Roots of Reaction

Abstract

The reaction of the U.S. ruling class to the ferment of the 1960s partially relied on an intellectual foundation. It was not an unthinking, emotion-laden response, even when its public manifestations took populist form. The first wave of American neoconservative intellectuals came to prominence in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the reaction was taking its form. Mainly born in the 1920s and 1930s, they include figures such as Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Daniel Bell, and Gertrude Himmelfarb. Some had a left-liberal or Trotskyist past, which was fashionable in their youth during the 1930s and 1940s. The neoconservatives rejected the Communism of their youth and the politics of the new left in the 1960s. Kristol (1995:6) cited the thought and work of Leo Strauss as basic to the neoconservative philosophy. Strauss is pivotal to neoconservatives because he taught many of the second generation, including significant advisers and administrators in the Reagan and Bush regimes such as Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, and Paul Wolfowitz. Another intellectual figure contributing to neoconservative philosophy but without direct influence on American politics was Carl Schmitt (Stern 2006:72), the leading Nazi jurist. The ruling-class reactionary program Lewis Powell outlined in his 1971 memorandum depended on neoconservative ideology, despite the fact that most members of the ruling class themselves held traditional conservative or liberal political ideas and values.