In interviews and on the stump, Senator Ted Cruz likes to attack President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and “some of the more aggressive Washington neocons” for their support of regime change in the Middle East.
Every time we topple a dictator, Cruz argues, we end up helping terrorists or extremists.
He has a point. But what interests me is his use of the word “neocon.” What does he really mean?
Some see dark intentions. “He knows that the term in the usual far-left and far-right parlance means warmonger, if not warmongering Jewish advisers, so it is not something he should’ve done,” former George W. Bush advisor Elliott Abrams told National Review. Another former Bush adviser calls the term “a dog whistle.”
I think that’s all a bit overblown. Cruz is just trying to criticize his opponent Marco Rubio, who supported regime change in Libya. There’s little daylight between the two presidential contenders on foreign policy, and this gives Cruz an opening for attack.
But Abrams is right — and Cruz surely knows — that for many people “neocon” has become code for suspiciously Hebraic super-hawk. It’s an absurd distortion.
At first, neocons weren’t particularly associated with foreign policy. They were intellectuals disillusioned by the folly of the Great Society. As Irving Kristol famously put it, a “neoconservative is a liberal who was mugged by reality and wants to press charges.” The Public Interest, the first neoconservative publication, co-edited by Kristol, was a wonkish domestic-policy journal.
