The New York Times

September 16, 2000, Saturday, Late Edition - Final

By SAM TANENHAUS
Sam Tanenhaus, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, is writing a biography of William F. Buckley Jr.

No movement lasts forever, but how do we know when the end has come? Consider the case of the neoconservatives, the network of liberal and leftist intellectuals who were disillusioned by the convulsions of the 1960's -- or "mugged by reality," in the famous expression -- and drifted steadily rightward, emerging in the 1980's as an informal brain trust for the Reagan Administration.

It was the tension between liberal sentiments and conservative analysis that gave the neoconservative movement its distinctive flavor. Its first wave of thinkers -- people like Irving Kristol (often referred to as "the godfather of neoconservatism"), his wife, the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, the sociologist James Q. Wilson and the art critic Hilton Kramer -- often sided with traditional (or paleo) conservatives on policy questions but offered strikingly different lines of argument. Where paleos decried "Godless Communism," neocons framed the issue in terms of global totalitarianism. Where economic conservatives protested that antipoverty programs amounted to "creeping socialism," neocons pointed instead to evidence that the programs only worsened conditions for the poor. Where old-line conservatives equated affirmative action with Big Brother-style social engineering, neocons said that a system of quotas violated the spirit of the civil rights movement and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream of a color-blind society.

Several of the neoconservatives rose to highly visible positions in government: Jeane J. Kirkpatrick as ambassador to the United Nations; William J. Bennett as secretary of education. Others achieved influence mainly as writers, editors, teachers and publicists. But after so many years at center stage, does this aging band still deserve the prefix "neo"? Many, both inside the movement and out, think not.

"In my view, neoconservatism is as dead in 2000 as the Free Silver movement was in 1930 or the Southern Agrarians were in 1970," says Michael Lind, formerly an editor at The Public Interest, the social policy journal edited by Mr. Kristol, and now a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. Mr. Lind, who has broken with the neoconservatives and turned against them, points out that while a few of the original ones, like the sociologist Nathan Glazer, clung to their liberal roots, the majority took up permanent residence on the right and thereby surrendered their neoconservative credentials. Tom Wolfe, who lampooned fashionable left-wingers in his book "Radical Chic," agrees that the first neoconservatives were "liberals who did not so much become conservatives in the old sense of the term as react against the turn they saw liberalism taking." He adds: "I don't think neoconservatism has any other meaning."

He won't get a fight from Norman Podhoretz, who, as the editor of Commentary for more than three decades made it a haven for disaffected liberals. "The time has come to drop the prefix and simply call ourselves conservatives," he says.

But others think the obituary is premature. A number of younger thinkers are trying to revive some tenets of neoconservatism and formulate a kind of "neo-neo-neoconservatism," as Mr. Podhoretz calls it. What's interesting is that this younger generation, mostly people in their 30's and 40's, seems to be reaching back to the liberal principles of the first neoconservatives.

Mr. Lind, for one, declares that there is at least one remaining representative of neoconservatism -- himself, of all people -- and he hopes to replenish the movement's doctrines in a new book he is writing with Ted Halstead, his colleague at the New America Foundation. The book will seek, in Mr. Lind's words, "to define a 21st-century equivalent of New Dealism." And what does that mean? "I won't give it all away, but I'll say we're sympathetic to some libertarian ideas, like partial privatization of Social Security, while supporting old liberal goals like portable, universal health care."

This fusion of left and right, a legacy of 1970's-style neoconservatism, is catching on elsewhere, too. "I don't think neoconservatism is dead -- I think we're seeing a revival of it, especially at The Weekly Standard," says one of that political journal's editors, David Brooks. He describes himself and his colleagues as "intellectual heirs" of the original neoconservatives: "They cared about urban issues and talked about them. And they didn't hate the New Deal."

Mr. Brooks and William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard (and also Irving Kristol and Ms. Himmelfarb's son), have jointly been sounding the Kennedy-like theme of "national greatness" since 1997. During the Republican primaries they embraced the candidacy of Senator John McCain, contending that his agenda harked back to the Republican progressivism of Theodore Roosevelt. Senator McCain, they wrote, was "an agent of creative destruction" who might revitalize an "ossified Republican establishment" and rekindle the voters' faith in their leaders.

But just as the original neoconservatives aroused the suspicions of paleo-conservatives, who suspected them of being interlopers secretly wedded to liberal heresy, so the new neocons are meeting with skepticism from the young heirs of a more traditional conservatism. Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, accuses The Weekly Standard of being out of touch with the Republican base. "There is very little grass roots support for national greatness," he says. Others think "national greatness" sounds like code for big government.

