Since Irving Kristol's death, there's been a lot of blogging about neoconservatism's legacy. I think this post from Andrew Sullivan on Kristol's view that there were "no enemies to the right" and Matthew Yglesias' post on how Kristol knowingly embraced faulty economics in order to help the right win elections gets to the core of what neoconservatism has ultimately become.
Democracy promotion, anti-communism, limited support for the welfare state -- ultimately all of the tenets of neoconservatism were subservient to the destruction of the enemy, foreign or domestic, by any means necessary, including outright deception. Because America is good and just by definition, nothing that the U.S. does that would be considered immoral is immoral when the U.S. does it, because it's ultimately in service to the greater good, which is U.S. hegemony.
This is how we go from anti-communism to being misled into war with Iraq, torturing those the U.S. suspects of being enemies, and Bill Kristol supporting Sarah Palin as a candidate for vice president. The core of neoconservatism is that nothing matters except for beating the other guy to a pulp, and no course of action taken in pursuit of that goal is immoral. It's just ironic that such a philosophy is generally understood as having grown out of a disgust with the "excesses of the left."
-- A. Serwer
