Good afternoon. I'm David Bose. I'm the executive vice president of the Cato Institute. And I want to welcome you all here today for our discussion of neoconservatism, and particularly for whether neoconservatism as an idea is ready for an obituary, as this book proposes. I find the word neoconservative tossed around in a lot of ways without a whole lot of meaning. In fact, I wrote a blog post this morning complaining about the loose way people were these days using tea party, which I think has sort of replaced neoconservative as the all-purpose slur of anybody perceived to be on the right. In my perception, neoconservatism and tea partyism are fairly different. But I have a feeling Dana Milbank would be hard pressed to explain how he might see the difference. For myself, I have often wondered and sometimes asked at conferences like this, what does it mean to be a conservative in a country founded in libertarian revolution? What is it you're conserving in a liberal country? And I think that's a good question for conservatives. Then you get to the more complicated question. Well, then once you figure out what conservatism is, what is neoconservatism? Now me, I'm a traditionalist. And I like my neoconservatives to be neo. I don't like this idea of I'm a lifelong neoconservative. What does that mean? You weren't anything before. I like the good old days of disillusioned extratuskiists being neoconservatives. I also remember the wonderful phrase, which I actually Googled around and could not confirm who had originally said, but I understand that someone at some point said, a neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged. And what everybody does know is the very effective repost from Irving Crystal, a neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality. I would say that my own partner at home sort of qualifies as a neoconservative on both counts. He was, in fact, mugged once or twice in New York City during the depths of the crime-ridden days there before Giuliani. And it absolutely moved him from left to right. But he would tell you that wasn't the reason that he was, in fact, mugged by reality, by seeing the dysfunction of the welfare state, by seeing the dysfunction of the post-New Left kind of left. Neoconservatives were perhaps best identified with a magazine, The Public Interest, which published piercing critiques of the great society and the welfare state in practice, if not always in theory. There always seemed to be a more theoretical acceptance of the welfare state than you would find in libertarian and perhaps traditionally conservative journals. But in practice, these were the most incisive critiques being published. But later, some would say neoconservative came to mean simply big government conservatives. But that's certainly one of the things we'll be talking about here. One thing I never understood was the alleged connection to Leo Strauss. And maybe after today's discussion, I will understand that. Our first speaker today, the author of Neoconservatism, An Obituary for an Idea, is C. Bradley Thompson, who is a professor of political science at Clemson University and the executive director of the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism. He received his PhD at Brown University. He's been a visiting scholar at Princeton and Harvard and at the University of London. Before getting into this subject, he was the author of the award-winning book John Adams and the Spirit of Liberty, the editor of two books, The Revolutionary Writings of John Adams and Anti-Slavery Political Writings. And he was also a co-editor of the four-volume Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment. After Brad speaks, we'll have a response from Todd Lindberg. Todd is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and editor of Policy Review, their bi-monthly policy journal. He is the author of the Political Teachings of Jesus. He is editor of Beyond Paradise and Power, Europe, America and the Future of a Troubled Partnership and co-author of Means to an End, U.S. Interest in the International Criminal Court. He's a member of the Hoover Institution's Task Force on the Virtues of a Free Society. He is a contributing editor of the Weekly Standard and he is an honors graduate in political science of the University of Chicago where he studied political philosophy with Alan Bloom and Saul Bellow, among others. Please welcome Brad Thompson. Well, thank you, David, for that introduction and to the Cato Institute for hosting this event. I'd like to thank Todd Lindberg for taking time out of his very busy day to be here today with us and to share his thoughts on my book. A special shout out to Tom Palmer for supporting this book and I think for first bringing it maybe to David's attention a few months ago. I'd also like to thank Jason Kuznicki of Cato Unbound for running in this last week. An essay that I did, a conservatism unmasked or neoconservatism unmasked based on my book and in particular, I'd like to thank Douglas Rasmussen and Damon Linker for their very thoughtful responses to that essay. Now, I have to say though, I worry that I've been brought here under somewhat false pretenses. David invited me to do a book forum followed by what he described as a kind of friendly conversation with Todd Lindberg. A few days ago, a few days ago I went to David's Facebook page and to my horror saw that he was advertising this event as a smackdown. Although it was somewhat unclear what or whom was getting smacked down. Well, I guess we're gonna find out. Well, what is my book about? I've written a book about neoconservative political philosophy. So this is not a book about the war in Iraq. It's not a book about Israel, nor is it a history of neoconservatism or its various factions. It's not a book about the neo in neoconservatism. It's not a book about the conservatism in neoconservatism, but rather it is a book about the ism in neoconservatism. So what then is neoconservatism? Defining neoconservatism is no small task given that its exponents deny that it is a systematic political philosophy. Neocons such as Irving Crystal prefer to characterize neoconservatism as a persuasion, an attitude, a mode of thinking or even as a mood. How exactly does one define a mood? At best they say it's a syncretic intellectual movement influenced by thinkers as diverse as Plato, Trotsky and Hayek. Daniel Bell I think captured the syncretic nature of neoconservatism when he described himself as a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture. On one level neoconservatism certainly is a syncretic mode of thinking. But I shall demonstrate today that neoconservatism is in fact a comprehensive systematic political philosophy shaped most fundamentally in my view by the ideas of Leo Strauss via Irving Crystal. So let me begin then with how the neocons present themselves particularly in relation to the broader intellectual movement and to the Republican Party. Now Irving Crystal once boasted that neoconservatism is the first variant of conservatism that he said is in the American grain. Now the implication of this extraordinary claim for instance is that goldwater conservatism with its proclaimed attachment to individual rights, limited government and laissez-faire capitalism and its attachment or I'm sorry, its rejection of the welfare regulatory state is somehow outside the American grain. Now the neoconservatives are and always have been by contrast defenders of the post-New Deal welfare state. Not surprisingly then the neocons support in the words of Ben Wattenberg quote a muscular role for the state. One that taxes, regulates and redistributes and as I shall show later one that fights. Now this apparently is what it means for the neocons at least to be in the American grain. What really bothers the neocons however about small government Republicans is that they lack what they call a governing philosophy. The