Free Republic

… There are a number of differences between conservatives operating in the William F. Buckley Jr./Ronald Reagan tradition and neoconservatives operating in the Irving Kristol/George W. Bush tradition. Here are three, and I’ll use Kristol’s own words to explain it.* Neoconservatives believe the GOP should be converted to embrace a “modern democracy,” aka a welfare state in the mold of FDR and the Great Society. Neoconservatives don’t want to disassemble the federal government in order to rebalance divided powers between federal, state, and local governments; they just think they can pilot Leviathan better than the Democrats.Neoconservatives are largely secular intellectuals...

THE ODDS IN September were in Bill Kristol’s favor. Bashar al-Assad’s army had been caught using sarin gas, the president was beating the war drums, and Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard and an accomplished foreign policy percussionist himself, was optimistic that an American intervention in Syria was coming. Asked on CNN about opposition from congressional Republicans, particularly that of Sen. Rand Paul, Kristol was dismissive. “There are really five senators who are with Rand Paul. There are maybe 30 or 50 House Republicans,” he said. Kristol later warned that Republican lawmakers who voted for intervention might face some...

A genuinely pro-capitalist U.S. foreign policy would advance both the national and rational self-interest of Americans, which is: to live and flourish under authentic freedom, true justice, and the rule of law, with individual rights to life, liberty, and property protected by government against the initiation of force or fraud by hostile foreigners. To be clear, this does not mean fighting unjustified wars in Viet Nam, Iraq or Libya. Both President Obama and the GOP-led Congress failed yet again this week to abide by these principles as they apply to U.S. military operations in Afghanistan and Libya. Not only do...

The illusion of supposed conservatism, for scholars like Strauss and for politicians like George W. Bush and Mitt Romney, is that the political spectrum in America has shifted so far to the Left that yesterday’s liberals are today’s conservatives says Author and Speaker Jeff Nyquist... Consider the state of America: marriage is no longer an enforceable contract in most states (i.e., no fault divorce); even more telling, homosexual marriage is increasingly acceptentage of the population attending religious services has been falling steadily for years, along with honesty and our nation’s work ethic.....It would seem that conservatives have nothing left to...

...the US military has been prohibited from helping the local Christians by the administrations of both Bush and Obama. Two years ago, the distribution of Bibles was banned in Iraq, and even the sale to the military of assault weapons with Bible verses on them was stopped. In Egypt, the new authorities helped and financed by the Obama administration and supported internationally by Hillary Clinton, encouraged pogroms against the traditional Christian minority in the country, the Copts. It seems that one of the main strategic goals for the US military presence in the Middle East is the eradication of traditional...

On Fox News Sunday today, Bill Kristol threw cold water on Herman Cain‘s presidential candidacy, arguing that regardless of his popularity among conservative voters and whether or not his sexual harassment scandal will end up helping or hurting him, there was very little chance in the first place he was ever going to be the Republican nominee. Chris Wallace brought up Cain’s contentious exchange with a reporter last night over the allegations over his sexual harassment controversy, and asked the panel if there was a connection between what Cain is currently going through and what Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas...

Texas Gov. Rick Perry has leapt to the top in the Republican presidential race. His domestic policy looks standard-issue conservative. But his foreign policy veers neoconservative—even after George W. Bush and Barack Obama together launched two full-scale wars, one “kinetic military action,” and two deadly drone-campaigns. With the economy stuck in the doldrums, President Obama faces a potentially difficult reelection fight. However, it will take someone to beat him, and so far the leading Republicans do not impress. In a party that tends to practice political primogeniture, Mitt Romney was early anointed the front-runner. Yet dissatisfied GOP voters rushed to...

My father suggested to me recently that it might be helpful to better explain what the term “neoconservative” means. “A lot of people don’t know,” he said. As usual, Dad was right. Though decades old, the mainstream use of the word neoconservative is relatively new. I mentally filed away my father’s suggestion agreeing that a layman’s explanation of “neoconservative” might be helpful when the time was right. The time is right—as the American intervention in Libya has drawn a clearer line between neoconservatives and conventional Republicans than any event in recent memory. The “neocons” believe American greatness is measured by...

The night they drove old Hosni down — and all the neo-cons were singing. Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol was the kapellmeister. Prior to the exit of Beast Mubarak, Kristol (in yet another of his Olympian pronouncements), thundered: “The United States must support the Egyptian awakening, and has a paramount moral and strategic interest in real democracy in Egypt and freedom for the Egyptian people. The question is how the U.S. government can do its best to help the awakening turn out well.”How do we know neo-cons aren’t really conservatives? Conservatives are realists. They confront reality without ideological blinders. They...

