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Neoconservatism and the Managerial Revolution
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11658 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1986 |
7,806 Words |
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Samuel T. Francis
Samuel T. Francis is deputy editorial page editor of the
Washington Times. |
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. Neoconservatives, in Irving Kristol's well known definition, are "liberals who have been mugged by reality" - persons whose lifelong commitment to liberalism was unsettled by the patent contradictions that political and social realities began to present to the articles of liberal doctrine. College students who burned libraries and attacked their professors and high-school graduates who were illiterate contradicted the liberal faith in education as an instrument of human improvement. Communist regimes that refused to converge with the West and consistently betrayed their international commitments mocked the liberal preference for negotiation over force as means of settling global conflicts. Third world states that did not develop economically or politically and indulged in orgies of racism, genocide, and terrorism challenged the liberal ideal of a Western democratic mixed economy as the goal of human progress. Minorities that would not or could not be assimilated by liberal polices raised questions about the feasibility of social engineering and the reliability of environmentalist explanations of inequality. An economy that exhibited hyper-inflation, exorbitant fiscal burdens, and declining standards of affluence contradicted the prescriptions of Keynesian orthodoxy. At the level of national and international policy and in the most visible currents of contemporary society, the poverty of conventional twentieth-century liberalism became manifest to an increasing number of American intellectuals.
The failure of liberalism was thus the immediate historical occasion for the emergence of neoconservatism. Almost none of adherents of this movement came from what is now generally called the "Old Right": almost all approached it from the Left, usually the moderate Left, but sometimes from rather far on the Left. Yet whenever a sizable portion of a social formation such as an intellectual class begins to change or modify its beliefs and ideology, more is involved than a purely cerebral process. Social and political forces express ideas and values that reflect their interests and serve function for them in their efforts to keep or acquire power. This is true for neoconservatism, no less than for the Old and New Right and the Old and New Left, and whatever the strength, attractiveness, or truth of the ideas of these movements, no explanation of them can be complete if it neglects their aspirations and interests and their relationships to dominant and declining social and political forces.
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