neocons have long urged the Republican party to reinvent themselves by giving up their Jeffersonian principles and developing a new philosophy of governance. Ironically though the neocons conception of a governing philosophy is not one defined by fixed moral principles. Instead it's an intellectual technique defined by pragmatism. The neocons philosophy of governance is a philosophy for how to rule or govern. It's about thinking, it's about how to think politically which means developing strategies for getting, keeping and using power in certain ways. The neocons therefore urge the GOP to become chameleon like and to adapt themselves to changing circumstances. The neocons pragmatic statesmanship is grounded I think in two basic assumptions. First, the identification of the public interest with some kind of golden mean. And second, the conceit that they and only they have the practical wisdom by which to know the golden mean. The neocons therefore believe it to be both necessary and possible for wise statesmen to find the golden mean between altruism and self-interest, duties and rights, regulation and competition religion and science, socialism and capitalism. Norman Potthoritz for instance has argued that the neoconservative statesman should be able to figure out quote the precise point at which the incentive to work would be undermined by the availability of welfare benefits or the point at which the redistribution of income would begin to erode economic growth or the point at which egalitarianism would come into serious conflict with liberty. In the end, the neocons strategy to accept the moral ends of liberal socialism but with a caveat that they can do a better job of delivering the services or that they can direct those services toward conservative ends is their particular political method. Now at the core of my book is the claim that the political philosopher Leo Strauss was the most important influence on Irving Kristall's intellectual development. My book reveals for the first time the importance of Irving Kristall's 1952 review of Strauss' persecution and the art of writing. And for me, this is the Rosetta Stone in a sense for understanding the deepest layer of neoconservative political philosophy. Strauss according to Kristall had quote accomplished nothing less than a revolution in intellectual history and most of us will figuratively speaking have to go back to school to learn the wisdom of the past we thought we knew. Close quote. This is the moment I argue when neoconservatism was born. Neoconservatism in other words, in my view, was born philosophically intellectually in 1952. And what was it that Kristall learned from Leo Strauss? First, that there is an unbridgeable chasm between theory and practice, philosophy and the city, the wise few and the vulgar many. That is that there is a radical disjunction between what Strauss called the realm of theoretical truth, that is the realm inhabited by philosophers and the realm of practical moral guidance. That is the realm inhabited by non-philosophers. And what this meant for Strauss is that platonic idealism is compatible with Machiavellian realism. Two, the West, Strauss argued, is in a state of moral decline as seen by the rise of philosophic and cultural nihilism. He identified the source of modern nihilism with enlightenment liberalism, that is with the liberalism of John Locke and Thomas Jefferson. Strauss was a trenchant critic of modern rationalism and science, natural rights, individualism and laissez-faire capitalism, all of which he argued turned man away from a supra-natural reality to nature, from faith to reason, from community to the individual, from duty to rights, from inequality to equality, from order to freedom and from self-sacrifice to self-interest. The result is that man and society have become unhinged from the natural moral order and from the religious faith necessary to sustain moral and political unity. Three, platonic political philosophy for Strauss is a necessary antidote to the maladies of modern rationalistic society. And for Strauss, classical natural right was defined by four principles. First, the political community is the primary unit of moral and political value, which means that the common good is the end of the regime and the coerced unity is the means to that end. Second, a truly just political order should mirror, quote, the hierarchy order of man's natural constitution, which means that some men are more fit to rule than others. Third, that which is naturally right for any given society for Strauss is always changing depending on circumstances, which means that philosophic statesmen should not be hampered by conventional morality or the rule of law. And finally, virtue and the public interest represent the end or the purpose of the city, which means that why statesmen must use what Strauss called benevolent coercion in order to make their citizens virtuous. And the last big point that Crystal learned from Strauss was this. Platonic statesmen should ground the regime on certain ancestral pieties and political myths and the cardinal virtue for the vulgar many is self-sacrifice. Now, Strauss-unized neoconservatism is defined by what Irving Crystal called a new synthesis of ideas, a synthesis he characterized as classical realist in nature and in temperament. At the core of neoconservatism is a fundamental dualism that combines what Strauss called the way of Thrasymachus with the way of Socrates. Platonic natural right, that is the realm of theoretical truth provides the ultimate standard of justice for neoconservative statesmen. Yet the messy day-to-day reality of politics means that conventional morality and sometimes even Machiavellian prudence, that is the realm of practical moral reasoning, are both necessary and salutary. Philosophically, Strauss thought it possible to advocate what he called the shrewd power politics of Machiavelli with a larger platonic framework that separates theory from practice. Thus, Crystal learned how to reconcile platonic idealism, the classical thesis with Machiavellian prudence, the realist thesis antithesis to create the neoconservative synthesis. What then are the core principles of neoconservatism? And one of the things that I've tried to do in this book is to present neoconservatism as a systematic, integrated, comprehensive political philosophy. It's more than just a persuasion or a mood. So first, I believe that the neoconservatives have a metaphysics. They take the political community or what Irving Crystal called the collective self as the primary unit of moral and political value. They accept Plato's premise that the polis or the nation is the only community adequate for the fulfillment of man's natural end, which they associate with what they variously call the public interest or the common good. The actual content of the public interest is whatever wise men say it is, which is precisely why it should never be defined. And the highest task of neoconservative statesmanship is to superimpose a kind of ideological unity on the collective self in the name of this ever-shifting public interest. Two, the neoconservatives have a view of knowledge or they have a view of the way the human mind works. Neoconservatives begin with a platonic assumption that ordinary people are irrational and must be guided by those who are rational. According to Irving Crystal, there are, quote, and listen to this carefully. There are different kinds of truth for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children, truths appropriate for students, truths that are appropriate for educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. Close quote. The highest truth in Strauss and Crystal is restricted to the philosopher while the common man is and must be limited to knowledge of a different sort, to myth, revelation, and custom. Neoconservatives believe the opinions of the nation must therefore