By Daniel Greenfield:
Like Michael Moore, neoconservatism hasn’t weathered the Obama and Trump years all that well.
Their hoary old vision of finishing the work of WWI by leveraging American power to spread democracy around the world was dead a decade ago. Never Trumpism has become an ideology of last resort for pundits and experts whose entire worldview had become as implausible as it was irrelevant.
Neoconservatives had made a significant contribution during the Cold War by keeping alive the idea that the world was divided between democracies and dictatorships. The idea was intellectually flawed, but it provided a moral center for our struggle with Communism. Its revival after 9/11 glaringly revealed the flaws of applying a philosophy meant for Japan, Germany or Russia, to the Muslim world.
Trump’s America First approach used national interest as the test for intervention. Some neoconservatives reacted as if he had walked into church and asked how much money he could get for being a believer. Nation-building, like free trade, was supposed to be an innate good. Practicing it would help everyone. Asking for the details of how the magic worked was heretical blasphemy.
Read more: Frontpage Mag
