CIAO DATE: 04/06

Neo-conservatism: Some Theoretical and Terminological Clarifications

Abstract

The classification of current political tendencies in the United States is sometimes confusing. Since the beginning of Ronald Reagan's first presidential campaign, American journalists and scholars have used indistinctly terms like right, conservatism, neoconservatism, ultraconservatism, extreme right, New Right, etc., to define the different political forces behind Reagan's ascent to the White House. This confusion is evident in the work of John Judis. He believes that Kevin Phillips (a conservative scholar), Paul Weyrich (a New Right activist), Irving Kristol (a neoconservative leader), and William Buckley (a traditional conservative), could all be embraced within the term "conservative" without considering any differences in their theoretical and political position.

It is certainly difficult to define neoconservatism, because it is not a political party, its members are not affiliated to a single party, and it is not a formal organization. "We have no Neoconservative manifesto," asserted Peter Steinfels in 1979, "no neoconservative program for the seventies and eighties, no statement issued from the National Association of Neoconservatives ... Indeed it may be that no neoconservative is the neoconservative; the center of gravity of a collection of individuals may rest somewhere between them and outside of any single person." Ideologically speaking, it is also hard to classify it. Neoconservatism is a current of thought that shares principles with New Deal liberalism and traditional American conservatism, looking often like a "syncretic intellectual" expression.

Consequently, neoconservatism is a misleading term. Some European scholars have used the word to classify Margaret Thatcher's and Ronald Reagan's policies, to label the monetarist theory of Milton Friedman, or to characterize the social demands of the Moral Majority. Under this perspective Milton Friedman, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Jerry Falwell are part of the same political phenomenon, the neoconservative movement. Because of this terminology problem, Seymour Martin Lipset has declared that "the concept of neo-conservatism is irrelevant to further developments within American politics ... because it is a term which confuses, rather than one which helps further political discourse."

How could we study neoconservatism when it is such an amorphous term and political phenomenon? How could we capture its essence without falling into generalizations and misleading classifications? There is no easy way to solve these puzzles. But an appropriate ideological identification of neoconservatism within the different ideological tendencies in America, and a historical analysis of its evolution and organization, could help us to properly understand and draw the boundaries of this intellectual and political expression.

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