Neoconservatism

Neoconservatism combines acceptance of the market economy and a limited welfare state at home with an assertive, values-driven foreign policy abroad, holding that liberal democracy is universally valid and that American power may legitimately be used to advance it.

It originated among former liberals and leftists — many of them ex-Trotskyists — whose faith in social engineering was broken by the perceived failures of the Great Society, and whose Cold War anti-communism hardened into a broader conviction that the United States should actively promote democracy abroad — democracy promotion, by force where necessary — rather than merely contain tyranny. Irving Kristol's quip that a neoconservative is 'a liberal who has been mugged by reality' captures the self-understanding: chastened at home, crusading abroad.

Its influence peaked around the Iraq War of 2003, which its advocates in and around the George W. Bush administration promoted as a chance to plant democracy in the Middle East by force. The war's long, bloody aftermath discredited the project so thoroughly that 'neoconservative' became mainly a term of abuse.

Domestically it carries a moral concern about cultural decadence and about the civic and religious conditions a free society needs to sustain itself — a worry that markets and rights alone cannot supply the virtue on which they depend.

Its critics span the spectrum: realists charge that its faith in exporting democracy ignores history and culture, paleoconservatives call it a betrayal of conservative restraint, and the left sees ideological cover for empire. The gap between its universal rhetoric and its single-nation instrument is the tension the diamond marks.

It is frequently confused with the wider right, but it is distinguished precisely by the thing the compass cannot show — a doctrine defined above all by what it believes should be done to other societies, on which none of these axes has anything to say.