Why Do the Neocons Deserve the Right’s Loyalty?

Last Sunday’s attempted assassination of former president Trump by a leftwing activist, Ryan Routh, caused me to think about one of my admitted obsessions, the fateful alliance of the conservative establishment with the neoconservatives. Vicious attacks on Trump that led Routh to go after the supposed “new Hitler” threatening American democracy, did not come entirely from certified Democrats. As Dan McCarthy observed in a column this week, the “Trump is Hitler” meme has been quite popular with “moderate conservatives” in the Lincoln Project. Indeed, the kind of anti-Trump invective that resonated with Routh has been popular among anti-Trump Republicans for years. 

The association of Trump with Nazism and virulent anti-Semitism has also been a rhetorical practice among those writing for that quintessentially neoconservative website, the Bulwark. The contributors Jonah Goldberg, Charlie Sykes, Mona Charen, Cathy Young, Gabriel Schoenfeld, David French, Jonah Goldberg, and Kevin Williamson have all taken turns sliming The Donald. In 2022, the Bulwark posted an invective by Sykes, which dragged up the already then refuted charge that Trump said Nazis were “fine people.” He and Young have tried repeatedly to tie Trump to right-wing nationalist and anti-Semitic groups, typically through a fog of innuendo. 

While these developments are going on, other identifiable neoconservatives have either declared for Kamala (e.g., George Will and Dick and Lisa Cheney) or spoken out against Trump (John Bolton, Condoleezza Rice). These neoconservative celebrities are joining kindred spirits like Max Boot, Bill Kristol, and David Frum in the other camp, where said journalists have already profitably located themselves.

What makes all these defections noteworthy, speaking as a historian of the conservative movement and as someone on the independent right, is that those involved were the pampered darlings of the movement for decades. And these privileged few have behaved exactly as some of us, including the founders of The American Conservative, predicted they would. What supposedly made such allies valuable assets was their unswerving dedication to building an American empire centered on spreading “democratic values.” There is of course nothing intrinsically conservative about such a vision, no matter what the conservative faithful were told by their leaders for years. What’s more, this bizarre mission diverted the conservative movement from focusing their energy on the moral and cultural revolution that the organized left was carrying out domestically. 

In the end, many neoconservatives have made their peace with that revolution, providing they’ve been promised an opportunity to entangle us in more overseas adventures. The democratic model that neoconservatives have sought to inflict on others has changed dramatically since they first emerged as “new conservatives.” Our politics and culture are no longer what they were in the 1980s, when the neoconservatives were ascending to influence in the conservative establishment. Now wokeness has become an intrinsic part of our “democratic mission,” a situation that is not causing those neocons in transit to the Kamala camp any indigestion. 

It might take nothing less than reading my surveys of the conservative movement to understand how the neoconservatives gained influence and then control over conservative publications and institutions. Significantly, their position went largely unchallenged, until some of their spokesmen decided to abandon their conservative colleagues and join the far more powerful leftist establishment.

But the neoconservative presence never departed the conservative scene entirely. Many neoconservative personalities still enjoy places at the conservative table, including the ones who denounce Trump as a Nazi. Watching Fox News, or reading the New York Post or Wall Street Journal, I see lots of the old names featured. As long as these people have wealthy patrons and mainstream respectability, the conservative establishment will hold on to them. While our conservative gatekeepers frown on anyone seen as too far to the right, their treatment of neoconservative luminaries is entirely different. Providing these figures wish to associate with authorized conservatives, neocons may call Trump whatever they want. Only the Democrats are to be denounced for such practices.

This all reminds me of the German concept of Nibelungentreue, which refers to unconditional loyalty among allies. The term refers back to the medieval Nordic saga, das Nibelungenlied, in which a Burgundian princess turns furiously on her brothers for shielding their vassal who slew her husband. The extravagant loyalty of the Burgundian kings leads to the destruction of their entire family and to the descent of their kingdom into chaos. First used by the German Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow in 1909 to characterize his country’s unswerving support for its ally, Austria-Hungary, this concept came to pertain to any loyalty that defies limits. But a younger generation on the right feels no such loyalty toward the neocons. It has no interest in democratizing the world and is far more committed to liberating America from the deep state and the fake media than it is in making the world woke or neoconservative. This younger generation also has zilch interest in joining the leftist chorus against Trump. 

These younger conservatives may also sense how much the conservative movement has sacrificed in terms of credibility by displaying this Nibelungentreue toward those who have proven unworthy of their confidence. The question, then, is when the movement’s powerbrokers will give up their unconditional loyalty.