Nonetheless, much of the neoconservative agenda, in its older and newer forms, seems to have been appropriated by Gov. George W. Bush. His acceptance speech at the Republican convention echoed the theme of "national greatness." And his "compassionate conservatism," says Myron Magnet, an adviser to Mr. Bush and the editor of The City Journal, "is a variety of neoconservatism, its latest avatar." George Nash, a historian who has written extensively on postwar American conservatism, finds "Bush's compassionate conservatism closer to neoconservatism" than to Reagan-style Republicanism: "His education policies accept a federal role. There's no talk of abolishing the Department of  Education."

And Mr. Bush's reforming impulse fits the neoconservative formula. "A lot of what neoconservatives offer is criticism of policy that has gone awry in practice," Mr. Nash explains. "They excel at demonstrating that good intentions don't necessary lead to good results."

That was certainly the case in the late 1960's and 70's, when neoconservatism forced liberals to rethink their positions. The neoconservatives introduced into the political debate a supple form of dialectical argument derived from venerable left-wing journals like The New Leader and Partisan Review. Irving Kristol had briefly been a Trotskyist in his teens, and Mr. Podhoretz was a disciple of Lionel Trilling, the Columbia English professor whose book "The Liberal Imagination" (1950) applied the dialectical method to cultural themes by exploring the ways in which literary masterworks deflated the pieties of trendy left-wing politics. Trilling, who identified himself as a liberal, called for a new kind of criticism that "might find its most useful work not in confirming liberalism in its sense of general rightness but rather in putting under some degree of pressure the liberal ideas and assumptions of the present time." That statement was almost a blueprint, or prophecy, of the neoconservative creed.

Not many political movements would have found inspiration in a book of essays whose subjects included Henry James, the Romantic poets and the Kinsey Report. But the neoconservatives were unabashedly intellectual. For a long time they didn't even align themselves with a party. With the exception of President Ronald Reagan, their favorite politicians were cold war Democrats like Henry Jackson, Hubert Humphrey and Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

"The only group I can think of that resembled the neocons in their intellectual vitality and coherence and also in their proximity to power are the progressives of the early 20th century -- men like Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann," said Fareed Zakaria, the managing editor of Foreign Affairs and the author of a recent, and much discussed, essay in The New Yorker on the declining influence of conservative intellectuals. "Both believed that ideas mattered, that linking theory to practical problems was important, that social science and history could illuminate public policy." Both also articulated their ideas in serious small-circulation magazines that became, Mr. Zakaria says, "the path to power and fame -- The New Republic for the progressives, Commentary and Public Interest for the neocons."

But power and fame exacted a price. Beginning in the Reagan era, neoconservatives seemed to lose a bit of their independence. Some settled in at high-paying think tanks and foundations where they were lionized instead of challenged. Others, mistaking the diverse energies of the 1990's for a resurgence of the 1960's counterculture, leaped headlong into the culture wars and wrote jeremiads stocked with cant phrases like "family values" and "moral relativism." A telling moment arrived when Mr. Lind, perhaps the most promising junior neoconservative, denounced his onetime mentors in an article published in Dissent, the socialist quarterly, in 1995. Neoconservative leaders, he wrote, were guilty of "corruption by excessive partisanship in the service of the Republican Party."

And a turning point came in 1996, when a group of Christian conservatives affiliated with the political-religious publication First Things declared a virtual war on the American government and proposed solutions ranging from  "civil disobedience" to "morally justified revolution." This extremism contradicted everything neoconservatives stood for. "I did not become a conservative in order to become a radical, let alone to support the preaching of revolution against this country," Mr. Podhoretz wrote in a letter to Richard J. Neuhaus, the journal's editor and formerly a neoconservative. Revisiting the incident in his latest book, "My Love Affair With America," Mr. Podhoretz says it "reminded me -- and not me alone -- of nothing so much as some of the attacks on America emanating from the Left in the 1960's."

The neoconservatives, it appeared, had completed their circuit. Having begun as old-fashioned liberals taking arms against the onslaughts of the radical left, they now wore the mantle of old-style conservatives doing battle against the assaults of the radical right.

Still, if the neoconservative movement has dwindled or died, neoconservative ideas are flourishing as never before. Last year Mr. Podhoretz praised President Clinton for having "de-"McGovernized" the Democratic Party and steering it back to the political center. And Joseph I. Lieberman, a friend of Jerry Falwell and William J. Bennett, has over the years taken positions -- like his well-publicized criticisms of Hollywood culture -- that come straight from the neoconservative play book. It seems that on a wide array of issues -- from crime to schools to welfare reform -- neoconservative thinking is not difficult to reconcile with either conservative or liberal aims. Recently Robert B. Reich, the former Secretary of Labor and a consistently liberal voice in the Clinton Administration, proposed an ambitious plan for school vouchers, which he sees as a means of achieving the classic liberal goals of integrating classrooms and improving education for the poor.

In this sense, the legacy of neoconservatism seems secure. "Neoconservatism has had a trickle-down effect on the political culture, and its influence on both major parties is evident even today," Mr. Podhoretz says, with considerable satisfaction. Or perhaps, as David Brooks puts it, "We're all neoconservatives now."

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