Yet exactly this has happened. Today, neoconservatives are riding high once more, in the White House, on Capitol Hill, in the most prominent organs of opinion. The Weekly Standard may have shuttered, but anti-Trump neocons enjoy increasing influence in the center of the Republican and Democratic parties and in publications like The Atlantic and The Washington Post. Others, meanwhile—call them neo-neoconservatives, or post-neoconservatives—are busy making policy in the Trump administration. They’ve gone with Trump for good reason. Although he is repudiating the export of liberal democracy and degrading its practice at home, Trump is also reasserting the American right’s pugnacious antipathy to “globalism.” He is acting as many within the neocon firmament have long favored, positioning the United States against a vicious world and fetishizing brute force in response. [...]
For the dominant strand of neoconservatism, embodied by those who left the Democratic Party in the 1970s and 1980s in order to keep waging the cold war behind Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump’s political ascent offered a unique opportunity, even if it did not look that way at first. Ever since the Iraq War began to lose the American public’s support in 2005, the neocon agenda had proved increasingly bankrupt, out of step with the world and therefore dangerous if imposed upon it. The hallmark of the mainline neoconservatives was their alarm against totalitarianism, originally aimed at the Soviet threat. But their anti-totalitarian ethos had little to offer in the post-totalitarian twenty-first century. After the September 11, 2001, attacks, some neoconservative mainstays, such as Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz and Bill Kristol’s The Weekly Standard, tried to conjure “Islamofascism” into existence. Here was a totalitarian enemy to succeed the Nazis and the Soviets, the idea went—except that numerically small terrorist groups, however threatening and odious, possessed neither the geopolitical strength nor the universalist ideology to sustain the analogy, even among Islamophobes. It was due to their basic intellectual commitments, and not just their particular policy failures, that neoconservatives spent the Obama years on the defensive, carping about Obama’s supposed weakness but unable to put forward a fresh program of their own. [...]
What best explains centrist Democrats’ rapprochement with neoconservatives isn’t an anti-Trump strategy but rather a genuine affinity with their current political objectives and style. Neocons have spent decades reducing politics to an all-encompassing crisis, a Manichean struggle between an imperiled liberal democracy and a pervasive totalitarian menace. Now certain liberals see things in much the same way. Lionizing the neocons indulges these Democrats’ fantasy that respectable Republicans will rise up to sweep Trump and all he stands for onto the ash heap of history. Decent citizens, the tale goes, will recoil at Trump’s profanities and banish his like for good—but only if they are led by the very authorities for whom those citizens have demonstrated deep mistrust. “We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators,” Vice President Dick Cheney claimed in March 2003, days before the first bombs dropped. The Never Trump neocons hold out a similar promise. The question is whether they have any more to offer America than they had to Iraq.
