The Washington Times

If I were running a presidential campaign, I would rather have a slight lead in the polls than a slight deficit plus a theory about why my opponent’s lead either wasn’t real or didn’t matter. On the basis purely of being on the side of the more likely winner, I would now rather be in the position of the Bush campaign than of the Kerry campaign. But the race is so close that the difference in the probability of either side winning is miniscule.

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The Washington Times

What, George W. Bush’s record in office hasn’t given John Kerry enough to work with? Instead, the Democrat prefers to run against demons he himself has conjured? The Kerry campaign’s grip on reality, which it seized with tenacity during the first debate, by the close of the third had become tenuous once again.

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The Washington Times

You could have knocked me over with a feather, but what was George W. Bush’s best moment in the town hall debate on Friday? Why, his answer to the question on taxpayer funding of abortion, that’s what.

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The Washington Times

Last week, John Kerry figured out that he would like to be president of the United States in 2005. At long last, we have two candidates who are competing for that office. And a pretty close race it is.

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View this article at Policy Review, October/Novemeber 2004

This essay appears in slightly different form in Peter Berkowitz, ed., Varieties of Conservatism in America (Hoover Institution Press, 2004).

“Neoconservatism” is the name of a robust strain in American intellectual life and American politics, a strain with a very rich history. But although even some of its leading figures over the years have pronounced the end of neoconservatism usually on grounds of its merger with (or perhaps takeover of) the conservative mainstream, the term remains very much alive. This is especially true when used to describe a certain group of people who have sought to influence American public policy, most notably foreign policy in the post-Cold War era, and who, in the administration of George W. Bush, obtained that influence.

One might, therefore, begin a consideration of neoconservatism with its rich history — or, in the alternative, with its contemporary influence. I propose to do neither (though I will indeed touch upon the past and the present). Instead, I want to explore its future — specifically, the ways in which neoconservatism has evolved according to its own premises in the direction of a current and future politics dedicated to the preservation and extension of liberal order, properly understood. To get to neoconservatism’s liberal legacy, however, it is necessary to begin with liberalism’s origins in the nature of politics itself.

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