US Neoconservatives

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This page was last updated on: Friday, 18 February 2005

Note: This is the first of four general pages about the Neoconservative movement in the United States of America.  After this introduction page, there is a page about the foundations (front organisations) through which the Neoconservatives seek to sell their policies to the US public, a page on aspects of Neoconservative foreign policy and a page on how Neoconservatives are seeking to change the US legal system.

   Introduction

In any democratic society there will be shadings of political opinion broadly ranging from fascism on the far right to collectivist socialism or Trotskyism on the far left.   In the United States, as in Britain and many other Commonwealth countries, ideology has not been a major driving force in the politics of the majority of people and there has not been the fractioning into myriads of political parties one sees in some European countries. Perhaps this results from the fact that philosophy is no longer taught as part of secondary education in the English-speaking world.

Broadly speaking, in the 20th Century, one would generally find just two mainstream political parties in an English-speaking democracy, one to the right, representing old money and business, one to the left representing organised labour and the disadvantaged.   In England these were the Conservative and the Labour parties, and in the United States they were the Republican and Democratic parties.

Within the parties there were activists who certainly had ideologies - but in general the electorate cared little for ideology.  People identified themselves as, Conservatives/Republicans or Democrats/Labour and voted accordingly. Often the commitment to the party was life-long.

Extreme right wing conservatism in the USA was, of course, pro big business, isolationist in tendency (think of "America First")  Many of the old right wing conservatives also supported segregation and were personally anti-Semitic. 

The Great Depression marked a step change in the fortunes of the right in both the UK and the USA.  Politicians of the old right were identified as failures.  Massive Keynesian economic intervention become the order of the day and World War II identified fascism as an evil which it was necessary to defeat by all means - including an alliance with Soviet Russia. 

After World War II,  big government and high taxation remained.  Governments were broadly internationalist in outlook, supporting the United Nations, NATO, Bretton Woods, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank. 

In the post-war ear, in order to be electable,  conservatives in England and Republicans in the USA had to become "one nation tories". While they differed from the left  on matters of detail, the goal of all politicians was (at least in public) to reduce the gap between rich and poor and to promote equality of opportunity -  and if that meant redistribution of wealth through taxation - so be it.

During the Cold War, the great bugbear of the US right was "Communism" as practised in the Soviet Union and its satellites.  It became the enemy to be contained.  Fearful of the "domino effect", the USA intervened, both openly and covertly, to contain and defeat the spread of communist regimes:-

(1) openly through NATO, SEATO, the Baghdad Pact and the like organisations and with wars in Korea and then Indochina;

(2)  covertly through activities such as the funding of Christian Democrat parties in Europe (especially in post-war Italy), clandestine CIA support for "regime changes" in Latin America, Greece, Iran and Iraq, which favoured military dictatorship over democracy, and, above all, with the proxy war in Afghanistan.

Up to and including the Nixon - Kissinger years, this policy was essentially pragmatic.  It sought to achieve a "balance of power", or even a "balance of terror" between the Western, democratic, bloc and the Eastern, communist, bloc.

The advent of Ronald Reagan shifted the emphasis from pragmatism to an ideology.  Now, the emphasis was on "the evil Empire", which was not merely to be contained, but overthrown.

An ideology was supplied for this tendency on the US right by a group of self-proclaimed intellectuals, many of them apostates from communism and Trotskyism, who gathered at the National Review magazine, James Burnham, David Horowitz, Irving Kristol, Frank Mayer, Norman Podhoretz,  Willi Schlamm - to name but a few - who started to call themselves "Neoconservatives", presumably because they did not wish to emphasise the fascist nature of the ideology they were preaching but also, as a reader of this page has pointed out, to distinguish themselves from "old" US Conservatives (whom they labelled "Paleoconservatives").

In contrast to the "old" Conservatives,  the Neoconservatives had often come from a liberal Jewish background.  Instead of being anti-Semitic, they were rabidly pro-Israel.

According to an article by Michael Lind† in the New Statesman, the Neoconservatives were:-

"products of the largely Jewish-American Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, which morphed into anti-communist liberalism between the 1950s and 1970s and finally into a kind of militaristic and imperial right ." 

 Lind† rightly points out that this movement has no precedents in American culture or political history. 

† Lind is Whitehead Fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of "Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the southern takeover of American politics".

James Zogby, the President of the Arab American Institute, defines Neoconservatism thus:- 

"Neo-conservatism is the secular political philosophy that defined the reaction of a group of former liberals to what they felt was the Democratic party's policy of appeasement toward the Soviet Union--most especially the USSR's treatment of its Jewish population and its relations with the Arab world. They were a small but influential group of writers, commentators and government officials."