be shaped by those who rule. To control ideas is to control public opinion, which is to control the regime as a whole. Ultimately, the vulgar, the vulgar many must be ruled by faith and by faith's necessary ally force. What about the neoconservative ethics? If you believe, as Straussian eyes neocons do, that there are different kinds of truth for different kinds of people, then you must believe that there are and must be different kinds of moral codes as well. Ordinary people need some form of conventional morality that is easily learned, followed, and transmitted from one generation to another. The vulgar many need piety and patriotism as the ordering myths by which to live. For the neocons, morality is conventional and pragmatic. Because they regard the nation as the primary unit of political value and because they identify the public interest with the purpose of government, they regard moral good and virtue to be that which works. Not for the individual, but for the nation. Morality is therefore defined as overcoming one's petty self-interest, so as to sacrifice for the common good. And then there's the neoconservative politics. Central to the neoconservative's philosophy of governance is the conceit that it is possible in the words of Irving Crystal for a small elite to quote, to have an a priori knowledge of what constitutes happiness for other people. Close quote. The highest purpose of neoconservative statesmanship is therefore to shape preferences, form habits, cultivate virtues and create the good society, a society that is known a priori to those men of superior philosophic wisdom. The neocons therefore advocate using government force to make good decisions for America's non-philosophers in order to nudge them in certain directions, that is toward choosing a life of virtue and duty. As Strauss made clear in his most influential work, Natural Right in History, statesmen must learn to use what he called forcible constraint and benevolent coercion in order to keep down the selfish and based desires of ordinary men and women. Now, the culmination of the neoconservative's political philosophy is their call for national greatness conservatism. Following Crystal and Strauss, David Brooks, William Crystal and a new generation of neocons proclaimed the nation as the fundamental unit of political reality, nationalism as the rallying cry for a new public morality and the national interest as the moral standard of political decision making. Morally, the purpose of national greatness conservatism is, according to David Brooks, to energize the American spirit, to fire the imagination with something majestic, to advance a unifying American creed and to inspire Americans to look beyond their narrow self-interest to some larger national mission, to some mystically Hegelian national destiny. The new American citizen must be animated by nationalist virtues such as duty, loyalty and self-sacrifice. The neocons basic moral principle is clear and simple, the subordination and sacrifice of the individual to the nation state. Politically, Brooks's new nationalism would use the federal government to pursue great nationalistic public projects and to build grand monuments in order to unify the nation spiritually and to prevent America's slide into what he calls nihilistic mediocrity. It is important that the American people, he thinks, conform, swear allegiance to and obey some grand central purpose defined for them by the federal government. The ideal American man, he argues, should negate and forego his individual values and interests and merge his self into some mystical union with the collective soul. This is precisely why Brooks, in an op-ed in the New York Times last year, praised the virtues of Chinese collectivism over those of American-style individualism. In the end, the neocons want to remoralize America by creating a new patriotic civil religion around the idea of Americanism, an Americanism that will essentially redefine the American grain. The neoconservative vision of a good America is one in which ordinary people work hard, read the Bible, go to church, recite the Pledge of Allegiance, practice homespun virtue, sacrifice themselves for the common good, obey the commands of government, fight wars, and ultimately die for the state. The neocons' national greatness philosophy is also the animating force behind their foreign policy. Indeed, neoconservative foreign policy is a branch of its domestic policy. The grand purpose of national greatness foreign policy is to inspire the American people to transcend their vulgar, infantilized, and selfish interests for uplifting national projects. The neoconservative's policy of benevolent hegemony will, according to William Crystal and Robert Kagan, quote, relish the opportunity for national engagement, embrace the possibility of national greatness, and restore a sense of the heroic, close quote. In other words, America should wage war in order to combat creeping nihilism. In the revealing words of Crystal and Kagan, quote, the remoralization of America at home ultimately requires the remoralization of American foreign policy, close quote. Going to war, sacrificing both treasure and blood in order to bring democracy to strangers, this, in their view, is the mission worthy of a great nation. The neocons therefore believe that a muscular foreign policy, one that includes military intervention abroad, war, regime change, and imperial governance, will keep the American people politicized and therefore virtuous. By saving the world from tyranny, America will save herself from her own internal corruption. And there's more. By keeping America perpetually involved in nation building around the world, neoconservative rulers will have the opportunity to exercise their statesman-like virtues. There can be no statesmanship without politics, and there can be no truly magnanimous statesmanship without war. So the neocons fear and loathe moral principles that might deny them that outlet. A condition of semi-permanent war, a policy of benevolent hegemony and the creation of a Republican empire means that there will always be a need for politics and statesmanship. Neoconservatism, in my view, as I've tried to demonstrate, is a systematic political philosophy. All the neocons talk about moderation, all of their talk about moderation and prudence is really only meant to disarm intellectually their competitors in the conservative libertarian movement who want to defend the founders' principles of individual rights and limited government. The neocons preach moderation as a virtue so that ordinary people will accept compromise as inevitable. But a political philosophy that advocates moderation and prudence as its defining principles is either dishonestly hiding its true principles or it represents a transition stage on the way to some more authoritarian regime or both. Or both. So, to what then does it all add up? My deepest fear is that the neoconservatives are preparing this nation philosophically for a soft American-style fascism. A fascism purged of its ugliest features and gussied up for an American audience. Now, this is obviously a very serious charge and not one that I take lightly. The neocons, and I want to make this very clear, the neocons are not fascists, but I do argue that they share some common features with fascism. Consider the evidence which I lay out in several hundred pages in the book. First, like the fascists, Strauss and the neoconservatives reject the values and principles associated with Enlightenment liberalism, namely reason, egoism, individual rights, material acquisition, limited government, freedom, and capitalism. They are repulsed by the moral ethos associated with liberal capitalism and they praise the nobility of what they call the barbarian virtues such as discipline, courage, daring, endurance, loyalty, renunciation, obedience, and sacrifice for evidence read Leo Strauss' 