The Neocons are Back: How Their Ideas Endure, and What It Means for Democracy

If the obvious impacts of America's proxy war in Ukraine are lives lost and debt accrued, a quieter impact is the neoconservatives' revival.  A few weeks ago, the Biden administration conferred the deputy secretary of state position on Victoria Nuland, a policymaker in almost every 21st-century American intervention abroad and an ardent supporter of our involvement in Ukraine.  Recently, William Kristol, who along with Nuland's husband Robert Kagan co-founded the Project for the New American Century, which drove the push for the Iraq invasion, launched a $2-million organization, Republicans for Ukraine, encouraging congressional Republicans to fund the proxy war despite a majority of the public turning against it.

Even if history truly does come as tragedy and repeat as farce, the neoconservatives' re-emergence is extraordinary, because Iraq isn't the only tragedy, or farce, on their sixty-year record.  This record has nothing to do with the hard-nosed, practical, anti-communist, and anti-Iranian outlook with which it's sometimes associated — one shared by many Republicans.  Instead, it flows from a broader foreign and domestic project of power accrual and social control driven by ideologues and administrators in Washington, D.C.  The project's effects reach wide and deep: though the Center for American Progress and Democracy: A Journal of Ideas feed the Biden White House personnel and policies, their insider playbook was created by the neocons, whose think-tanks and magazines laid the groundwork for an insulated class of political ideologues to wreak their will on the rest of us.

Why do their moves keep working?  And how can we minimize their influence?

Read more at American Thinker.