How to define the ideology that is currently called ” Neoconservative ” ? It might be simplest to recognize that what we are seeing after 9/11 is a broader-based, foreign-policy centered movement best described as ” Second Generation Neoconservatism ” to distinguish it from it’s narrower and more philosophically coherent parent. In some cases, with Bill Kristol and Daniel Pipes, we mean ” second generation” literally; in others, as with Dick Cheney, the term signals movement to accepting and advocating Neocon policy positions. Second Generation Neocons are playing offense against Islamism, terrorism and rogue states, not trying to rally a flagging defense against Soviet expansionism as in the late 1970’s. Spreading democracy is of greater importance to Second Generation types than to First Generation Neocons – recall Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s famous moral and strategic distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes and contrast that with today’s Neocon criticism of the Saudis. Domestic policy does not excite this group to the extent it did Moynihan, Himmelfarb, Kemp and Bennett, so you are not going to hear nearly as much about virtue, welfare or polarizing social issues like abortion.

What you will get from the Second Generation Neoconservatives is foreign policy like a laser beam. Their ambition is epochal, on par with the magnitude of the changes that took place in the aftermath of the Second World War where the foundations of the postwar era – the UN, Bretton Woods, the IMF, NATO, the GATT, the EU – were set. The collapse of the USSR and the Cold War world and the rise of rogue regimes and non-state actors like al Qaida have undermined the old structures of the international community as surely as Germany, Italy and Japan once defied Versailles and the League of Nations. In defeating terrorism and thwarting the proliferation of WMD Second Generation Neocons will attempt to organize new international institutions that will reflect and reinforce in international law individualist and market values and political democracy instead of collectivism, autarky and authoritarianism.

This is why there is so much sound and fury among the elites and on the left; the Neocons might succeed.

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