In less than a decade, Trump emptied the republican party of what made up its political and programmatic substance for at least a generation: neoconservatism.
In this book taken from his doctoral thesis, Pierre Bourgois explores the theoretical springs of neoconservatism, a current which united the American right in the 1990s and known its hours of glory under the presidency of Georges W. Bush (2001-2009). While Trump’s new mandate seems to lead the United States to “ democracy “, This firmly supported analysis is all the more justified as the Republican Party must be held responsible for this illiberal drift, as the Levistky and Ziblatt teachers have shown in 2018 in a test in the title as fatal as it is prophetic:” The death of democracies ».
In the light of the intellectual and theoretical bases of neoconservatism presented by Bourgois, it seems to us possible to illuminate, in counterpoint, the ideological characteristics of Trumpism as techno-libertarianism (associated with Elon Musk) which have now supplanted it.
Liberals “ Realized by reality »»
The origin of the neoconservative current dates back to the turn of the 1960s, at a time when the United States, entangled in the Vietnam War, wondered about their values. First close to the movements for civil rights, sexual liberation or emerging ecology, several liberal intellectuals distance themselves from the supporters of the counterculture. Feeling “ Realized by reality ” – According to the famous expression of Irving Kristol, they fear that ambient hedonism softening an American company likely to be fines in the face of communism and fear that internal divisions divert the Washington elites from the priority to ward off its threat on an international scale. In other words, the left of the campuses is deemed indolent, victim of blindness, and the political class, accused of pusillanimity, in particular following the pitiful withdrawal of Saigon (1975).
It is in this context of questioning that the neoconservative movement is structured, the composite character of which does not prevent the existence of a common ideological base. For Bourgois, it is not a matter of a mass movement, but a intellectual current matured by the objective of winning, from a gramscian perspective, “ The war of ideas (P. 24). To spin the fellow metaphor, neoconservatism flips its weapons on two theaters of operations (internal and international) and deploys them on four fronts.
The four battles of neoconservatism
In journals aligned on their obedience such as The Public Interest (1965-2005), Commentary Or National review, The neoconservatives first attack state interventionism, whether social or economic. However, their theoretical assault is less offensive than that led by libertarians. The first would rather seek to open a breach in the ramparts of the welfare state in order to obtain their surrender, when the latter would work to undermine the foundations to see it collapse. Indeed, if they are very critical of social policies, the neoconservatives do not decide for their pure and simple suspension, unlike libertarians.
Failed anti -communist elsewhere, the neoconservatives are supported by the free market. Obtained by the growth of the economy they corrèle to social peace, they campaign for capital reductions and do not fear public deficits if they remain punctual and necessary for recovery. In this sense, “ They are not followers of a very disappearance of the state. On the contrary, they stand out for libertarians by defending certain state policies (P. 75). Besides Welfare State limited, they are thus favorable to a state “ energetic “(P. 98) – which builds public infrastructure – and” regulator »(P. 101), in particular biotechnologies and other contemporary techno-scientific drifts (genetic manipulations, cloning, transhumanism) ; Where libertarians see in “ any state intervention in (CE) a hindrance to human development and accomplishment (P.104).
The other battle horse of neoconservatism is at the societal and cultural level. Haunted by the fear of a decline in the United States seen as a flagship of Western capitalist civilization, they endeavor to defend the traditional values of American society. Fearing the destructive individualism promoted by a successful author such as Ayn Rand, they express their attachment to intermediate structures and local associative life, already praised in his time by Alexis de Tocqueville – towards whom they recognize their intellectual debt. If they are opposed to positive discrimination measures (Affirmative Action) in the name of the preservation of “ legal equality (P. 166), they are not fundamentally hostile to multiculturalism, as soon as it is based on assimilation and does not undermine national unity. In addition, they even see a good eye immigration (supervised), since it constitutes history as of American identity. As for the freedom they claim, it is not total or without consideration, unlike the libertarian meaning. THE neocons claim to be freedom “ bourgeois »Based on conservative principles, intended to authorize what virtue determines and prohibit what morality reappears. So they blame sexuality outside marriage, pornography and obscenity.
