How Neocons Are Still Winning in 2016
Oliver Turner, Chengxin Pan
Politics, Americas
Even the neoconservatives’ opponents have absorbed their assumptions.
By any standard, the 2016 U.S. presidential race has been extraordinary. The campaigns of maverick candidates such as Democrat Bernie Sanders and Republican Ted Cruz gained strong support, and in the end Donald Trump confounded expectations to become the Republican nominee. The underestimated popularity of these political outsiders highlights the depth of ill-feeling on both the right and left towards the so-called Washington establishment. Largely for this reason the main “establishment” candidate, Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton, still has a real fight on her hands.
Yet, amidst this antiestablishment fervor, one establishment characteristic of American politics and foreign policy is more likely than not to survive: neoconservatism. Beyond Robert Kagan’s statement of support for Clinton, neoconservatives have gone largely unnoticed this time around. Their significance is not entirely ignored; in this publication Michael Lind blames the rise of Trump on neoconservatives themselves, for example. However their vocal absence does not necessarily mean that neoconservatism has passed its use-by date in the United States. In fact, the contrary may be true.
Here we use the term neoconservatism not in its conventional and often derogatory sense. Indeed, in a recent academic article we argued that neoconservatism does not simply represent the ideas of a small band of readily identifiable neoconservatives. While Robert Kagan, William Kristol and other notable figures were instrumental to the rise of a particular strand of neoconservatism under the administration of George W. Bush, neoconservatism itself cannot be narrowly defined according to its individual leaders and followers, or their worldviews (which in any case vary between so-called neocons). Nor should it be simply equated with the now-infamous Bush Doctrine and its blueprint for the post–9/11 War on Terror.
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