This definition is of importance in one respect:  it highlights that fact that there are few Neoconservatives who could be defined as original thinkers,  they are mainly journalists, media pundits from New York intellectual circles and people from what is sometimes referred to as "official Washington"- the people who inhabit Georgetown and the beltway and seek administration places or advisory functions with contractors to government.

Godfrey Hodgson was for many years as a foreign correspondent in Washington. He was at different times the Washington correspondent of The Observer, the editor of Insight on the Sunday Times, the presenter of the London Programme and of Channel Four News, the foreign editor of The Independent and for the past eight years the director of the Reuters Foundation Programme for Journalists at Oxford University.  In his book, "The World Turned Right Side Up: A History of the Conservative Ascendancy in America"  Publ: Houghton Mifflin Company 1996, Hodgson described the Neoconservatives as:-

"a cross between a generation of New York intellectuals, a coterie, and a tendency." Together, they reflected a narrow alcove of American society: essentially, they are products of Ivy League graduate schools and "a corner of the New York literary world." 

According to Hodgson:-

"Although many of them claimed to be 'scholars' or 'social scientists,' their real gifts, in most cases, were for a particular style of what used to be called 'the higher journalism,' more French in many ways than American, in which they slashed away at the errors of those who disagreed with them in great and sometimes cloudy realms of high policy and national destiny. ...They definitely made the decisive breach in the defences of the liberal orthodoxy, because they succeeded in stripping liberalism in the public mind of its monopoly of expertise...."

The group who founded the magazine The Public Interest represented the core of what later became the Neoconservative movement.

Hodgson points out:-

"Beginning in the late 1960s this group did develop a cluster of ideas and attitudes that were characteristic of what evolved into an identifiable neoconservative movement. It was to have an immense effect on the form American conservatism took in the 1970s and 1980s. Perhaps the absolutely fundamental neoconservative idea was the need to reassert American nationalism or patriotism or "Americanism" or "American exceptionalism": the idea that American society, however flawed, is not only essentially good but somehow morally superior‡ to other societies." "This belief has been deeply ingrained in the United States since the Revolution. It was strong in the American colonies before the Revolution. It has origins in the Puritanism of the English Revolution in the seventeenth century, and it has religious overtones, in the idea that it is the destiny of the United States to "redeem" a sinful `-   world, as well as nationalist ones. Indeed, it has sometimes been called a "secular religion." It is found in every corner of the country geographically and in Americans of every ethnic origin and social class, even among many black Americans."

‡  Note: The Neoconservative conviction  that American society is "innately morally superior"  is one of the marks of  the fascist and imperialist nature of Neoconservative thought.  A somewhat similar view of the superiority of British societal and moral values marked the high point of British Imperialism and perhaps it is more than a coincidence that some Neoconservatives talk in terms of taking up "the White Man's Burden" in the Third World.

As the former editor of the Observer, Will Hutton, said in an on-line debate with Robert Kagan on America's Public Broadcasting System:-

Will Hutton is author of a book entitled A Declaration of Interdependence: Why America Should Join the World in which he argues that Europe and America share a great liberal tradition that runs much deeper than the temporary phenomenon engendered by the occupation of the White House by an Administration whose foreign policy has been hijacked by the Neoconservatives.

Hutton's thesis is that the current rift between the Bush Administration and its European allies over the war in Iraq is really a sharp split between this consensus of US/European foreign policy liberalism and the presently prevailing Neoconservatism of the Bush administration.   We believe that thesis to be correct.

We question,  however, whether the "Neoconservative hijacking of US foreign policy" will prove to be as temporary as Hutton evidently hopes.  All the signs are that foreign policy in the Bush Administration will, if anything, prove to be even more driven by Neoconservative ideology - and even more disconnected from realities on the ground.

There are two reasons for our doubt.

The first is that the Neoconservatives determined that one of the ways to achieve power and put their ideology into practice was to have the American Religious Right hijack the Republican Party.  The influential Neoconservatives are not religious at all, they are disproportionately secular Jews or secular "nominal" Christians, and unlikely in either case to allow the tenets of the faith some of them admit to professing to get in the way of their political ideology.

But the problem is that having decided to use religious extremism as a means towards achieving power, the Neoconservatives have unleashed one of the most elemental and pernicious forces known to mankind.   History is littered with examples of rulers who have sought to "use" the power of religious extremism to their ends and have ended up being overwhelmed by the force they set in motion.

