Liberalism’s Fifth Column

If the New Left put an indelible mark on the ’60s, the neoconservatives will surely become a major part of the image of the past ten years. Peter Steinfels’s anatomy of their ideology would be important if only because he documents this facet of recent history. But his analysis of neoconservative thought also alerts us to a significant aspect of our political life.

The first notes of the new conservatism began to be heard toward the end of the last decade in the Public Interest and the conspicuous emergence of today’s rightist Commentary. Although it is in part a reaction to the New Left, the roots of the new conservatism, as Steinfels points out, go back to the ’50s and such notions as &#...