What would be your most charitable take on the neocon position? Especially interested because of the period when you came of age politically
The charitable case is its own utopian account of itself: we magnanimously export our own "regime type" to those suffering for its lack—wouldn't it be hypocritical to do otherwise?—with the added advantage that this revolution-from-above keeps up an appropriate level of both animal spirits and virtue in our own society, otherwise benumbed or demoralized by peace and plenty. And as much as Obama and Trump both enjoyed their political success partly because they opposed neoconservatism owing to the chaos it caused at home and abroad, they and their movements both succumbed to its logic at different times, e.g., the general Democratic Party approach to Russia in the last decade and of course the war in Iran now. This is especially true now that much of the cultural conservatism has dropped out of neoconservatism, with even Trump offering amid his myriad Iran justifications "we support gays," for example. The most coherent objection to neoconservatism was always paleoconservatism, i.e., a theory that regime types are determined by ethnoi and not to be recklessly interfered with either through warfare or migration (recall racialist Steve Sailer's mocking summary of the neocon position as "invade the world, invite the world"), while liberalism and socialism tend to just be "neoconservatism driving the speed limit," as it were, where they are not arguments for communitarian regression (degrowth, etc.) in disguise. We might say, if we reconceive wokeness as an offshoot of neoconservatism, "imperial blowback," the regime re-educating the chuds of Middle America the way it tried to re-educate Middle Eastern Muslims, that neoconservatism has been the most or only revolutionary ideology of the 21st century so far.