The second reason we doubt that the policy will easily be changed is that the USA is steadily becoming a state where corporate power and the state are melding into one.  The policies of government are now built in alliance with the corporations and directed to their objectives.  That is a well-known phenomenon which goes by a very ugly word: fascism.

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   Neoconservatives and the 'Christian' Right

It is not necessarily the case that religious extremists and political fascists must be opposed to each other.  In fact, they cohabit very well.

Fascist states have long co-existed with religion, often Roman Catholicism (the structure of which Church is essentially hierarchical with little place for any form of democracy).   The Roman Catholic Church signed concordats with Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy.  The Church provided right-wing prelates to Franco's Spain and Salazar's Portugal - not to mention a whole string of military juntas in Latin America.  It has long been a Vatican dogma that democracy is not the only, nor necessarily the best, environment in which the Roman Church can attend to the care of its flock. 

The religious sects on which the Neoconservatives have relied to achieve power include, the Roman Catholic right and the followers of various sects described as following the schools of "Dominionism", "Reconstructionism" and "Dispensationalism" or "Christian Zionism":-

"Dominionism" : a "militant post-millennial eschatology ('doctrine of end times') " which pictures the seizure of earthly (temporal) power by the church as the only means through which the world can be rescued; only after the world has been thus 'rescued' can Christ return to 'rule and reign.' (Some dominionists see the seizure of the earth as the result of 'signs, wonders, and miracles;' others picture it as the result of military and political conquest; most see it as a combination of both.) See: Mark Coomber: Dominionism - Christian International and Personal Prophecy

"Reconstructionism": a variant of Dominionism which argues that it is the moral obligation of Christians to recapture every temporal institution for Jesus Christ See: Frederick Clarkson: Christian Reconstructionism: Theocratic Dominionism Gains Influence

"Dispensationalism/Christian Zionism":  a belief that the promises made to Abraham and through him to the Jews, although postponed during this present Church age, are nevertheless eternal and unconditional and therefore await future realisation since they have never yet been literally fulfilled. So, for example, it is an article of normative dispensational belief that the boundaries of the land promised to Abraham and his descendants from the Nile to the Euphrates will be literally instituted and that Jesus Christ will return to a literal and theocratic Jewish kingdom centred on a rebuilt temple in Jerusalem.  See: John Scott: Christian Zionism: Dispensationalism And The Roots Of Sectarian Theology

These sects outwith main-stream Christianity are one of the less happy exports of the United Kingdom to the United States of America (see our entry on Christian Zionism on our Towards Secular Societies page).  Far too extreme to have thus far gained much currency in the UK (although, unhappily, television and much American money is having a pernicious effect, even in UK society), these sects have flourished in the USA, particularly in the so-called "Bible Belt" where existing flavours of the 57 varieties of Christianity laid much emphasis on individual interpretation of the Christian holy book. 

Charismatic preachers, particularly the so-called 'televangelists' of the ilk of Jerry Falwell, Jim Bakker, Paul Crouch, Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggart and Billy Graham, have used the ether to proselytise and gain devotees (and their cash) and, even though there has been some falling off as it has been discovered that these 'holy preachers' were all too prone to use the cash their cults brought them for all too earthly purposes, their adherents are now a force to be reckoned with in US politics.

Particularly to be mentioned is Pat Robertson (a web site where the Divine is extolled as a "broadcaster, statesman, author, humanitarian, businessman and Christian" - in that order !) and  his Christian Broadcasting Network .

According to CBN's 2003 financial statements the station pulled in a cool US$239,840,000 for its "ministry program" (meaning propaganda and proselytising) and which is now operating in more than 90 countries.  That is rather a far cry from the median US stipend for a US Catholic priest (inclusive of housing) which is US$25,000 pa and for a US Protestant pastor which is US$40,000 pa.  [Stipend Study by Pulpit and Pew at Duke University - PDF format 36 pages].

One is forced to wonder whether it is appropriate to permit televangelists the use of the airwaves to gull the vulnerable into parting with so much money.

Here is a fairly unbiased picture of Robertson's demagoguery in action:-

Now while people must be free to believe what they wish, provided that the practice of their beliefs does not involve conduct detrimental to society as a whole, the dogmas of such sects are inimical to the separation of religion and state enjoined by the US Constitution.

One only has to look at the web site of the Christian Coalition of America to see fundamentalism at work trying to impose its beliefs on the entire population.

Those Neoconservatives of an academic disposition, who apparently spent so much time under Strauss looking at authors such as Machiavelli, ought perhaps to have spent a little time looking at what happened to Florence when the Medici dynasty was unwise enough to let loose Fra Girolamo Savonararola OP.

