DeLong Critiques the Neocons

In critiquing The Economist, Brad Delong explains the great intellectual history of neoconservatives.

The "neoconservatives" were a different group of people, later--Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz were their intellectual godfathers, rather than Daniel Bell and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The real neoconservatives formed into a group at the end of the 1970s around four planks:

1) That the Soviet Union was winning the Cold War, which the west needed to heat up and wage it with harsher methods--nuclear weapons, aircraft carriers, and death squads rather than limp-wristed Carter-Ford focus on international economic prosperity, democratization, and human rights.

2) That Likud should be encouraged to drive Palestinians into their existing homeland of Jordan as soon as practicable.

3) That taxes should be cut, (military) spending raised, and budgets balanced--and that anyone who pointed out that this didn't add up needed to be shouted down.
And:

4) That African-Americans got too easy a ride in modern America, and needed to be made poorer and less powerful.

It's not much to be proud of.

Posted by Peter