The Contradictions of Neo-conservatism

Francis Fukuyama writes:

 

Of all of the different views that have now come to be associated with neo-conservatives, the strangest one to me was the confidence that the US could transform Iraq into a Western-style democracy and go on from there to democratise the broader Middle East.

 

It struck me as strange precisely because these same neo-conservatives had spent much of the past generation warning about the dangers of ambitious social engineering and how social planners could never control behaviour or deal with unanticipated consequences.

 

I’ve had the same thought myself. I read Irving Kristol’s essays and thought they were sensible, balanced, and incisive criticisms of utopian thinking on the left. Indeed, I took “neoconservative” to be practically synonymous with “anti-utopian.” Kristol was himself a man of the far left at one time, but rejected it in favor of a pragmatic and humane conservatism. Sort of an American Michael Oakeshott. His intellectual heirs, however, seem to have accepted the conclusions of Kristol’s conservatism without its style of thinking: skeptical, empirical, and mistrustful of ideological abstractions.