I suspect that most Americans shared with me a complete unfamiliarity with the label "neo-conservative" before 2001. Today it seems like it's used as "fascist" once was — a term of opprobrium divorced from any actual semantic content. For some reason, the debate between Caleb McDaniel and Horizon's own Alan Allport (see here and here ) over the morality and pragmatics of nuclear deterrance reminded me of an article I read a few years ago.
"The Irony of American Power" appeared in the March, 1998 issue of First Things a mostly-conservative, mostly-Catholic monthly, and addresses the limitations of neo-conservatism and the then-currnent Clintonian neo-liberalism from a refreshingly distanced perspective. It proposes "realism" as an alternative — which may seem obvious to many of us here in 2006, but is especially useful reading right now. Separating ourselves from current affairs is perhaps the only way to evaluate political philosophies, otherwise we are tempted to forget the banality of neo-liberalist globalism or conflate neo-conservative theory with the application thereof we see in evidence.
Posted by Ben Brumfield at May 2, 2006 11:55 AM