Trump, Neoconservatives, and the Misrepresentation of the American Founding

This chapter evaluates the neoconservative anti-Trumpers who view the Trump presidency as a betrayal of America's founding principles. These detractors have been especially critical of nationalist populism and its rejection of “globalist” policies like free trade, foreign interventionism, and immigration. The chapter argues that neoconservatives misunderstand America's principles as a nation because they have relied heavily on certain sources, starting with the view of the American founding taught by the followers of Leo Strauss. This view overemphasizes Lockean natural rights and the merits of commercial acquisitiveness. Absent from this neoconservative analysis is an appreciation of three tenets of James Madison's political thinking, each of which accords with nationalist populism: civic republicanism, intergenerational duty to ancestors and posterity, and a warning that too much diversity will lead to a plutocratic oppression of society through a politics of divide and conquer. Although neoconservatives may have personal reasons to criticize the presidency of Donald Trump, their argument from the American founding is not particularly convincing.

The Significance of the M. E. Bradford Affair

This chapter analyzes the precipitous downfall of Southern literary scholar M. E. Bradford, who in an explosive rebuke was refused the post of director of the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1981. The M. E. Bradford affair was the first incident where the neoconservatives were able to establish a position for themselves in the conservative movement and Republican politics by aggressively attacking and slandering an accomplished scholar, and by promoting someone who was much less accomplished in his scholarship in his place. Indeed, Bradford's fall from grace in the Reagan administration was engineered by neoconservative journalists and foundation heads; and the attacks leveled against him in the press as a “Lincoln hater” and Southern reactionary continued long after he was kept from government service. The chapter considers the likely reasons for these broadsides and how they targeted not only Bradford but, at least indirectly, other Southern regionalists, whom the neoconservatives in their ascent to power were interested in marginalizing. Contrary to a widespread misconception, the Bradford affair was more than a minor incident in the history of the conservative movement. It was fraught with significance in both demonstrating and consolidating neoconservative control of American conservatism.

Big Conservatism and American Exceptionalism

This chapter discusses “Big Conservatism,” or “the Big Con,” and the doctrine of American exceptionalism (AE). What is known as the conservative movement in America is not conservative in any traditional or historical sense. The present conservative movement is largely a creation of neoconservatism, which gained effective control of establishment conservative media in the 1980s. The Big Conservatism that emerged from this takeover is a recognizable form of the Rationalist, progressivist, imperialist Left, against which classical conservatives and later the interwar American Right were once furiously opposed. The movers and shakers of Big Conservatism, true to their ideological pedigree, anchor their political vision in a metaphysical abstraction, American exceptionalism. From the perspective of American exceptionalism, America is an Idea and perhaps the only nation in all of human history that is imagined to transcend history. It is on the basis of this equation of America with a concept—a borderless, immaterial, universal concept—that those in the Big Con seek to justify their policy prescriptions, particularly their linkage of idealistic military intervention abroaexceptionalism with unrelenting immigration at home.

The Contradictions of Catholic Neoconservatism

This chapter details the rise and fall of perhaps the most unusual bloc within the neoconservative movement: the Catholic neoconservatives. It traces how Michael Novak's best seller The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (1982) caused Catholic neoconservatives to shift American Catholic discussion of economics to a defense of “democratic capitalism” as the purest distillation of Catholic social teaching. This argument was reinforced when another Catholic neoconservative, George Weigel, seized the public image of John Paul II for political purposes with the publication of Weigel's biography Witness to Hope (1999). Once the neoconservatives were able to speak for conservative Catholicism in America, they rallied American Catholic celebrities to their positions on foreign interventionism, support for multinational corporations, and Jewish ultranationalism. Integral to this campaign was the success of Catholic neoconservatives in fashioning an American Catholic understanding of political philosophy, starting with the social teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas. In The Hemisphere of Liberty, Novak dwells on a statement made by the English Catholic classical liberal Lord Acton in order to present St. Thomas as the “First Whig.” This was part of an arduous effort to reconcile medieval political philosophy with the neoconservative understanding of Anglo-American liberalism.