Having let the genie of religious fanaticism out of the bottle, the Neoconservatives (and everyone else) may have considerable trouble getting the genie back in and replacing the stopper.

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  Intellectual Basis of Neoconservatism

Much of the intellectual underpinning of Neoconservative thought came from two academics at the University of Chicago, Leo Strauss and Albert Wohlstetter.

Leo Strauss Leo Strauss (1899-1973), Professor of Philosophy (1899-1973)  fled to America from Nazi Germany in 1937.  His teaching of philosophy was deeply marked by his life experience. Strauss had a very strong Jewish identity and viewed his philosophy as a means of ensuring Jewish survival in the Diaspora. As he put it in a 1962 Hillel House lecture, later republished in Leo Strauss: Political Philosopher and Jewish Thinker: 'I believe I can say, without any exaggeration, that since a very, very early time the main theme of my reflections has been what is called the "Jewish ‘Question’"...' Strauss blamed, not fascism, but the Weimar Republic's liberal democratic ideals for permitting the rise of the Nazi party and he interpreted the classical philosophers, Plato, Machiavelli, Nietzche and Hobbes, in a Machiavellian sense: Truth, he taught, was the preserve of an elite few who might have to tell "noble lies" to the uncomprehending masses.  The elite were to be "the Guardians" of Plato. Strauss posited the Machiavellian proposition that political entities are compelled to use force and fraud if they are to prosper.  He believed that democracy, however flawed, was best defended by an ignorant public pumped up on nationalism and religion. According to Strauss, only a militantly nationalist state could deter aggression. The creation of such nationalism requires an external threat - and if one cannot be found it has to be manufactured. See Kitty Clark on Strauss

Albert Wohlstetter RIP 16 January 1997 - Jude Wanniski It is no exaggeration, I think, to say that Wohlstetter was the most influential unknown man in the world for the past half century, and easily in the top ten in importance of all men. The headline said "Expert on Nuclear Strategy." He was The Expert on nuclear strategy. Dating back to 1951, when he worked as a senior policy analyst for the Rand Corporation, he steadily moved to the edge of the nation’s nuclear chessboard, and from the mid-1960s, Albert never had a serious challenger at the top of that intellectual pyramid, right up until the end of the Cold War. He remained unknown, except to the inner circles of power in our country, because he saw no need to become a public man when his function was to design the grand strategy that would bring military victory over the Soviet Union without a nuclear shot having to be fired. Albert’s decisions were not automatically made official policy at the White House from the Johnson presidency forward. A nuclear chessplayer cannot move pieces as easily as that. But Albert’s genius and his following were such in the places where it counted in the Establishment that if his views were resisted for more than a few months, it was an oddity. Not only did he have a mainframe computer in his head -- the Times tells us he earned a master’s degree in mathematical logic from Columbia University in 1938 -- he also had direct access to the most secret of all information available in the U.S. government. In the 1970s, Albert’s chessplaying in the Middle East helped lure Moscow into its costly adventure in Afghanistan. The defense buildup in the Reagan years was presided over by Albert’s protégés, Perle and Wolfowitz, who were brought into the Defense Department. link to full text

Leo Strauss and the History of Political Thought

The Writings of Albert Wohlstetter

The British Broadcasting Corporation broadcast in March 2004 a three part documentary which had much to say on the teaching of Strauss and on US Neoconservatism.  Real Video and transcripts are available on the Information Clearing House web site:-

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   The Powell Memorandum

One of the early goals of the Neoconservative ideologues was to enlist the support and funding of senior business executives.

Corporations had withdrawn to the political sidelines since the Great Depression. They had participated in the war effort under Roosevelt and in the reconstruction of Europe under Truman.  They had lobbied Washington for the special interests of business but they had generally stayed out of the wider political debate.

The Media Transparency web site, which we gratefully acknowledge as the source of much of the foundation data on on this page, has relied on research by Professor Jerry M. Landay to highlight the little known fact that an early invitation to big business to embark on a campaign to shift public opinion to a neoconservative agenda was issued by Lewis F. Powell Jr, then a corporate lawyer, to the business leaders of the US Chamber of Commerce. [See Article on the subject by Jerry M. Landay - Assoc. Prof. Emeritus, Journalism Univ. of Illinois].

