“After Election Day [1976], neoconservatism scored its major victory behind the scenes.
“The formerly Marxist immigrant Jews [who were] at the forefront of the movement had trained rigorously for political warfare in the hothouse ideological environment of the Depression, most famously in furious debates in the alcoves of the cafeteria of the City University of New York. They came of age in the passionate belief that Communism was the inevitable wave of the future. They still suspected this—only now they dedicated their lives to vanquishing it, for the survival of the West in the ongoing war for the world. Détente, they believed, was a fatal delusion. The ever-expanding cadres of quisling liberals within both parties, who refused to grasp that Communism was determined to conquer the world, were the Kremlin’s objective allies.
“They also still believed, as the had in their Marxist youth, that the most effective way to change history was to organize in subterranean cells, vanguardists guiding the hand of history by deploying the power of ideas. Thus did they burrow within the establishment to tutor Republican and Democratic politicians in these dire imperatives before it was too late.
“Washington conventional wisdom had not been kind to them: it held that the world was ‘multipolar,’ and ‘interdependent,’ rivalry between the Communist and capitalist worlds no longer the central concern, that after the debacle in Vietnam the United States could no longer act as the world’s policeman.”
–Rick Perlstein, Reaganland: America’s Right Turn 1976–1980 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020), 42-43.