1941 lecture on German nihilism. Two, like the fascists, Strauss and I's neocons are metaphysical collectivists. They take the nation as the primary unit of political value. They view the body politic as an organic whole. They promote social duties over individual rights. They support using the coercive power of the state to promote order and unity. They demand that individuals subordinate themselves to the public interest and serve some fuzzy notion of national greatness. Three, like the fascists, Strauss and the neocons are status who strongly oppose a depoliticized, that is a night watchman view of government in favor of a paternalistic, corporatist, omnipotent state. They advocate using the coercive power of the state to regulate man's economic life and his spiritual life. And like the fascists, Strauss and I's neocons downplay the importance of constitutional rules and boundaries and they glamorize in particular the virtues of great statesmen. Like the fascists, finally, Strauss and the neocons believe that life is or should be defined by conflict and that a state of ongoing peace and prosperity is morally degrading. They advocate keeping the American people in an agitated state of permanent fear and loathing against internal and external threats. They want to militarize American culture. They romanticize the virtues of war and empire as regenerative and they support a foreign policy of perpetual war in order to restore America's national destiny and sense of greatness. In conclusion, I worry then that the neocons are paving the road for a kind of soft despotism that might even lead one day to a type of fascism. They make us feel comfortable with certain fascist principles by Americanizing them, by draping them in traditional American manners and mores and in the rhetoric of Abraham Lincoln. The neoconservatives are the advocates, I think, of a new managerial state, a state controlled and regulated by a Mandarin class of conservative virtue crats who think the American people are incapable of governing themselves without the help of the neocons special a priori wisdom. They are the conservative version, in other words, of FDR's brain trust.  They support government control of the economy as well as government control and regulation of people's private lives. The neocons, in other words, want to regulate the bedroom as much as they want to regulate the boardroom. The neoconservatives, finally, are the false prophets of Americanism. And those who wish to defend America's enlightenment values and the individual rights republic created by its revolutionary founders must therefore recapture from the neocons the intellectual and moral high ground that once defined the promise of American life. Thank you. Thank you, Brad, and thank you for reminding me to watch out not to get caught up in Facebook culture. Now please welcome from the Hoover Institution, Todd Lindbergh. Thanks, David. Thanks to Kato for putting on this event. Thanks to you all for coming. Thanks to Brad for getting the party started. You will have gathered that neoconservatism and obituary for an idea is a polemical book. We can get into some of the specifics a little bit later. I guess I'll start with a note of autobiography. I had, you know, 1982 when I left the University of Chicago, I, when I was leaving the University of Chicago, I had two possible destinations. And one was to go up to Toronto. Allen Bloom had arranged the possibility of my study there with a couple of his fellow members of his school, Tom Pangle and Clifford Orwin. The other path was to go work for Irving Crystal at the public interest in New York. Now, I used to think that that represented a choice and a difference, but I'm not sure now having been enlightened by Professor Thompson on the subject that there really was any such difference. The subtitle of the book is an obituary for an idea. And this is an interesting subtitle in many respects, not least because I think, you know, if the premise of that is that neoconservatism is dead, which as you can see, there's a tombstone on the cover of the book. I think it's quite likely that, you know, zombie-like, the neoconservatives are going to dig themselves up again. And this precise sense in which Brad has described what he means by an obituary is in a way sort of prospective, he talks about Charlotte Corday writing Marat's obituary on her way to Paris. He does not elaborate.  Charlotte Corday, of course, killed Marat in Paris. So I think the aspiration of the book is to produce the condition that the cover depicts, namely the death of the neoconservatism as an intellectual strain. This will, however, I think be a pretty big project because I was asking what all would have to die in order for neoconservatism to disappear as an intellectual strain. And I started making a little list and it seemed to me that the Wall Street Journal editorial page would have to go. The Weekly Standard would have to go. Commentary Magazine would have to go. The Publication and National Affairs would have to go. The New Atlantis would have to go. Large chunks of national review would have to go. I think there might even be a couple of people at the Heritage Foundation who might have to go. The American Enterprise Institute gone. Hudson Institute now gone. The Ethics and Public Policy Center out. Obviously a few people at the Hoover Institution. Other institutions have not been gone uncontaminated by this tendency. Bob Kagan sits at the Brookings Institution now, so that's obviously gonna be a problem. And Elliott Abrams is at the Council on Foreign Relations of all places. And I guess since we're, I'm not trying to be comprehensive, but the Washington Post editorial page is the home of Charles Krauthammer. So I guess there's a whole lot of killing that is gonna have to go on in order for this vision of the death of neoconservatism to be realized. And I think that's where my work on preventing mass atrocities and genocide and in other contexts may come in handy because I would certainly hate to see this degree of carnage wrought upon the American intellectual landscape. I know I think the better question actually is the persistence of neoconservatism. Why is something, why has this tendency been around for so long? And I think I would like to take an opportunity to try to offer a little bit of a sense of an answer to that. But first, let's go back. Neoconservatism as they tell the story tend to trace the origins of the movement to, I mean, they may be lying, of course, but they tend to trace the origin of the movement to the founding of the public interest in the middle of the 1960s. And then basically you have a number of disaffected academics, mainly social scientists asking pragmatic questions about how the world works and publishing critiques of the great society programs of Lyndon Johnson, et cetera, in the public interest. Meanwhile, there, of course, the new left is in full bloom in the 1960s and that causes a reaction among a number of other people and eventually results in the great turn that commentary magazine took, not suddenly, but within the space of a few years in the late 1960s and early 1970s and the emergence of commentary as a major, the other major poll in the neoconservative universe, which, of course, grows and grows and influence up through the election of Reagan and in whose administration neoconservatives, many of them played a rather prominent role. And throughout this time, there was also, of course, a backlash against neoconservatives. The traditional, many traditional conservatives regarded neoconservatives as Johnny Come Lately's of upstarts as people who waltzed in only after the real conservatives had been making the serious arguments all along and flashed their fancy social science data as if they just invented the wheel when in fact the wheel had been invented long ago and had been turning nicely. And there was, of