vision (a vision that often overlaps with the aims of neoliberalism).92
As an ideological orientation, neoconservatism became a flashpoint in the 2000s because of its foreign policy commitments, but the neoconservative response to the New Left in the 1970s and 1980s represents an important episode in its history and demonstrates that for neoconservatives the relationship between domestic and foreign policy is linked inextricably. Neoconservatives argue that absent the cultivation of healthy nationalism and patriotism at home it is impossible to sustain the project of American global hegemony abroad. In this regard, the left’s demand for deeper racial and gender equality and its criticisms of American militarism posed a unique threat to the neoconservative vision for America.
The foreign policy vision of neoconservatism is rooted in several convictions about the American political experiment. First, and most importantly, neoconservatism proposes a distinctive understanding of the American state and its democratic form as exceptional in relation to other forms of political organization. Second, as a result of this commitment to American exceptionalism, neoconservatives maintain that the United States has been commissioned with the task of disseminating American values—particularly liberal democracy and capitalism—around the world. Neoconservatives describe a stark situation in which either the United States imposes its “universality” on the rest of the world or the world faces “global barbarism.”93 Third, neoconservatives link this messianic project of democratizing the world to a patriotic civil religion that views the role of the state in moral or even theological terms. At a foreign-policy level, neoconservative ideology organizes all of reality in terms of those committed to freedom, human rights, and democracy (the United States and its allies) and those who oppose these ideals (communists/socialists, terrorists, and other dissidents). Fourth, neoconservatism combines an idealist’s moralism about the significance of democracy in the world with a realist’s commitment to the exercise of power. Thus, neoconservatism prefers military solutions to peaceful negotiations and posits that the only way to provide security for Americans is by using both indirect (in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s) and direct force (in the Middle East from the 1980s to the present).94
As noted above, the sequence of events between 9/11 and the war on terror reignited the debate surrounding the politics of American empire. Much of the criticism focused on the problematic character of the neoconservative response to the attacks of 9/11. But to focus on neoconservatism as an aberration from an otherwise democratizing American foreign policy only obscures the continuities that exist between neoconservatism and the imperialist aims of the mainstream of US foreign policy. Greg Grandin, for instance, has argued that neoconservatism “is just the highly self-conscious core of a broader consensus that reaches out well beyond the Republican Party to capture ideologue and pragmatist alike.”95 Robert Kagan, a prominent neoconservative, makes a similar point in “Neocon Nation: Neoconservatism, c. 1776,” when he observes that the basic orientation of neoconservatism is consistent with the foreign policy ideals of the broad sweep of the American tradition.96 According to Kagan, neoconservative ideology is committed to “a potent moralism and idealism in world affairs, a belief in America’s exceptional role as a promoter of the principles of liberty and democracy, a belief in the preservation of American primacy and in the exercise of power, including military power, as a tool for defending and advancing moralistic and idealistic causes.” For Kagan, this orientation is consistent with the mainstream of American foreign policy from its founding in 1776. Of course, it is true that important differences exist between realists, liberal internationalists, and neoconservatives in terms of their willingness to intervene in foreign countries and to use military force. But the fact remains that a bipartisan consensus—which stretches from Kissinger’s realism and Albright’s liberal internationalism to the neoconservatism of the Bush administration and the liberal realism of the Obama administration—has supported a model of the state rooted in the defense of American exceptionalism and the commitment to the project of American hegemony. This bipartisan consensus is animated by what Andrew Bacevich describes as the foundational commitment of post–World War II American foreign policy to expand the “American imperium” and to create “an open and integrated international order on the principles of democratic capitalism, with the United States as the ultimate guarantor of order and enforcer of norms.”97 According to the Congressional Research Service, more than 80 percent of the United States’ interventions abroad since 1946 have taken place after 1989. This means that American interventionism abroad reached its peak during the period in which neoconservatism dominated American foreign policy.98
As with neoliberalism, neoconservatism is rooted in a reality principle that offers a vision of world affairs and America’s role within it. Henry Kissinger described the reality principle of American empire in 1963, and this same principle would be echoed by an official in the George W. Bush administration in 2004. Kissinger observed, “In the decades ahead, the West will have to lift its sights to encompass a more embracing concept of reality . . . There are two kinds of realists: those who manipulate facts and those who create them. The West requires nothing so much as men able to create their own reality.” This statement about the power of a state to create reality is eerily bookmarked by a comment made by a Bush administration official, presumably Karl Rove, about the status of the United States as a global hegemon. The official observed that the United States is an “empire now . . . we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors.”99
American foreign policy from Kissinger to Bush and Obama has viewed its task as remaking reality in its own image and likeness.100 The principle that animates this approach to the world is American exceptionalism, which claims that the United States is a nation providentially ordained by God to spread freedom and democracy around the world. Madeline Albright, the secretary of state during the Clinton administration, summarized the logic of this position when she argued that “if we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future.”101 This view serves to legitimate the United States’ exercise of power and its use of military force and, as the historical record demonstrates, often blinds the United States to the real motivations that drive its foreign policy.102
In view of this ideological distortion of America’s motivations, it is unsurprising that democracy is a central area of contradiction within neoconservative ideology and practice. The purported aim of neoconservatism is to defend democracy against its domestic detractors and foreign enemies, but the effects of its cultural politics and military interventions have served to undermine democracy.
In the domestic realm, the assessment of democracy published by Samuel Huntington and his coauthors in 1975 is representative of the contradictions of this approach to democracy. In The Crisis of Democracy Huntington responded to civil rights and feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s by arguing that these movements threatened democracy by demanding too much democratization. He warned that the emergence of a “democratic surge” in the 1960s had made the United States “ungovernable” by allowing democracy to spill over from a system of governance monitored by elites into the cultural life of the United States.103 Huntington argued that the proper response to the “excess of democracy” demanded by labor, feminism, and African-Americans was to advocate for “a greater degree of moderation in democracy.” Huntington’s evaluation of grassroots democratic movements is representative of a broader conservative attempt to undermine feminism, civil rights, affirmative action, and the LGBTQ movement in the name of the traditional family, a commitment to nationalism, and the cultivation of a patriotic culture. For neoconservatives, democracy should be affirmed if it serves to defend established hierarchies and to reanimate “aristocratic and traditional values” in society, while those forms of democratic action that upend established orders should be viewed as “excessive” and perceived as a threat to a stable democratic order.
Similarly, while the putative aim of neoconservatism in foreign policy is democratization, neoconservatives evaluate only certain forms of democracy as legitimate. Those forms of democracy not responsive to the political and economic interests of the United States have been dismissed as illegitimate by the