On September 13, 1971, a month before President Nixon was to nominate him to the Supreme Court to fill the seat vacated by Hugo Black, Powell wrote a letter to a law-school friend, Ross L. Malone, general counsel of the General Motors Corporation. That 1971 letter, now stored in the Powell Archives at Washington and Lee University enclosed a copy of a memorandum that Powell had written at the invitation of Eugene Sydnor, Jr., a Richmond friend and department store owner, as well as chairman of the education committee of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington. In it, Powell urged the Chamber, which represented America's major businesses and trade associations, to take the lead in an aggressive education campaign in defence of free enterprise.

Powell's blueprint focused on four broad targets of attack:

As we shall see, these were, in the event, precisely areas of American life which were targeted for change.

1. Higher Education:

Powell felt that on campuses, "liberal" professors and their agendas were wielding "enormous influence far out of proportion to their numbers". Balance had to be restored. A counter-culture had to be created, with staffs of scholars, lecturers, public speakers, and speakers' bureaus.

• Universities would be persuaded to provide "equal time" on the college speaking circuit" for "moderate or conservative viewpoints" to adequately represent the views of American business.

• These same pressures would be applied to "administrators and boards of trustees" to correct the "imbalance of many faculties". 

• The first priority was to establish "staffs of eminent scholars, writers, and speakers, who will do the thinking, the analysis, the writing and the speaking" for the whole movement.

•  They would insist on the "right" of conservatives to be heard.

 2. Television and other media:

Powell called for organisations staffed by experts to promote the business agenda in the media.  These experts would reach public opinion, and effectively communicate with them. They had to be "thoroughly familiar with the media".

•  "Incentives" were to be provided to "induce" the media to publish and air more writings by the "faculty of [conservative] scholars".  

• Businesses were to devote more of the many millions they spent on advertising to "inform and enlighten the American people" to "support the system".

 3. Politics:

Powell noted that Presidential candidates were daring to express "anti-business views." Lawmakers were being "stampeded" to support the agendas of consumerists and environmentalists. The American businessman had lost his influence within the government.

• There should be  an intensive campaign to "enlighten public thinking" about business.

• Business had to take "direct" steps to regain decisive political power within government.

 4. The Court System:

Powell's recommendations on the judicial system were to prove especially compelling to Neoconservatives, and would later be applied with forceful effect.

 He observed that "the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic, and political change",  and gave the example of the American Civil Liberties Union, which "initiates or intervenes in scores of cases each year". 

As a jurist, Powell well understood that changes in policy which could not readily be achieved by legislative or bureaucratic means might be achieved through the courts.

 See Full Text of US Chamber of Commerce Cover and Powell Memorandum.

The Chamber of Commerce leadership eventually decided against acting on the Powell Memorandum. Powell's ideas were deemed too ambitious and costly. But they were taken up as organising principles by others, as will be shown below.

 

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   Powell Footnote

If the Memorandum typified Powell's views as a private citizen, it says much for his personal integrity that on the Supreme Court Bench from 1972 to 1987,  Powell would prove a disappointment to President Nixon, who had nominated him in the hope that his presence would help drive the court rightward toward "strict construction".

Instead, Powell staked out the moderate centre in a Supreme Court split 4-4 between liberal and conservatives colleagues, often casting the "swing" vote on crucial decisions.   If he was politically conservative, he was socially liberal.   He sided with the majority in Roe -v- Wade to uphold a woman's right to abortion.

In the mid-1980s, Powell voted with conservatives to uphold the death penalty, despite hard evidence that its application was all too often influenced by race.  But by 1991, no longer on the court, he had reflected and told his biographer: "I have come to think that capital punishment should be abolished" because it "brings discredit on the whole legal system" and "cannot be enforced fairly."

At the end of his career, he conceded that he had remained "troubled to this day" by his vote to uphold Georgia's anti-gay sodomy law.

In 1998 Professor Richard Fallon, a former law clerk to Justice Powell, described him in a memorial as "too liberal to please the conservatives, and too conservative to please the liberals." - Link to Full Text in Harvard Law Bulletin

Powell, a man of undoubted integrity, wrote his Memorandum in 1971.  It is clear that what he considered to be the excesses of the "swinging sixties" had troubled him greatly.   It would be kindest to conclude that his judgment was temporarily clouded.  He probably never realised that what he had written was a blueprint for the hijacking of the American democracy by the far right.

What Powell's  liberal conscience would have made of the effects of two decades of  Neoconservatism is an interesting speculation.

 

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   The Foundations Finance The Neoconservatives

The Powell Memorandum remained confidential for more than a year after Powell composed it.  It was not disclosed or referred to in the Senate hearings on his nomination. 