course, a fair bit of resentment. There were actually some fairly tough political struggles actually during the Reagan administration about what direction the Reagan administration would take in ideas matters. There was essentially a campaign, I mean, a war, I don't like war as a metaphor, I think war is war and shouldn't be recruited into discussions that are fundamentally peaceful. But there was certainly some back and forth over the question of whether Bill Bennett would become head of the National Endowment for Humanities or whether Emmy Bradford would. And that was an early distillation of a critique that I think continues to this day and in Professor Thompson's book. But nevertheless, the neocon strain persisted and went on and on through the Reagan administration. The collapse of communism I think came as a surprise to most people, including the neocon cold warriors in town who thought, as indeed I did, when I moved here in 1985, that I would spend most of my life waging the Cold War in an effort to preserve the actuality of freedom in America and possibly elsewhere around the world. But the collapse of communism brought in, I think, probably the most celebrated or notorious element, I suppose, of the neoconservative argument, which was Francis Fukuyama's reflections on the end of history and essentially raising the question of whether liberal democratic capitalism wasn't, in point of fact, a kind of final human answer to how the world ought to be organized. These thesis was much derided, much less was it actually read and still less understood. But it was an interesting kind of intellectual moment. And meanwhile, I think you see what begins as a thought experiment that Charles Murray propounds in a book in the early 1980s, namely what would happen if we actually got rid of the welfare entitlement. It was posited as a thought of experiment because no one could conceivably imagine such a proposal being taken seriously as a policy proposal when Charles first broached it and losing ground. By the mid-90s, it's becoming actually something that is a distinct political possibility. So you see Bill Clinton himself wanting to end welfare as we know it. Now, his emphasis was on as we know it, I think, which is to say he wanted to change it into something we would get to know and love more. But he kind of got tripped up by the election of Republican majorities in 1994.  And after some back and forth, that actually happened. So in essence, you can see the way in which some of the ideas propounded by neoconservatives in neoconservative venues sort of became more or less merged with the mainstream of the Republican Party at about that time. And I think that that has continued. But meanwhile, abroad, we have the extraordinary phenomenon of the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, the collapse of the breakup of the Soviet Union and the emergence in Central and Eastern Europe of countries that actually do want to be part of the West, want to engage with the United States and Europe, want to feel themselves to possess the same sort of values. And I think you can find, in addition to some liberal internationalists who were very much in favor of pursuing an agenda that would allow NATO to expand and that would draw these countries in and try to anchor them in Western institutions and solidify their own internal democratic processes and develop their economies in a market direction and so forth. In addition to that, you also have a real sense at the time that this is an important new project in the spread of freedom. And that is something that I think the neocons were very much engaged in. So now on to the present. And I don't want to, at the end of the Bush administration, the death of neoconservatism was pronounced as it has been in the past. And yet I find no particular evidence that this strain has disappeared. And I think there's a reason for that. And it's that neoconservatism, which is difficult to speak of in the sense that it is, at best, one's talking about an ideal type, by which I don't mean pinnacle, in the sense of a set of ideas. Professor Thompson has his take on those ideas. I think I would have another one, obviously. But again, it is, as he notes, rather hard to wrap your arms around the animal because there is no spokesman. There is no central authority on the question of what neoconservatives think. There are only neoconservative thinkers, many of whom disagree with each other. But if you had to say, well, what is this current in American intellectual life and what does it bring to the table, it enables it to persist from 1965 through 2011 without any sign of serious diminution of its authority, influence, attraction, I think I would say that it is because neoconservatism is both soft and hard. It is hard in the sense that it understands power and it seeks to understand political power, military power, other forms of power. And through the better understanding of these things to really try to understand better how to manage what is, inarguably, the world's most powerful nation. There was a time when we had a bipolar order and there was a central struggle over real power in the world. And there were things like proxy wars in Central America and Africa. That was a moment at which clear thinking about power was very important. And I think in a number of articles and commentary and elsewhere, some very major contributions were made by neoconservatives to the understanding of that conflict and what it meant to wage it and what its implications are. But also neoconservatism is soft. And it's soft in the sense that it's concerned about ideas and not just any ideas and not just the ideas of philosophers or of Plato but actually of freedom. And I think the neoconservative emphasis on freedom has been at the heart of the project for quite some time. There was a, the neoconservative critique of capitalism, which was developed by Irving Crystal and Daniel Bell, Bell and the cultural contradictions of capitalism and Irving and several major consequential essays that are still worth reading today, was essentially a riff on an extension of Weber's analysis of capitalism, namely that the system depended on certain virtues that it did not itself produce and that, in fact, in some respects, it acted to undermine. So this was not a critique of capitalism that was aimed at the undermining of capitalism. On the contrary, it was aimed at the preservation of capitalism. And it's worthwhile to remember just exactly how leaning much public opinion was in the 1970s when many people still thought that wage and price controls were a good idea. And more than that, that there was in no sense among liberals on the left side of the political spectrum, which is to say not classical liberals, there was no sense of chastity with regard to their ambitions for the government, for the public purse, et cetera. There was a let it all kind of hang out moment. So these ideas about freedom are absolutely central, I think, to understanding conservatism, both its domestic element and its foreign elements. And they are classically liberal ideas. Their affinity is with Locke and with Mill and not with others. And this soft and hard element, I think, stands in somewhat in contrast with a purely hard view, which does exist in American society. It's, in some respects, in foreign policy. It's neorealist. But I suppose if you have any sympathy for people in Tunisia or Egypt or Libya fighting authoritarian governments, then you're probably more on the neocon end of the spectrum. And if you have more sympathy for the idea of stability and order that would result from keeping autocrats in power and keeping a lid on things and preventing the possibility of illiberal anti-democratic forces coming to power through democratic means, then you would be, I think, in this harder, realist vein that I'm describing. And of course, there's a soft strain, and that's