From Partisan Review to Fox News: Neoconservatives as Defenders of Intellectual Standards

Abstract

This chapter will explore the relations, direct and indirect, between the movement of intellectual neoconservatism since the late 1960s and the conservative attack apparatus, mainly guided by the Republican Party, surveyed in my previous two chapters. The bottom-line conclusion is that by the twenty-first century, the two had merged indistinguishably—and proudly—as epitomized by Podhoretz’s enthusiasm for Sarah Palin in 2010. My main point in defense of leftists in academia and media is, once again, that condemnations of their political correctness need to be evaluated in the perspective of the coordinated, unrelenting, and often unscrupulous attack campaign against them by elements on the right, in this chapter the intellectual-journalistic right and in the next, the scholarly right. This campaign has distorted accurate proportions through a double standard in those who obsess over sins on the left while suppressing comparable sins on their own side or who even praise the same kind of attitudes and behavior on their side that they denounce on the other.

Most neoconservatives believe that the last, best hope for humanity at this time is an intellectually and morally invigorated liberal capitalism.

Irving Kristol, Reflections of a Neoconservative 77

I would rather be ruled by the Tea Party than the Democratic Party, and I would rather have Sarah Palin sitting in the Oval Office than Barack Obama.

Norman Podhoretz, Wall Street Journal, 2010