As a young student of politics in the 1970s, Mark Lilla adored The Public Interest. The small-circulation public-policy journal had been founded in 1965 by Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell in the hope of, in Lilla's words, "injecting some sanity and empiricism into ideological controversies over social policy." The intellectual hallmark of The Public Interest was its insistence on thinking through the unintended consequences of government policy. (The magazine published its final issue in 2005.)

Lilla, a professor of the humanities at Columbia University, went to work as an editor at The Public Interest in 1980. He reflects on that experience in an essay in The New Republic that explains how he failed to realize then the magazine had already begun to betray its founding mission.

"And what happened on a small scale at the magazine then took place on a large scale within the growing Washington counterestablishment. A switch got flipped," Lilla writes, "and once it did, suites of offices were prepared for any 'resident fellow' who would reliably turn out research" that lent credence to policies advanced by the Republican Party.

Lilla's reflection is occasioned by the release of Jacob Heilbrunn's new book, They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons. (Read an interview with Heilbrunn about the book here.) While there are a raft of books, essays, and articles that advance one explanation or another for the neoconservative phenomenon, Lilla succeeds in injecting some fresh thinking into what has become a rather tired discussion. (Though perhaps readers disagree, and this post is merely an extension of that tired discussion. Nonetheless...)

Lilla situates neoconservatism within the larger historical sweep of intellectual and political reaction--a concept that has "done as much to shape Western history over the past two centuries as any revolution."Neoconservative reaction is a bit hard to trace, but Lilla begins by stressing how domestic and cultural issues initially trumped foreign-policy concerns among neoconservatives. But by the time of Vietnam, neoconservative thinkers began connecting some pretty disparate dots. For instance, this is how Lilla describes the way neoconservatives squeezed everything into a cogent ideology (in a "hall of mirrors" kind of way): 

In the neocon funhouse, the Vietnam War appears as the first skirmish in the culture wars, which can be directly linked to the Beatles' first LP and the subsequent rise in divorce rates, but of course also to the birth of academic postmodernism and Kissinger's surrender at Helsinki in 1975, which bear a direct relationship to anti-Zionism and Andres Serrano's Piss Christ, finally explaining why we were in Vietnam. It all connects.

In the process, Lilla writes, the neoconservatives forgot what they knew about the unintended consequences of political action, instead becoming solely consumed with confirming their own ideas about the world.