very much the mushy liberalism that we've all come to know and understand that large elements of it consist of wishing the world was a different place from what it is and then learning or not learning as a result of its stubborn action against what one expects. So this soft and hard element of neoconservatism is, I think, what accounts for its resistance. That's why it's going to be around for a long time to come. And we can talk a little bit about Strauss, if you want to, in the Q&A. And we can get into the more philosophical elements and charges and countercharges that Professor Thompson raises. But let me just say that I think that the connection between Strauss and neoconservatism is not complicated. I think it's explicable in that Strauss was seriously interested in philosophical ideas and seriously interested in the question of politics and politics, including the power elements of it that were then increasingly out of vogue in the academy. It used to be, if you wanted to study power, you might go to Sam Huntington or Hans Morgenthau, people like that, there was a very robust conversation there. And it was not distinctly neoconservative. It was hard in the sense in which I had described it earlier. But by the time the present generation, say, Wolfowitz on, I suppose that's Wolfowitz's sort of the lynchpin of the argument in some sense for those who would like to draw a diabolical connection between Strauss and neoconservatism. By then, I think you might be attracted to Strauss or the Straussians because they talked seriously about serious things, including power and how it operates. And you wouldn't necessarily have an outlet for thinking about things like that in other ways. And if you thought for whatever reason that that was going to be important for your country in the years ahead, then that would be a good place to learn something about it, not for the purpose of a long-range project of the internal subversion of your country, but in fact, to ensure that it was capable of thriving in a very challenging international environment and one that continues to be challenging today. Thank you. Thank you, Todd. Let's take some questions now. Please raise your hands. Wait for a microphone to be brought to you. Introduce yourself and any affiliation you're willing to admit to. Right here. Tim Carney, Washington Examiner. My question, I would like you to address what he was saying, what was that Kagan Crystal quote about, both the foreign policy, as well as a domestic policy, being used to try to make Americans be better, the soul craft, statecraft as soul craft, I guess would be. Is that something you think is very present in the neocon thought? Do you want to collect? Yeah, thanks. Thanks, Tim. No, I don't think that's an especially large element of neoconservant. Statecraft as soul craft, by the way, is George Will's book title. So that is a kind of older, more paternalistic form of conservatism, certainly not a libertarian form. But yes, it is true that David Brooks wrote an article about national greatness and his aspirations for national greatness and that Bill Crystal associated himself with some elements of that. But this was an article in a couple of columns with a proposal that essentially went nowhere. There did not emerge a kind of national greatness rallying cry amongst the neoconservatives, apart from a couple of them. And then again, let alone anything like a mass phenomenon. Now, I mean, at the time, my response to national greatness was I thought we were pretty busy being great in our own little way as things were. This was kind of the period in which we were kind of coping with trying to be the unipolar power in the world. So I thought we had plenty to do in that respect. Some people thought we should, in addition, go to Mars. OK, I mean, if you want a project to go to Mars. But I don't think that there's a great sociological thick description that you need in order to get at this. I mean, is Brooks a conventional conservative? Well, no. I mean, have you read his New York Times columns lately? So whether he is an archedipal figure of neoconservatism, I think I would dispute that as well. David, can I just say something very quickly on this? And that is, for the neoconservatives, the great threat to the United States has never been either communism nor Islamic totalitarianism. The great threat to the United States is nihilism. It's philosophic nihilism. This is absolutely clear in the writings of Strauss and it's clear in the writings of Irving Crystal. And that fear of nihilism, which, by the way, they take the source, the root of modern cultural, philosophic, moral nihilism, is not Heidegger. It's not Nietzsche. It's Lockean liberalism. This is the great stocking horse of Strauss and the neocons. So you go straight from the Declaration of Independence to Boy George. This is their view of the history of the nihilistic idea which Strauss finds directly in John Locke. And so it's fighting, it's combating nihilism, which is the great task for the deepest thinking Straussians. And this notion of benevolent hegemony and war is one important way in which you fight nihilism, which is the, as I said, the great threat to the West. Yes? Hi. Mary Carrick, there was something. I have one comment, some questions. William Crystal in the Foreign Policy Initiative yesterday issued a statement, not only calling for us to do the airspace thing, but also limited strikes in Libya. So there is a lot of sable rattling there. I had one question is, for the neoconside, is if you believe in getting involved in all these rebellions, yet, on the other hand, you like the government so much, why is it for decades now we've been buying out most of these horrible dictators, especially in Egypt. And Egypt received the second highest amount of aid. And so, and the neocons all supported that, because it gets to the other issue, is why is it so many people who are neocons, although most of the ones I've seen appear to be native-born Americans, promote foreign policy that serves the interests of Israel over the interests of the United States. And the other question I had is? I think that's probably enough questions. Oh, well, Lindbergh, by the way, is a Swedish name. If you think that there was any opinion in Israel that favored the uprisings in Egypt and the toppling of the Mubarak regime, I assure you you are mistaken. It's a notion that there is an identity of view between neoconservatives and Likud is a conclusion that borders on something that I find very distasteful. The broader question of propping up dictators, well, you know what? Back in the day when Jean Kirkpatrick was writing Dictatorships and Double Standards, which is a sort of seminal neoconservative argument from commentary, her argument was that if you acted rapidly to undermine authoritarian rulers who might in time liberalize their governments and enable democracy to take root, that if you undermined them, the alternative was not a sudden onrush of democracy in a country, but rather the likelihood that less attracted, less savory, more repressive elements, and specifically communists, would take over the place. So what do we conclude from this? I think that it's pretty clear that an interest in liberty was the essential question and the essential premise throughout this period. Second, that in the absence of a serious communist threat, there would be no particular reason to be supportive of thuggish dictators, but rather their opposition. And third, that nevertheless, one must, I suppose, be wary of something other than communism as a possible worse outcome. Now, at the moment, it seems as if most of my neoconservative friends, oh, I signed that letter, by the way, have reached the conclusion that propping up dictators is not something we're going to be in. We should not be in the business of doing. But at the same time, I think if the result is going to be anarchy