By the middle of 2003, as it became clear that the American invasion of Iraq would result not in a quick “mission accomplished” but a long, bloody occupation, a certain narrative of what went wrong began to take root in some precincts of the anti-war left. The decision to invade Iraq, this story went, was the result of the government falling under the sway of a dangerous ideology, called neoconservatism. The neocons, as they were often derisively called, believed in the naked assertion of American power—in a kind of imperialism, really, which gave America the right to invade other countries...

When Mitt Romney denounced the new START treaty in the Washington Post last week, he didn't simply demonstrate that he's determined not to allow Sarah Palin to outflank him on the right. He also affirmed something else -- the decline and fall of the Republican foreign-policy establishment.

The nature of existence is boom and bust. The pattern of rising up and falling down, birth and death, debt and wealth, consolidation and expansion. The phoenix burns bright until crumbling to ash -- only to rise again in a new form. So too with political ideology. On Pajamas TV's "FrontPage with Allen Barton," professor C. Bradley Thompson and Yaron Brook, head of the Ayn Rand Institute, discuss their new book Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea Defining the influential -- but allegedly dying political philosophy -- Thompson said, I think the best way to put it is the way...

Despite George W. Bush's many failures as president, in one area he was an unqualified success: demonstrating the impossibility of big-government conservatism. For decades, clever pundits and Republican apparatchiks have been touting this self-evident oxymoron as the path to political success. After eight years in practice, it has proved to be the road to irrelevance and ruin - politically as well as financially. Ideologies that celebrate the swollen state while traveling under the name "conservative" are nothing new. As the Old Right faded into the modern American conservative movement, Eisenhower-era "Modern Republicans" preached a "dynamic conservatism" that was to be...

The editors of two of the country's most powerful publications, conducting a gloat-fest over the corpse of Reaganism last week, described their idea of true conservatives: Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham asked a remarkable question of Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times Book Review, in New York's Greenwich Village Wednesday evening: "Isn't Barack Obama the most significant Burkean in American politics today?" "Burkean" refers to Edmund Burke, the 18th-century British parliamentarian who sympathized with the freedom-loving revolution in America while vehemently opposing the anarchistic revolution in France. Tanenhaus, author of an impressive biography...

... "Irving Kristol was an intellectual giant who played a major role in developing the anti-communist arguments that led to the defeat of the Soviet Union," former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told The Washington Times. ... ... Known as the godfather of neoconservatism, Mr. Kristol was a youthful radical who went from embracing communism in his 20s to attacking it publicly in his 30s. In subsequent years, he became an equally forceful advocate of free-market economics, including the supply-side tax cuts enacted during the Reagan administration and dismantling much of the so-called welfare state. Neoconservatism was a label originally bestowed...

Irving Kristol, 89, a forceful essayist, editor and university professor who became the leading architect of neoconservatism, which he called a political and intellectual movement for disaffected ex-liberals like himself who had been "mugged by reality," died Friday at the Capital Hospice in Arlington. He spent much of his career in New York but had for the last two decades lived at the Watergate apartments in the District. He died of complications from lung cancer, said his son, William Kristol, the founder and editor of the conservative Weekly Standard magazine.

Rosie O'Donnell, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and James von Brunn have a lot more in common than not. All have a problem with "Neocons" and two of the three are clear that they have a fear of the power of Jews ... and believe that 9/11/2001 was not the result of jetliners being hijacked and flown into the World Trade Center in New York City. Imagine that! An odd observation and investigation shows intersections of thought and philosophy shared by these three people and it begins to suggest that they all were reading from the same prayer book. The issues in...

Andrew Sullivan has decided that he now knows the truth about neoconservatism: "We patiently listened as neocons told us that the Palestinians are too dysfunctional a people ever to have democratic rights or their own state, but that the the ancient sectarian warfare of Iraq can be transformed in a few years!"

Neoconservatives are elated with Obama's appointments, recognizing that the new guard is very much like the old.  Some traditional conservatives were hoping that with Bush leaving office and Obama coming in, the neocons would be put out of power, but sadly, they're not going away that easily. Contrary to the public's perception of President-elect Obama as the peace candidate, he has been extremely hawkish in his appointments. The selection of Joe Biden as a running mate was a sign that the globalist and hawkish wing of the Democratic Party (where the neocons originally hailed from) was going to be strongly...

The rise of the neoconservatives within the GOP has not only discredited the Grand Old Party but tarnished the image of conservatism. The Republican party suffered an overwhelming electoral defeat this past November. The establishment media were all too quick to proclaim that conservatism is dead and we're now at the dawn of a liberal age. Peter Beinart, Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy for the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), wrote in Time magazine that we are facing the dawn of a "new liberal order." In making this proclamation, Beinart overlooks the fact that the public was not voting...