dictators are better than your dictators' (referring to capitalist dictators vs communist dictators) attributed to her, although I don't think she ever actually said that specifically.

It is also not really compatible with the Conservatism for that very reason, at least not long term, which is a point that I have pushed quite hard. In that sense, the fact that the neocons found themselves on the outs on the right is not really that surprising, it is in some ways more surprising that they were able to (for a short time) push themselves as "the true conservatives" in foreign policy discussions.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

It's important to view neoconservatism as a pillar of the "three-legged stool" comprising the fusionism first-espoused by William F. Buckley and manifested in Goldwater campaign. This ideological marriage remained on the fringe of the Overton Window until various elements (e.g. Vietnam for Greatest Generation-era Democrats and their children who served, the desegrationist movement for Dukes of Hazzardesque Dixiecrats) drove their various wedges into the New Deal Coalition. Then stagflation caused the minarchist leg to re-appear as the AFL-CIO's rank-and-file defected (at least temporarily) into the apocryphal Northern Reagan Democrat mold.

Now whole time religious fundamentalists such as Phyllis a55fly Schafly and Moral Majority types created a new cultural framework for a Christian Right seething over Warren/Burger (no pun intended) court rulings and pretty much about everything the Sexual Revolution and second-wave feminism stood for. This Dominionist impulse galvanized the Southern Strategy already livid over the aforementioned racial grievances. I'll leave the details to those who know more what's up w/those subjects, however it's not hard to understand why the people who Satanic Panicked over Dungeons and Dragons would hate those godless commies.

The Cold Warrior plank regained steam both due to the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan and legitimate concerns of the Warsaw Pact surpassing NATO's capabilities. The Warsaw Pact arguably held the upper hand by 1977 as it not only augmented its long standing conventional forces advantage but also at least equaled NATO's nuclear deterrent via its SS-20 missiles. Reagan himself long desired nuclear abolition and highlighted opposing détente due to atomic fears in his 1976 RNC speech. The Iranian Hostage Crisis proved a final straw for Americans who'd already felt humiliated over Vietnam, the Gas Crunch, and everything in between. Reagan seized the moment over a Carter campaign already hamstrung by a labor-backed Kennedy primary challenge, and the New Right finally had one of the own calling the shots.

From there Reagan's various actions as executive such as massive tax cuts, firing the air traffic controllers, cutting nurturing the military industrial-complex in hopes of driving the USSR bankrupt (which tbh did help get the nuclear treaties done), iinadvertently jump-starting crack epidemic via his perversion the Monroe Doctrine, deriding AIDS as the "gay plague", perpetuating a fossil fuels-dependent economy, founding the mass incarceration state, and reprising old Atwater racial tropes as electorally needed codified neoconservatism as an ideology. Bush Sr. ratcheted up the cultural dialectic. He escalated the disastrous War On Drugs and declared we needed to be more like the Waltons and less like the Simpsons. For their part social liberals mostly capitulated into law-and-order rhetoric in face of the violent crime wave; After all, the Congressional Black Caucus and most Black Americans  supported the 1994 Crime Bill. They simply had the wrong phucking solutions.

Evangelicals came to the GOP's center stage through Gingrich's '94 revolution sweeping across the South. Neoconservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation drafted ill-advised policy prescriptions such as DOMA and welfare reform passed a Clinton administration clawing for any scrap of political capital. You also saw the "us vs. them" mentality during the 90s government shutdown which both paved the way for Karl Rove's "majority of majority party" tactics and the Tea Party-infused Obama era budget fights. By 2000 the New Right wrestled control from endangered Rockefeller Republicans as well as warded off the Buchananite impulse. Bush Jr. dominated the South and Plains in the primary via consolidating the conservative vote against McCain, and after that whole Florida thing the think tank-drafted (you may be noticing a theme here) Project for a New American Century got its turn at the wheel.

I won't spend too much time writing about the Bush Jr.'s implementation of the 3-legged stool (e.g. squandering the budget on tax cuts, passing bankruptcy laws which really blew during the Great Recession, the litigated ad nauseam foreign policy unilateralism, preying on post-9/11 fears to encroach on privacy rights, letting the Assault Weapons Ban expire, codifying the idiocy of unfunded mandates through NCLB, etc. etc.) because its failures are still relatively fresh with most. By 2008 the three-legged stool had thoroughly splintered and turned its sights more towards state-level control via ALEC and other Koch-funded enterprises which flourished after Citizens United.

Tl;dr: It's a gross oversimplification to define "neoconservatism" as an interventionist foreign policy impulse born out of Red Scare fears. Rather, it is a facet of the fusionism which emerged as a reaction towards the postwar economic consensus then absorbed traditionalist grievances over the countless sociocultural upheavals during the 60s and since. Overall, the ideology glorified hubris through divinely-inspired American exceptionalism, consistently generate(d) some of the worst public policy failures in postwar history, and caused mass wealth concentration and environmental challenges which we are still struggling with to this day. One must understand its deep sociopolitical roots to fully grasp how phucking lemon-headed these people are.