Finally, on the international scene, the neoconservatives again lead their fights on two terrains. On the one hand, they believe that the United States has a civilizing mission to accomplish: that of extending the liberal order everywhere on the planet, heard in its political and economic dimension. Reconnecting with Wilsonian idealism from the beginning of XXe century and backed by the multilateral institutions that they forged at the end of the Second World War, they support the “ moral clarity (P. 220): In their eyes, democracy is fundamentally better than tyranny and must be defended as such. At the same time, they assert themselves realistic in their conception of international power relations and consider that the world is always likely to switch to the Hobbesian war “ from all against all ». Also, favorable to a “ offensive promotion of democracy (P. 241), they demand that their armed forces remain powerful, firmly funded and deployable, in a unilateral way, wherever it is good to project them. Their vision is, in short, militaro-centered and readily interventionist, with the difference there of a libertarian current destabilized by the September 11 attacks.
From the Republican Party to the Democratic Party: anti-Trump defectors
THE neocons never exercised a stranglehold on a republican party which, centrists responding to the nickname of Rino (Republicans in Name Only) With evangelical fundamentalists, has always been composed of contradictory, sometimes rival factions. Their influence on foreign policy was nonetheless important as decried, in particular under the Bush administration. In addition to the failure of the war in Iraq to them, Obama’s victory in 2008 against John McCain-a free-track candidate-sealed their political marginalization. That said, the members of this intellectual current remained active polemists.
With rare exceptions embodied by Norman Podhorotz or, to a lesser extent, by the former executive of the Reagan administration, Eliott Abrams, the necons were widely diverted from the Republican Party after the electoral ascent of Donald Trump and the chaos of his first mandate (2017-2021). In fact their values and their visions of the world are so diametrically opposed to those of Trumpism, that most of them came out of their reserve to shout loudly their disapproval against a new candidacy of the former real estate magnate to the presidential election. If some of them took the lead in 2016, like William Kristol who launched the movement nevertrump then federated the project Republicans Voters Against Trumpthey had already largely called to vote for the Democratic camp during the November 2020 election, multiplying in stands the warnings against a Trumpocalypse in power (according to the title of a work by David Frum). The judicial guerrilla warfare undertaken against the validation of the presidential elections of November 2020 and, even more, the attacking coup in democratic institutions carried on January 6, 2021 only confirmed their fears.
As for the second term of Trump, it seems to be paid into an extremism to which even the most “ hawk »Of them cannot adhere. And for good reason, the nationalist withdrawal, the inclinations of territorial expansion, the contempt for the Atlanticist alliance and especially the pro-Russian reversal of the new administration come into total contradiction with their convictions. In addition, they cannot endorse the unprecedented company of dismantling of the federal state led by Musk in the name of a techno-libertarianism which they reprove.
It should be added that the neoconservatives cannot finally find themselves in anti-intellectual rhetoric at work in Washington. As shown in the academic trajectory of Francis Fukuyama, they are (or have been) for most of them academics, who have completed their career in the most prestigious faculties of the Ivy League. In this sense, it is difficult for them to consider adhering to openly conspiratorial, false or anti -ientive speeches which, by their massive and omnipresent character, would now come to constitute a “ state unreason »Dispensed from the oval office.
As concluded with irony Pierre Bourgois, the neocons of the second generation prove, just as much conservatives “ Realized by reality That their predecessors had been as liberals (Liberals). This brutal ideological telescoping today takes the form of a circumstantial rallying to a democratic opposition which does not seem to be sluggish and confused.
The collective springs of Trumpism
In conclusion, this brilliant intellectual genealogy of neoconservatism calls for other studies of political sociology, where it would be a question of analyzing, for example, how and to what extent the republican party “ Trumpized ».
Because, to borrow in the title of a collective work, The erosion of American democracy is ultimately not the fact of a single man. Behind Trump’s second electoral victory not only played an opposing economic context (marked by the rise in inflation), but also, deep collective springs, made of superstition (the supposed divine intervention during the missed attack of July 13, 2024), hidden agenda (the 2025 project of the Heritage Foundation), of media blindness (with regard to the real intentions of the boss of Spacex for example) or of unfair decisions – such as that taken by the Supreme Court in January 2010, which confirmed the plutocratic drift of the political system by suppressing, in the name of freedom of expression, any ceiling of electoral expenses. Again, it does not prevent the global responsibility of a republican party which has continued to radicalize in the past thirty years cannot be elected.