Lee Edwards, professor of politics at the Catholic University of America, is the official historian of the Heritage Foundation, and reports an account of an interview with the late Joseph Coors, head of the largest brewery west of the Mississippi in which Coors stated that he had been "stirred up" after reading the Powell Memorandum.

Coors told Edwards that Powell's Memorandum had "convinced" him that American business was "ignoring a crisis".  Coors was moved to act. He "invested" the first $250,000 to fund the 1971-72 operations of the Analysis and Research Association (ARA) in Washington, D.C., the original name of the Heritage Foundation. Other wealthy contributors on the lunatic right of American business followed Coors' lead. The Heritage Foundation became the trend-setting model for scores of other policy institutes and lobbying operations and has been a major beneficiary of the Coors' Castle Rock Foundation and other donors ever since. 

See our entry for the Heritage Foundation.

Thus the proposals outlined in the Powell Memorandum were refined and implemented with funding provided by charitable foundations, including:-

The grants have paid for a veritable constellation of think tanks, pressure groups, special-interest foundations, litigation centres, scholarly research and funding endowments, publishing and TV production houses, media attack operations, political consultancies, polling organisations, and public-relations operations.

This is an extract from a memorandum published on the Crisis Papers web site, with some thoughts about why the Kerry Campaign lost the 2004 general election. 

Rightly, much influence is ascribed to the opinion-forming and influencing infrastructure which the Neoconservative right has built up over the last 15 years or more:-

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   Funding in Operation

The  Media Transparency web site reports how the programme to bring about a shift to the right in public opinion was devised.  The explanation was given at a conservative foundation conference in 1995 by Richard Fink, then President of the Charles G. Koch and Claude R. Lambe Foundation.

While in Europe funds for higher education and research largely come from the state, in the United States almost the totality of the money comes from private charitable foundations.  There are more than 800,000 grant giving non profit organisations in the United States controlling funds which exceed the national budgets of many European nations. 

It is to be noted that the monies provided to shift education to the right  has been a long term investment.  The monies invested in the 1970's and 1980's are only now producing the new Neoconservative ideologues for employment in government service and the courts. 

Grant makers, Fink argued, would do well to invest in change along the entire production continuum by funding :-

(i) scholars and university programs where the intellectual framework for social transformation is developed;

(ii) think tanks where scholarly ideas get translated into specific policy proposals; and

(iii) implementation groups to bring these proposals into the political marketplace and eventually to consumers [note: for an example see our listing for Empower America on page 2].

Over the past two decades, conservative foundations have broadly followed such a model, investing hundreds of millions of dollars in a cross-section of institutions with the aim of achieving political and policy change.

The money has been directed, inter alia, at the following areas:  

In accordance with Fink's advice - the Ultra-Right Foundations targeted their grant resources: just 18 percent of the grantees received over 75 percent of grant dollars awarded.

It should be noted that the academic strategy depends very much on the fact that US higher education depends on charitable funding. 

Over the 1992-1994 period, these Foundations directed substantial grant resources to approximately 145 academic institutions, programs or higher education organizations, awarding

The rest of the money supported a variety of purposes, including lecture circuits, manuscript preparation, publications support, and more.

In compliance with the targeting policy, of the US$88.9 million awarded for academic or higher education-related purposes, US$51.3 million was channelled to just 16 grantee institutions which included:-

Harvard University, US$9.67 millions  Yale University, $5.95 millions

University of Chicago, US$10.35 millions George Mason University, US$8.55 millions

Established universities, such as Yale and Harvard,  are not going to be bought by the sums of money which the far right conservatives have been handing out.  Nor are some of the more established think tanks.  But the endowment in prestigious institutions of chairs for politicians and others with conservative ideology as  "Distinguished Professors" has given them a platform they otherwise might not have had and a chance to influence the young people they teach.

It is interesting to note the relative size of the grants given to the University of Chicago and to George Mason University (the latter hardly in the premier league of US higher education). The University of Chicago was, of course, where Leo Strauss and Albert Wohlstetter taught.  George Mason University is a convenient parking place for Washington DC and with the ultra-right's Robert Fink on its Academic Standards Committee it is well placed to become a temple of Neoconservatism.

It is noteworthy that the Neoconservatives have placed a lot of effort into the funding and organisation of groups pressurising all University Trustees and Faculties to move to the right.

The National Organisation of Scholars Inc was founded in 1985 "..to unite right-wing faculties against 'politically correct' multicultural education and affirmative action polices'.  It has received funding of US$7,521,678.  Jeane Kirkpatrick, Gertrude Himmelfarb and Irving Kristol of the AEI are on its board of advisers. 

