Neoconservatism: Why We Need It

Kristol and his fellow thinkers came to believe not just that liberalism was not up to the job – that there were unbridgeable flaws in the liberal programme – but that the whole liberal world-view was faulty. It wasn’t that liberalism didn’t feel nice, or didn’t look nice; the problem was that it was wrong. By its consistent refusal to adequately condemn Nazism’s single moral equivalent in Russia, liberalism had shown that it possessed none of the attributes its name suggested. By undermining the society that was defending true liberal values from the threat of communist tyranny, it had shown its flaws and its deceits – Douglas Murray

What is wrong with liberalism is liberalism – a metaphysics and a mythology that is woefully blind to human and political reality – Irving Kristol

This ‘liberalism’ was simultaneously aiming for ‘political and social collectivism on the one hand, and moral anarchy on the other – Irving Kristol

At the root of many of these assumptions, on race, welfare, employment and other issues, lay the most mistaken rallying cry of liberals, ‘equality’ – Douglas Murray

…neoconservatives are united by specific and general objections to the post-60s western status quo, to increasing secularism, to illiberalism masquerading as liberalism, and to the destructive effects of the counter-culture. Implacably opposed to relativism, they invariably differ in what they believe the specific foundations of contemporary culture should be, but not in the belief that American society was better off and more itself when the common values of organised religion formed its bedrock – Douglas Murray