Neoconservatives today dominate conservative think tanks and foundations; they have a major presence in the media; and they are entrenched in America’s universities. Well-known neoconservative intellectuals such as Michael Ledeen, William Kristol, and David Brooks are regular contributors to the National Review, Weekly Standard, and New York Times. They all appear frequently on Fox News and PBS. They are the public face of the conservative movement.

Given their high levels of prominence and productivity, how can the question of the death of their intellectual movement even arise?

C. Bradley Thompson and Yaron Brook, authors of the newly released Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea, have an answer, a rather complex one. In part, the subtitle of their book is ironic.  Their “obituary” might become a cause of death.

Thompson is the Executive Director of the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism, and the author of John Adams and the Spirit of Liberty. Brook is the executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute. They have attempted to produce the deepest and most comprehensive analysis of neoconservatism yet written. They begin with a puzzle. Leading neoconservatives deny that neoconservatism is a political philosophy. Neoconservatives instead have called their approach a “persuasion” or “mood,” thus disarming serious critics.

The neoconservatives do offer a “philosophy of governance.” The general character of that “philosophy” is now clear. It is a set of ideas that includes a rejection of fixed ethical and political principles in favor of beliefs such as: amoral political “prudence” (Machiavellianism); “moderation” (strengthening the state through gradualism and compromise); and pragmatically “coping” with situations as they arise short-term. These guidelines are for the rulers, the statesmen. What will common people follow? Whatever religious and customary rules happen to prevail at a particular time and place, say the neoconservatives, who have illustrated their point with tolerance for an Islamic constitution in Iraq’s new regime won with American blood and treasure.

One consequence of that cynical view of morality is a “third-way” politics. Neoconservatives want to combine socialism as their end with capitalism as their means of paying for it. Neoconservatives therefore support the welfare state, but differ from liberals mostly in wanting to make it more fiscally responsible and sustainable. David Brooks’s support for massive federal bailouts is an example. The label “conservative welfare state” comes from Irving Kristol (1920-2009), the “godfather” of the movement. To appease supporters of capitalism within the Republican Party, the neoconservatives offer the palliative of “free-market solutions” to social problems, but the solutions are not free market at all. They leave the state in charge.

“Neoconservatives,” Thompson and Brook observe, “agree with the underlying moral principles of the socialists; they disagree merely over the best means to achieve their shared ends.” The core of their ethics is altruism, the doctrine of self-sacrifice for the sake of a “higher” cause. For example, to achieve “national greatness,” the neoconservatives say, government should play an active and decisive role in shaping the nature and direction of a nation as an organic whole; in controlling education as a major means to that end; and in expecting individuals to sacrifice themselves — their property, their time, and even their lives — for “the nation.” Such a political philosophy, Thompson and Brook show, goes against the grain of Americanism, by which the authors mean a stream of Jeffersonian ideas such as individualism and government serving only as a night watchman, not as a shepherd of our lives in a collective.

A more descriptive title for Thompson and Brook’s book might have been “Neoconservatism: Its Philosophical Nature, Historical Roots, and Poisonous Fruit.” Thompson and Brook delimit their in-depth study to those neoconservatives influenced by Irving Kristol, who in turn was deeply influenced by the political philosopher, Leo Strauss.

Having shown the political philosophy of neoconservatism, the question of historical origins arises. If the neoconservative philosophy came from Strauss, where did Strauss get it? The authors examine new evidence to show that the philosophical grandfather of neoconservatism was immersed in and largely agreed with the basic principles that were common in Germany during the Weimar Republic (1919-1932), when Strauss was a student there. Strauss rejected the anti-semitism and barbarism of the Nazis but agreed with elements of the generalized fascism common in that time among European intellectuals. Strauss added what he said were the classical virtues of “prudence” and “moderation” in applying those principles. Go slowly, go softly. Irving Kristol and other neoconservatives took the next step of appearing to Americanize the notions of national crusades to unite the citizenry, sacrifice for the group, and the state as a parent to the common man.

Throughout their book, the authors compare neoconservatism to another stream of conservatism, one tied closely to the Founders of the Republic. That stream is variously known as classical liberalism, Goldwater conservatism, and Jeffersonian republicanism. “In conclusion,” Thompson and Brook say, “the neoconservatives are the false prophets of Americanism, and neoconservatism is America’s Trojan horse. Those who wish to defend America’s Enlightenment values and the individual-rights republic created by its revolutionary Founders must therefore recapture from the neocons the intellectual and moral high ground that once defined the promise of American life.”

No, neoconservatism is not dead. Its advocates may be temporarily out of federal power, but the intellectual movement is very much alive in journals, books, institutions, and individuals who carry its ideas forward. However, Thompson and Brook’s book — which exposes neoconservatism’s previously hidden nature to a harsh light — may be a step toward the movement’s demise. With the principles of neoconservatism’s philosophy finally articulated and systematized, the Jeffersonians in the conservative movement can now confront their opponents in open debate.

Burgess Laughlin, a publications manager long retired from the electronics industry, is the author of The Power and the Glory: The Key Ideas and Crusading Lives of Eight Debaters of Reason vs. Faith.