A generation ago Iriving Kristol declared that a neoconservative was a liberal who'd been "mugged by reality." After the past 4 years I don't know if we can say that anymore. It seems to me that the foreign policy of the hard-core neoconservatives is rather idealistic, a form of muscular Wilsonianism (I find the posturings of some the liberal hawks at The New Republic in the way they try to distinguish themselves from necons on foreign policy rather facile). The neocons descend from a group of intellectuals who were generally supportive of the New Deal, and even the Fair Deal. But they reacted negatively to the Great Society overreach of LBJ, and in the 1970s began formulating a realist response toward the social crises that emerged from the synthesis of The Great Disruption and the welfare state.

In response to the hard-headedness of the Right the Left half of the political spectrum seems to have generated three primary camps. Moderates, typified by the DLC and Bill Clinton in the latter half of the 1990s (i.e., the Welfare Reform Bill Clinton, not the Universal Healthcare Bill Clinton) accepted many of the criticisms of the neocons, and formulated a "Third Way" which attempted to mix & match conservative means with liberal ends. Others retreated into bizarre identity politics or fixed themselves on the political margins and became rather irrelevant (though the Nader campaign of 2000 was not irrelevant at all one could say). And of course there was the old bull post-Great Society liberalism still in play, typified by Ted Kennedy, serving as a counter-weight to the DLC moderates.

For the past generation it seems that many liberals have not only wanted to preserve the welfare state in its Great Society form (note the cries of betrayal during Welfare Reform), but they have fantasized about expanding the scope of government intervention. With no real possibility of implementation, as the moderate Democrats would block them within the party and they would receive no succor from the Republicans, dreams could spin out of control. Some on the Left still seemed to harbor the idea that all humans had infinite potentialities, that job training and universal college educations would free up the native genius of individuals. Skeptics of this panglossian perspective on human nature of course didn't buy into this program.

Then came G.W. Bush. In many ways Bush is a conservative, with his tax breaks and moderate social policies...but, in many ways he is not. The No Child Left Behind Act was to my mind Bush's inadvertant ploy to call the far Left's bluff, and raise them one. I have had personal experiences with many individuals who work in school systems, or around them, who can't believe the expectations that some children, and their teachers, are put under. I even talked to a woman who worked in the adminstrative wing of a school district, who tentatively supported the NCLBA because she told me, "...the students in this school district are doing really well, but a few kids are getting left behind, and they tend to be poor, minority...." In the Best of All Worlds no child can be left behind, no matter that they are drooling on the school carpet and need the special attention of two attendents to make sure that they don't mess their diapers too often.

I joked to a friend that for 25 years some liberals have been dreaming of a program that would send a crew of Down Syndrome adults to the moon, since with the right programs and right mind set, anyone can do anything! G.W. Bush agrees, and now liberals are having to figure out how they will actualize their dreams of Down Syndrome doctors and astronauts, using raw will power to drive themselves forward across the fields of self esteem.

Speaking of the attraction of many liberals pre-March 2003 to the Iraq War, Matthew Yglesias noted:

Packer, like a lot of liberal intellectuals, was essentially swept up in this wave of applause. But how much sense did this line of thinking ever make? Extremely little, it seems to me. Nobody who was actually being asked to put themselves on the line would find this reasonable. As I've said before, it's the equivalent of playing poker with someone else's money. When it's not you who needs to do the fighting, why not choose hope over wisdom?

In many ways the Iraq War project appealed to the idealism of many liberals. Who doesn't want to liberate a nation from a loathesome dictator? Who doesn't want to bring democracy to the masses? The neoconservative project fundamentally appealed to many liberals because of its idealism and high hopes for human nature. I was rather struck how many anti-war liberals had to engage in strange cognitive contortions to remain the idealists, they were the ones who really cared about those brown people. Arguments were made, and have been made, that from a utilitarian angle the Iraqis will have suffered more under the Americans than under the dictatorship. From a short term perspective, this might be true, but over the generation I think the Iraqis have really benefited quite a bit. I suspect that there will be long term The Mouse That Roared impacts. Nevertheless, fundamentally, this is going to be a hard slog. Many Americans have died, and we've spent a lot of money on this project. I'm not going to get into the details of whether the war is good or not, I'm skeptical, but not dogmatic about it, ultimately as long as too many Americans don't die and too much money doesn't get spent I don't care too much. But what I've been seeing, in glimmers and flickers, is that many liberals, like Yglesias, are transforming themselves into realists and rationalists. G.W. Bush's sunny optimism is something that revolts them on a visceral level. They can hate his idealism, ridicule it, express their naked contempt for his world building and policing ambitions, because he is a Republican. They can attack No Child Left Behind, mandatory testing, etc. because he is a Republican.

They've been mugged. Now let's see how this plays out.