I prefer a more restrictive definition of neoconservative then one that encompasses the entirety of Reaganite Conservatism, because doing so is itself an oversimplification of the nuances and differences on the right with regards to foreign policy.

Not everyone this side of Ron Paul, is a neocon.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

I prefer a more restrictive definition of neoconservative then one that encompasses the entirety of Reaganite Conservatism, because doing so is itself an oversimplification of the nuances and differences on the right with regards to foreign policy.

Not everyone this side of Ron Paul, is a neocon.

It is true the post-modern American conservative movement on aggregate featured foreign policy dissent from paleoconservatives and minarchists. In addition, neoconservatism enjoyed its own ideological diversity during its Vietnam-era infancy. Some proto-Reaganites remained relatively warm towards social liberalism when not concerned with reproductive rights; foreign policy hawk and supply-side tax cut architect Jack Kemp staunchly supported racial integration and even broke with religious conservatives on not viewing the LGBT community as the scourge of God. However, it’s hard to summarize a foreign policy predicated on American exceptionalism without understanding why they viewed American hegemony spreading freedom as a moral imperative in the first place. Hence Karl Rove coining the Bush Jr. administration’s foreign policy detractors as the “reality-based community” vis a vis their own “faith-based community”. I challenge you to produce a self-described “neoconservative” who was merely an American unilateralist and outright rejected fusionist orthodoxy before the Tea Party replaced the 3-legged stool with an empty chair.

You are missing my point. You are the one deploying too expansive a definition of neoconservative and then challenging me to prove what you are saying?

Of course I cannot find such a neoconservative, I never said such existed.

You are saying that everyone who supported a hawkish foreign policy in the Reaganite stool was a neoconservative and that neoconservatism itself was the whole (the fusionism itself). I disagree with this contention because it fails to understand the nuances in the foreign policy space, the divides between Bush and McCain on foreign/military policy, the divides between Rumsfeld's desire for a lean and nimble Department of Defense (as well as McCain's own opposition to wastefulness in the defense budget), in contrast to the "appropriators" and their constant desire to appease the defense contractors.

Bush's entire world operated on a basis of "Daddy failed because he compromised, we just need to get tougher in all quarters and we will not end up like Daddy". Drowning in deficits to avoid tax hikes, "Going all the way to Bagdad", "leaning much more heavily into religious right". Ignore the figures, the facts, the reality, just go all in on faith and philosophically. The Rove quote fits right into this mindset.

What I would say is that there were people who embraced the Reaganite fusionism but were not "neoconservatives" on foreign policy and thus since they weren't so on foreign policy, they weren't so across the board (though I would never use that term to describe the Reaganite stool to begin with, because Reagan himself was not a neoconservative). They were Reaganite conservatives (all three legs even), they embraced a strong national defense and were certainly willing to defend the country and even advance its interests abroad. However, they weren't willing to use military force to nation build, weren't willing to engage in unending foreign conflicts and/or weren't of a mind to turn a blind eye to endless demands of the contractors for wasteful spending.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

The bigger question, as evidenced by this thread: what is neoconservatism?

1. (Wilsonianism) The weaponization of old school foreign policy https://youtu.be/CH1oYhTigyA?t=930idealism/liberalism, into a geopolitical approach that seeks to impose values and systems so as to achieve a liberal democratic utopia across the globe.

2. The insertion of this mindset into the conservative sphere, effectively becoming the "conservative foreign policy", the same way that liberalism inserted itself into the conservative sphere and became "conservative economics". Of course, as I have routinely pointed out, this is fundamentally incompatible with conservativism Reagan or no Reagan and thus its supreme dominance was always on borrowed time.

3. Nation building

4. Long term engagement in a military conflict for the sake of 3, with no clearly definable victory or endgame.

5. Elective/Preemptive War

6. Turning a bling eye to wasteful spending in the Pentagon (less important than 1-5).

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

For the love of god it is like watching a video by TiK, who claims everything short of libertarianism is a socialist. I don't think this is by accident either.

For the millionth time, I never said there was an "isolationist fusionist". I said there were Reaganites who would "in my opinion", not be worthy of the label neoconservative. There is a spectrum here of views ranging from interventionism to isolationism and included in their are interventions that aren't what I would consider to be "neoconservative".

Retaliation following an attack on the homeland, is not "neoconservative". Launching any old military campaign regardless of purpose or motivation, is not by itself neoconservative. Unilateralism is also not by itself, neoconservative. In my view all of these things spring from more of a Jacksonian tradition than a Wilsonian one and thus doesn't qualify for being neoconservative unless some other factor makes it so.