ABSTRACT
In 1950, one of the key forerunners of American neoconservatism expressed the judgment with withering finality. Peter Viereck urged that America deserves a more sophisticated and genuinely American conservatism than this. The American conservatism that is needed would seek to conserve American traditions and social institutions that actually exist, he contended. A genuine American conservatism would be a new thing that defended the actually existing American establishment from its various critics. In the early 1960s the very currents that he sought to define out of American conservatism consolidated instead to become a dominant force in Republican Party politics, making Barry Goldwater the party’s presidential nominee. Neither America nor neoconservatism needed a world mission that transcended America’s economic and security interests. Neoconservatives pushed hard for Jackson in the 1976 Democratic primaries, but they gave short shrift to the moderate Southern moralist who won the party’s nomination.
