‘The Return of the Neocons’ (As If They Ever Left)

Here’s a great story by David Margolick on the neocons, those big-government conservatives and Middle-East warmongers who dominate the conservative movement and the Republican party. Read it all, but here is just one excerpt, about who attended Irving Kristol’s funeral:

Filling the pews were his progeny, not just biological but intellectual, and they were an impressive lot. They came from the publications that neoconservatives either run, like Bill Kristol’s Weekly Standard, or work for, like The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. Others came from the think tanks where neocons congregate, particularly the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). There were faces from the Iraq War, with which the neocons are inextricably linked, like former deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz (making a rare public appearance) and the former civilian administrator of Iraq, Paul Bremer. Charles Krauthammer, the impassioned and highly influential neoconservative columnist at The Washington Post, and the political scientist Francis Fukuyama (a rare lapsed and repentant neocon) hadn’t spoken to each other for several years—ever since Fukuyama had taken exception to the roseate view of the Iraq War Krauthammer had offered in the American Enterprise Institute’s 2004 Irving Kristol Lecture—but Kristol’s death had briefly brought them back together, albeit in different parts of the synagogue. The more traditional wing of the Republican Party, the one the neocons had arguably routed, also paid homage: George Will, who’d come to view the Iraq War as an enormous mistake, took his seat respectfully. In his uncharacteristically apolitical, even gentle, eulogy, Bill Kristol couldn’t help but gloat over the proliferation of neocons: “scores, legions—hordes they must seem to those who disapprove of them,” he said.

Read the whole story.

UPDATE There are also left neocons, whom Murray Rothbard called “one of my least favorite ideological groups,” such as the people at the New Republic.

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8:42 am on January 23, 2010