Twilight of the neoconservatives

[Draggingtree]

:
Twilight of the neoconservatives

The movement's unlikely 20-year reign over the GOP could now be coming to an end.

by Max Fisher on March 10, 2016

In the early winter months of 1998, in a series of drab meeting rooms in the Rayburn House Office Building near the Capitol in Washington, DC, a group of dissident conservative intellectuals, a tweeded and mostly forgotten faction of foreign policy thinkers calling themselves neoconservatives, scored the first in a series of surprise political coups that would lead them to the heights of power — and, within a few years, change the world.

 

The meeting rooms held what House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Sen. Bob Dole called the Congressional Policy Advisory Board. Gingrich had helped lead a Republican revolution in Congress a few years earlier, but the party had struggled to offer a substantive alternative to the Clinton administration, as Dole's failed 1996 presidential campaign had shown. They had recruited a new generation of Republicans, and now, with the policy board, they would to give those recruits an ideology.

 

The word "neoconservative" is often taken as synonymous with Republican Party foreign policy, or as merely a fancy way of saying "hawkish."

[kevindavis]

I would rather be a Neo-Con than a Paleo-Con.