An excerpt:
>For conservatives, who yearned for and then celebrated socialism's
>demise, Clinton's promotion of free trade and free markets was
>anathema. Though conservatives are reputed to favor wealth and
>prosperity, law and order, stability and routine-all the comforts of
>bourgeois life-they hated Clinton for his pursuit of these very
>virtues. His quest for affluence, they argued, produced a society
>that lost its sense of social depth and political meaning. "In that
>age of peace and prosperity," David Brooks would write, "the top
>sitcom was Seinfeld, a show about nothing." Robert Kaplan emitted
>barb after barb in The Coming Anarchy about the "healthy, well-fed"
>denizens of "bourgeois society," too consumed with their own comfort
>and pleasure to lend a hand-or shoulder a gun-to make the world a
>safer place. "Material possessions," he concluded, "encourage
>docility" and a "lack of imagination." In an influential manifesto
>published in 2000, Donald and Frederick Kagan could barely contain
>their hostility for "the happy international situation that emerged
>in 1991," which was "characterized by the spread of democracy, free
>trade, and peace" and was "so congenial to America" with its love of
>"domestic comfort."
>
>Clinton's vision of a benign international order, conservatives
>argued, betrayed a discomfort with the murky world of power and
>violent conflict, of tragedy and rupture. "The striking thing about
>the 1990s zeitgeist," complained Brooks, "was the presumption of
>harmony. The era was shaped by the idea that there were no
>fundamental conflicts anymore." Conservatives thrive on a world of
>mysterious evil and unfathomable hatred, where good is always on the
>defensive and time is a precious commodity in the race against
>corruption and decline. Coping with such a world requires pagan
>courage and barbaric virtù, qualities conservatives embrace over the
>more prosaic goods of peace and prosperity. It is no accident that
>Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was a student of Allan
>Bloom (in fact, Wolfowitz makes a cameo appearance in Ravelstein,
>Saul Bellow's novel about Bloom); Bloom, like many other influential
>neoconservatives, was a follower of the political theorist Leo
>Strauss, whose quiet odes to classical virtue and harmonious order
>veiled his Nietzschean vision of torturous conflict and violent
>struggle.
>
>But there was another reason for the neocons' dissatisfaction with
>Clinton's foreign policy. Clinton, they claimed, was reactive and
>haphazard rather than proactive and forceful. He did not realize
>that the United States could shape rather than respond to events.
>Breaking again with the usual stereotype of conservatives as
>non-ideological muddlers, Wolfowitz, Libby, Kaplan, Richard Perle,
>Frank Gaffney, Kenneth Adelman, and the Kagan and Kristol father-son
>teams called for a more ideologically coherent projection of U.S.
>power. They insisted that the United States ought, as Cheney said
>during the first Bush administration, "to shape the future, to
>determine the outcome of history," or, as the Kagans would later put
>it, "to intervene decisively in every critical region" of the world,
>"whether or not a visible threat exists there." What these
>conservatives longed for was an America that was genuinely
>imperial-not just because it would make the United States safer or
>the world better but because they wanted to see the United States
>make the world, to create history.
>
>September 11 has given the neocons an opportunity to articulate,
>without embarrassment, this vision of imperial American power, which
>they have been quietly harboring for years. "People are now coming
>out of the closet on the word 'empire,'" Charles Krauthammer
>accurately observes. Unlike empires past, conservatives claim, this
>one will be guided by a benign goal: worldwide improvement. Because
>of America's sense of fair play and benevolent purpose, this new
>empire will not generate the backlash previous empires have
>generated. As a Wall Street Journal writer says, "We are an
>attractive empire, the one everyone wants to join." In the words of
>Rice, "Theoretically, the realists would predict that when you have
>a great power like the United States it would not be long before you
>had other great powers rising to challenge it. And I think what
>you're seeing is that there's at least a predilection this time to
>move to productive and cooperative relations with the United States,
>rather than to try to balance the United States." Imperial America
>will no longer have to "wait upon events while dangers gather," as
>President Bush put it in his 2002 State of the Union Address. It
>will now "shape the environment," anticipate threats, planning its
>empire not in terms of months or years, but in decades, perhaps
>centuries. The goal here is what Cheney first outlined in the early
>1990s: to ensure, through prediction and preemption, that no
>regional powers ever attain preeminence in their local theaters, and
>that no other power ever arises to challenge the United States.
>
>For conservatives, this is a heady time, a moment when their
>ambivalence about the free market-not about capitalism per se, which
>they refuse to challenge, but about the culture of capitalism, the
>elevation of buying and selling above political virtues like heroism
>and struggle-may finally be resolved....