Neoconservatism's Liberal Legacy by Tod Lindberg - Policy Review

I continue to be attracted to neo-conservatism in theory (though not in practice and I have a strong aversion to many of its salesmen at the Weekly Standard. This article is well thought through.Neoconservatism's Liberal Legacy by Tod Lindberg - Policy Review, No. 127

I think it is not unfair to describe the neoconservative conclusion as follows: Reality is such that efforts to alter it result in its mugging you -- often enough, that is, to render such efforts dubious at best. One should reduce one�s ambitions accordingly.

He presents it as a politics of common sense and sets its central goal as "the conservation and extension of liberalism", but it falls sadly short in reality. But here is a bit that I couldn't agree with more as I said the other day.

As it happens, the story is more complicated than that. After all, a worse outcome than an authoritarian regime is certainly possible in some cases. For example, holding an election might result in empowering an Islamist government bent on smothering all liberal sentiment under a blanket of sharia. Or an authoritarian government, under pressure to liberalize, might lose its grip altogether, resulting in a failed state prone to lawlessness, warlordism, and misery.

But, of course, to say this is merely to say that one must be prudent in pursuit of the advance of liberalism — one must be realistic and take local circumstances fully into account; one must be attuned to the difficulty of introducing a balance between the desire for freedom and the desire for equality in places that have little or no experience of the two in relation and may not, in any event, wish this liberalism for themselves. One must not shrink from rejecting such illiberal wishes: Universal liberalism means nothing if it grants exceptions in principle — though, clearly, certain prudential accommodations may be necessary. In the end, however, it is the resolution of disagreement as “agreement to disagree” that most securely protects liberalism. This is no less true in the international context than in the domestic context (and, in my view, provides the only adequate account of the “democratic peace”18). If, at home, the politics of the future consists of the conservation of liberalism, abroad the same tendency — whether one wishes to call it “neoconservative” or something else — consists of the prudent expansion of liberalism.

He goes on to say that American exceptionalism concerning our relationship to liberalism broadly defined is just part and parcel of a belief in the universality of liberalism. The exceptionalism comes from the fact that we've played a special role in defending that liberalism, both our own and others.