and chaos, then it would probably be a good idea to avoid that as well. In the back there. Wayne Mary, the American Foreign Policy Council, for Mr. Thompson. Looking back over the experience of the past 30 years in terms of America's role in the world, its conduct of foreign and military policy, how would you distinguish, either in philosophic or in practical terms, neoconservatives from neoliberals? For me, that's a tough question. We have one foreign policy chapter in the book, which my co-author, Yaron Brooke, wrote. He's the foreign policy expert. So I'm afraid I'm going to have to punt on the question of neoliberal foreign policy, which I don't feel in any way competent to speak about. Okay, over there. Hi, Matt Duss, Center for American Progress. Thanks to both of you for a really interesting discussion. I think right after this, I was planning on heading over to the foreign policy initiatives event on the uprisings in the Arab world, that kind of getting to Mr. Lindbergh's point that neoconservatives are still very much around, still very much engaged in the debate. But I'm kind of curious to Mr. Thompson. I find a lot of what you said about the roots of the neoconservative tendency to be interesting. But how much of the continued influence in Washington, in policy debates, do you think is explainable by simple fundraising? I mean, it seems to me if part of your argument is that we need to go to war a lot, you're not going to have a lot of problem raising money for lots of new think tanks from people who make bombs. I'm not sure that though I'm a critic of neoconservatism, I'm not sure that my criticism would go so far as to suggest that they're on the take from arms manufacturers. What I would say though, is that the neoconservatives have been extraordinarily successful. And this part goes to Todd's opening remarks about the persistence of the neoconservatives, which he is absolutely right. I mean, they have persisted in playing a major role in American intellectual life and policy discussions now for several decades. And I've written an obituary, so how do we explain the continued persistence of the neoconservatives? It's a reasonable and a good question. The neoconservatives, in my view, are the dominant intellectual force in the conservative intellectual movement today. They have more of the best university appointments than any other faction, one might say, in the conservative intellectual movement. They control many of the major think tanks. They control many of the best magazines. And more importantly, and this sort of goes to, I think, your point, they control many of the largest conservative philanthropic foundations. So much, I mean, if you are a student at all of the conservative intellectual movement, there is a sense, and we all know this to be true, follow the money, and in following the money, you will see that their control, and Irving Crystal was actually very much, I think, to his credit, he was one of the first people to see that he who controls the philanthropic foundations will also then control, to a certain degree, the intellectual movement. And so, very early in the 70s and early 80s, Crystal played a major role in starting and in running many of these philanthropic foundations and then in the distribution of monies. And it was at that point that I think you can see a real shift within the conservative intellectual movement, away from both the libertarian and the more traditionalist wings of the conservative movement toward neoconservatism. And so, many of the best think tanks were started during this period with monies from these foundations that were now under the control of the neoconservatives. Let's take a question in the row in front of that. Trevor Burris in the Cato Institute. Two quick questions. You mentioned it just now, but the relationship between neoconservatism and conservatism, because it kind of sounds to me like neoconservatism is a near interpretation conservatism with a grandiose sense of self-importance, jingoism and power and maybe a Soviet menace. And then the second question is, how would you relate your interpretation of neoconservatism to Carl Schmidt and Spangler or any one of that sort of 1920s fascism? Well, I mean, there is a very real sense in which at least within the conservatism, the broadest tent that we can possibly imagine of the conservative intellectual movement, there is a sense in which I think it is appropriate to say as the Wall Street Journal did recently and as others have over the course of the last several years. Well, in fact, David Brooks said it, we're all neocons now. And the reason why I think there is some credibility to this, I mean, the reason why I think the neoconservatives dominate the conservative intellectual movement is in part for the reasons I've already suggested, namely their control of the philanthropic foundations, but more importantly because, I mean, it does seem to me that most, certainly many of the best intellectuals within the broader conservative intellectual movement are neoconservatives. I mean, I do think that, I mean, look, just to be autobiographical if I could for a moment as Todd was, I lived in that world for many years. I was never a Straussian nor a neocon, but I lived in that world. I was trained throughout my entire university career by Straussians and was entirely sympathetic to their mode of analysis, particularly their mode of analysis of modern culture. And it's extraordinarily powerful. I mean, they have done through commentary, magazine, and several other, and well, policy review even. They have offered some of the very best critiques that we have of the new left. They have offered amongst the very best critiques of feminism and egalitarianism.  And all of that, I think, is very much to their credit, but they, as I said, the very best neoconservative intellectuals are at the very best universities in the United States. And you cannot say the same thing about the intellectuals of the other strains of the larger conservative movement. On to your question about Carl Schmidt. Just very briefly, I have a discussion of this in my book, Leo Strauss' relationship to Carl Schmidt. The first thing I wanna mention is this. In 1933, Strauss wrote a letter that's only become available in the last couple of years to his old friend Carl Loveth, where he says that in order to combat the principles of Nazism, we have to do so with the principles of the right. And he names, as the principles of the right, fascism, authoritarianism, and imperialism. And at the same time, within the same year, Strauss is writing a review of Carl Schmidt's, a small book, The Concept of the Political, wherein Strauss is trying to deepen Schmidt's critique of enlightenment liberalism. And Strauss says to Schmidt that you have to find a horizon beyond liberalism, because in the end, Strauss says, his criticism of Schmidt is that by taking your anti-enlightenment views back to Hobbes, you are, in fact, only supporting the liberal view, because Strauss viewed Hobbes as the philosophic founder of modern liberalism. So Strauss says you have to find a horizon beyond liberalism, that is to say, beyond Hobbes, which he first takes to medieval political philosophy, El Farabi, and Maimonides, but ultimately, and most importantly, back to Plato. You know, I just want to comment on this, just with two brief points. It's probably a subject for a much longer discussion. The Strauss letter to Lirth, which Brad has alluded to, I think that the point that Strauss is making was that liberalism was an exhausted force in Germany by the early 1930s. It no longer had the oomph to resist the national socialism. There was a German right that was not national socialist. It was not, didn't have much in common with contemporary, with our contemporary ideas about bourgeois liberalism, but it was not the Nazis. And I think Strauss' argument in the letter is that only