What Neoconservative Revolution?

Prior to the Roberts hearings, many liberals stole a page from their own foreign policy analysis and worried about a ‘neoconservative revolution [that] would transform the nation’s constitutional morality’. But in the post-Roberts, post-Miers landscape, and with the Alito nomination finally making its way to the Senate today, we are left wondering: what neoconservative revolution?

In fact, the neoconservatives have been something of a left-wing bogeyman, scaring together opposition through frantic invocations of a conspiratorial vanguard threatening to destroy our nation. Newsweek only recently cottoned on to what others already noticed a while back: Bush, far from being the spearhead of a radical movement, is an increasingly isolated president, unpopular even within his own (fragmenting) party, and with nothing new to offer since the invasion of Iraq almost three years ago. Most of the major neo-conservatives, like Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Frum, have resigned or been pushed out of their positions of power and influence; Rice’s elevation suggested Bush wanted yes-(wo)men over ideological comrades.

Similarly, Bush’s Supreme Court nominees have not reflected a confident attempt to build Christian values into the court, or radically reinterpret the constitution along neoconservative lines. The only thing Roberts, the failed Miers, and now Alito seem to have in common is their permissiveness towards executive powers. The nomination pattern reflects not some ongoing neoconservative revolution, but rather the defensive reactions of a weak and bewildered president who has no greater project to pursue than expanding his prerogatives almost for their own sake.

Hysterical invocations about neoconservatives do little to clarify what is really going on, and permit wild fantasies about conspiracies and radical utopian visions, when what we are dealing with is considerably different. Such invocations are also a sign of lazy thinking. Painting the Bush administration with the revolutionary brush misses the fact that there is nothing visionary about his presidency. It also gives much of the opposition false comfort in thinking that the most urgent political need is to come together to save the country from being destroyed by right-wing radical s. This alarmist approach short-circuits long-term thinking about what a real opposition stands for. It even plays into the very politics of fear that should be opposed.