There is also the American Council of Trustees and Alumni which works on University Boards of Trustees and Curriculum issues. Its National Council is a roll call of the Republican right including Lynne Cheney, the wife of the Vice-President,  Irving Kristol of AEI and William Bennett, the former Regan Secretary of Education with Kristol's mother, Gertrude Himmelfarb on the Scholars' Council.  It has received US$1.1 millions.  

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (Willam Bennett, again) got US$12.7 millions.

For details of the funding of the institutions listed on the next page by the 12 conservative foundations see the Media Transparency site.   It should be remembered that all the institutions will receive substantial funding from other sources:  smaller donations tend to follow large ones.

In July 1997, the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy published a Report which showed that some 12 conservative foundations were targeting their giving towards organisations aiming to move public policy to the right - an agenda including the privatisation of government services, deep reductions in federal anti-poverty spending, industrial deregulation, and the transfer of responsibility for social welfare to state and local government and the charitable sector. 

Moving A Public Policy Agenda:  The Strategic Philanthropy of Conservative Foundations

That report was followed up in 1999 with an analysis of the 20 leading US conservative political think tanks and it found that together they spent $158 millions in 1996 and were likely to spend a total of US$1 billion over the decade 1990-2000. The $158 million 1996 spend is to be compared to the Republican Party "soft contribution" spend of $138 millions for the same period.

The five largest and most well-known policy institutions on the right (the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute,  the Hoover Institution, the Center for Strategic and International Studies,  and the Free Congress Research and Education Foundation) expended half of the $158 million total in 1996, but the remaining $80 million was spent by 15 smaller policy organizations working to advance core elements of the conservative agenda.

Investigation of the organisations funded reveals a closely interlocking network of personalities.  Professor X is funded as a "Distinguished Professor" at University Y and he then sits on the Academic Board of Foundation Z. 

Many of the organisations describe themselves as:  "non-partisan" or "independent" .  These words nearly always appear on web pages where donations are solicited.  In legal form such foundations may of course be independent and unaffiliated to party, but in fact many exist to pursue a very partisan agenda indeed.

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  The Neoconservative "Family"

The table below gives details of some prominent Neoconservatives.   The listing is very far from exhaustive and is produced mainly to show the networking of persons with the with the Bush Administration, its ideological predecessors, the Nixon and Reagan Administrations, and the various institutions and advocacy groups listed on page 2 - Neoconservative Institutions.

Some Prominent Neoconservatives
Elliott Abrams	Richard Armitage	William Bennett	John Bolton	Robert Bork	Midge Decter	Lynne  Cheney	Douglas Feith
Frank Gaffney	Newt Gingrich	Gertrude Himmelfarb	Jeane Kirkpatrick	Lewis Libby	Irving Kristol	William Kristol	Michael Ledeen
Robert Kagan	James  Miller	Edwin Meese	Richard Perle	Norman Podhoretz	Paul Weyrich	James Woolsey	Paul Wolfowitz