this force within Germany would have the potential to resist the Nazi takeover. So Brad's reading of the letter, in my view, is out of context and somewhat tendentious. Well, I have to, I'm sorry. Let me just respond very quickly to this. It's in fact in context. The context is that one of Strauss' friends, one of Strauss' friends, the philosopher Jonas, describes Strauss at the time as being one of the earliest friends to fascism. This from a friend of Strauss' and Strauss also at the time, we now have evidence, and I talk about it in the book, Strauss read the Italian Encyclopedia article by Mussolini on the principles of fascism co-authored with Giovanni Gentili. And if you read this essay by Mussolini and Gentili on the principles of fascism, it's very hard to distinguish between Strauss and Mussolini. No, actually it's not really very difficult to distinguish between Strauss and Mussolini, but I'll just enter my, we'll reserve that for another day. They're on the corner. John Pretty, the Fund for American Studies. For Brad Thompson, when you mentioned the Kato Unbound Essays, you failed to mention Patrick Deneen, his critique. I wanted to know if there was a reason for that. And secondly, do you agree with Todd Lindberg that the obituary portion of the title is greatly exaggerated? Right. Well, you did notice that I left, that I did not thank one of the three respondents to my Kato Unbound Essay. I will respond to Patrick Deneen in print or electronically at Kato Unbound after I returned from this trip to Washington. It's hard to know what to say in civil and polite company about an essay that is so fundamentally dishonest, intellectually dishonest, and more that I will just say for now that all of you who have been following this public conversation should wait for my response, my public response, which will be coming within the next week. I'll just, I think it's probably best to leave it at that. And your second question on the title of the book. The title is ironic, and it's ironic in two ways. First, it's ironic in that it's a play on a title of an essay by Irving Crystal. Irving Crystal once wrote an essay called Socialism and Obituary for an Idea. An essay which, by the way, is one where Crystal defends the moral superiority of socialism to capitalism. It's also an obituary, I think, in the ways that Todd suggested, namely that though neoconservatism is obviously still very much alive, one might describe this book as a prologomena to any future obituary in the sense that in Todd, and I'm glad one person, namely Todd, got the reference to Charlotte Corday writing Marat's obituary on the way to Paris. Yes, the book is polemical to the extent, although I'd like to think that it's philosophical in many ways, it is polemical in the sense that the goal is to unmask neoconservatism to take it on and then ultimately to defeat it on the intellectual battlefield. Let's take the last question right here. Bill Dennis, raise your hand, Bill. Without these things. Brad, I haven't made an opportunity to read your book yet, so I guess I'll have to after this, and you probably deal with this in there. But do you think all Straussians or neocons and all neocons are Straussians? Because I think there are different routes for both those groups besides Straussianism. Yeah, that's a fair, that's a good and a fair question. No, not all Straussians are neocons, although I think all Straussians to one degree or another are at the very least friendly to neoconservatism, but I think it is fair to say that certainly in my experience, and I know that world very well, most Straussians do incline toward neoconservatism, if not being full out neocons. Now, the reverse is not true. It would not be true to say, however, that most or that all or even most neocons are Straussians. So for instance, the first generation of neoconservatives, the most famous generation of neoconservatives, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Moynihan, all that group, none of those people could be remotely considered to be Straussians. Of that generation, of the original generation of neoconservatives, I think really only Irving Crystal could be considered to be a Straussian, and in a very peculiar way. He's a Straussian in the sense that he was, unlike most Straussians, he was never trained philosophically by Strauss or any of Strauss's students. He came to Strauss on his own. But I will say though that the neoconserv, and I do regard Strauss, excuse me, Crystal, to be the heart and soul of neoconservatism.  Daniel Bell and Nathan Glazer, for instance, had, well, Bell repeatedly said that he was not a neoconservative, and Glazer only sometimes. But it's those neoconservatives who centered around the world of Irving Crystal, who I think have had the greatest influence upon them by Strauss. And William Crystal, Irving's son, was himself trained by Straussians and is a self-identified Straussian. And David Brooks, who writes just like Irving Crystal and like Todd from the University of Chicago, I'm not exactly sure of his self-identification relative to Strauss, but there are certainly strains of thought in David Brooks that one can find in Strauss. Todd, do you wanna address that question? Yeah. I think, well, I don't think David spent a lot of time with Straussians at the University of Chicago. I could be wrong about that, but we overlap. We were a year apart and he certainly wasn't in any of the Bloom classes that I attended at the time. I don't, I should clear up. I've said, I've written, I don't mind if people call me the neoconservative, it's okay. As long as people understand that, I think the living strain of neoconservatism at the moment is actually a sort of classical liberal strain and that has a tendency to get lost a little bit in some of these darker speculations. And I wouldn't be, it's true that Strauss decided to start a school and that that's, it was an interesting decision on his part. Other professors in his position have made different decisions. So he wanted, it was clearly something that he wanted to get going, but I'm certainly not a member of it. And the fact that one learned something from Strauss or students of Strauss, I think doesn't require you to subscribe to the whole architecture. But that said, I think there's a great deal of value there. And it is, if you subscribe to a school, you're essentially going all in and maybe possibly denying yourself the opportunity to do anything like offer a kind of fundamental challenge of the premises and so forth. And so people make that decision and are happy with that decision. But just as much, I think there is, by the way, this is hardly unique to Strauss. There's certainly no shortage of Rawlsians out in the academy anyway. And that too is a school. But I think that in the end, the Strauss-in-Neocon connection is best explained as I was trying to get at, which is to say that if you are interested in political philosophy, presumably that is because you're interested in political power, in the structure of political order in regimes and types of regime and the way in which a type of regime might affect its behavior inside its borders and outside its borders, in the question of the clash of differing regimes, in the question of war and peace and the circumstances in which those resist. And that is, if you are interested in those questions, you may also be interested in having an impact on policy in your own country. And I think that's, I don't think we need to go a whole lot deeper than that in order to find what accounts for, not the identity, but what is, in fact, substantial overlap between these two things. All right, thank you, Todd Lindberg. Thank you, Brad Thompson. We have books and lunch upstairs, so please join us up in the Winter Garden.


Based on actual events as recorded in the book of Mormon another testament of Jesus Christ It is good. Leave us to the promised land