The American Spectator

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Neocons saw the failure of the Great Society as an opportunity to start pulling the levers of the state in a different direction instead of advocating their disassembly. It is thus no coincidence that the first public face of President Bush's "compassionate conservatism" was John DiIulio, the lifelong Democrat and Wilson disciple chosen to inaugurate the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives.

"In short," Stelzer neatly summarizes his subject, "just as neocons broke with conservatives in the foreign-policy arena when they adopted nation-building as a goal, they also broke with traditional conservatives in the domestic-policy arena by making their peace with the welfare state."

The larger issue, which came out at the America Enterprise Institute forum that launched this book, is that the long-term survival of neoconservatism depends on its ability to resolve the contradiction between the costs of a muscular foreign policy with the resulting unsustainable debts. (The late Wall Street Journal editor Robert Bartley contends that deficits are not what we should look at when deciding what we can afford.)

Returning to first principals, it is clear that Thatcher, Blair, and Will would not agree with many of the ideas espoused in the Neocon Reader -- but each would agree with some. It is a testament to the vitality of those ideas (and to the strength of the book) that none of them seem out of place in describing this strange non-movement called neoconservatism.

topics:
Foreign Policy, Iraq, Conservatism, Neoconservatism