Who's Who in the Neoconservative Extended Family:-

See also:-

All in the Neocon Family By Jim Lobe -  AlterNet -  27th March 2003 What do William Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Elliot Abrams, and Robert Kagan have in common? Yes, they are all die-hard hawks who have gained control of U.S. foreign policy since the 9/11 attacks. But they are also part of one big neoconservative family – an extended clan of spouses, children, and friends who have known each other for generations. Neoconservatives are former liberals (which explains the "neo" prefix) who advocate an aggressive unilateralist vision of U.S. global supremacy, which includes a close strategic alliance with Israel. Let's start with one of the founding fathers of the extended neocon clan: Irving Kristol. His extensive resume includes waging culture wars for the CIA against the Soviet Union in the early years of the Cold War and calling for an American "imperial" role during the Vietnam War. Papa Kristol, who has been credited with defining the major themes of neoconservative thought, is married to Gertrude Himmelfarb, a neoconservative powerhouse on her own. Her studies of the Victorian era in Britain helped inspire the men who sold Bush on the idea of "compassionate conservatism." The son of this proud couple is none other that William Kristol, the crown prince of the neoconservative clique and editor of the Rupert Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard. In 1997, he founded the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a front group which cemented the powerful alliance between right-wing Republicans like Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, Christian and Catholic Right leaders like Gary Bauer and William Bennett, and the neocons behind a platform of global U.S. military dominance. Irving Kristol's most prominent disciple is Richard Perle, who was until Thursday the Defense Policy Board chairman, is also a "resident scholar" at the American Enterprise Institute, which is housed in the same building as PNAC. Perle himself married into neocon royalty when he wed the daughter of his professor at the University of Chicago, the late Alfred Wohlstetter – the man who helped both his son-in-law and his fellow student Paul Wolfowitz get their start in Washington more than 30 years ago. Perle's own protege is Douglas Feith, who is now Wolfowitz's deputy for policy and is widely known for his right-wing Likud position. And why not? His father, Philadelphia businessman and philanthropist Dalck Feith, was once a follower of the great revisionist Zionist leader, Vladimir Jabotinsky, in his native Poland back in the 1930s. The two Feiths were honored together in 1997 by the right-wing Zionist Organization of America (ZOA). The AEI has long been a major nexus for such inter-familial relationships. A long-time collaborator with Perle, Michael Ledeen is married to Barbara Ledeen, a founder and director of the anti-feminist Independent Women's Forum (IWF), who is currently a major player in the Republican leadership on Capitol Hill. Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and another neo-con power couple – David and Meyrav Wurmser – co-authored a 1996 memorandum for Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu outlining how to break the Oslo peace process and invade Iraq as the first step to transforming the Middle East. Though she doesn't focus much on foreign-policy issues, Lynne Cheney also hangs her hat at AEI. Her husband Dick Cheney recently chose Victoria Nuland to become his next deputy national security adviser. Nuland, as it turns out, is married to Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol's main comrade-in-arms and the co-founder of PNAC. Bob's father, Donald Kagan, is a Yale historian who converted from a liberal Democrat to a staunch neocon in the 1970s. On the eve of the 2000 presidential elections, Donald and his other son, Frederick, published "While America Sleeps," a clarion call to increase defense spending. Since then, the three Kagan men have written reams of columns warning that the currently ballooning Pentagon budget is simply not enough to fund the much-desired vision of U.S. global supremacy. And which infamous ex-Reaganite do the Kagans and another leading neocon family have in common? None other than Iran-contra veteran Elliott Abrams. Now the director of Near Eastern Affairs in Bush's National Security Council, Abrams worked closely with Bob Kagan back in the Reagan era. He is also the son-in-law of Norman Podhoretz, long-time editor of the influential conservative Jewish publication Commentary, and his wife, Midge Decter, a fearsome polemicist in her own right. Podhoretz, like Kristol Sr., helped invent neo-conservatism in the late 1960s. He and Decter created a formidable political team as leaders of the Committee on the Present Danger in 1980, when they worked with Donald Rumsfeld to pound the last nail into the coffin of detente and promote the rise of Ronald Reagan. In addition to being Abrams' father-in-law, Norman Podhoretz is also the father of John Podhoretz, a columnist for the Murdoch-owned New York Post and frequent guest on the Murdoch-owned Fox News channel. As editor of Commentary, Norman offered writing space to rising stars of the neocon movement for more than 30 years. His proteges include former U.N. ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick and Richard Pipes, who was Ronald Reagan's top advisor on the "Evil Empire," as the president liked to call the Soviet Union. His son, Daniel Pipes, has also made a career out of battling "evil," which in his case is Islam. And to tie it all up neatly, in 2002, Podhoretz received the highest honor bestowed by the AEI: the Irving Kristol award. This list of intricate, overlapping connections is hardly exhaustive or perhaps even surprising. But it helps reveal an important fact. Contrary to appearances, the neocons do not constitute a powerful mass political movement. They are instead a small, tightly-knit clan whose incestuous familial and personal connections, both within and outside the Bush administration, have allowed them grab control of the future of American foreign policy. (link to text of story)

See also a page on the prominent names in the neoconservative movement in the Christian Science Monitor

A good profile of Perle was written by Chris Suellentrop on 23rd August 2002:-

Many of the Neoconservative luminaries of the Bush Administration are what Americans refer to as "Chickenhawks":-

"Chickenhawk"   n.  A person enthusiastic about war, provided someone else fights it; particularly when that enthusiasm is undimmed by personal experience with war; most emphatically when that lack of experience came in spite of ample opportunity in that person’s youth.

See the Chickenhawks database in the on-line edition of:-

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  How the Neoconservatives have fared in the Bush Administration

Now that we have to live with the fiasco of the November 2004 US General Election,  it is useful to look at how Neoconservative dogma has served the American people:-

This from the National Catholic Reporter:-

See also these Green Dog Democrat Newsletters:-

A very useful source of more information about Neoconservatism is to be found on this site:-

A good source of thoughtful articles about Neoconservatism  and the results of putting their policies into practice is:

 

Some articles worth reading might be:-

Go to our page on Neoconservative Organisations 

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