The Iraq war opened a fratricidal split among United States neo-conservatives. Danny Postel examines the bitter dispute between two leading neocons, Francis Fukuyama and Charles Krauthammer, and suggests that Fukuyama's critique of the Iraq war and decision not to vote for George W Bush is a significant political as well as intellectual moment.

Fukuyama's Moment: A Neocon Schism Opens | Open Democracy - 2006 |

Over the last two years, the term "neo-conservative" has come into sharper focus than at any other point in its roughly thirty-year history. The neo-conservative movement has exerted greater influence on United States foreign policy since 9/11 than it was ever previously able to do, the Iraq war being its crowning achievement.

Coinciding with this ascendancy has been an unrelenting stream of criticism directed at neo-conservatism, from virtually every square on the ideological chessboard. Such sorties have become something of a rallying-cry among much of the left. Neo-conservatives either ignore left-wing criticism (a luxury they can well afford) or else chew it up and spit it out: the more vitriolic it is, the more emboldened it makes them.

Some of the most savage reprisals against the neocons, however, have come from the right. I have written elsewhere of the ensemble of realists, libertarians, and "paleoconservatives" who opposed the Iraq adventure and the doctrines that justified it, and of other conservatives who fear that the neocons and their war will sink Bush's presidency.

Neo-conservatives are no less sanguine about attacks from this political direction: as if to say "bring it on", neocons are armed with counterattacks about the variously amoral, isolationist, nativist, unpatriotic, even anti-Semitic nature of the conservative cases against them.

So we got Trump instead of Hillary, succeeded by old man Joe. Far-right extremism and white-supremacy has taken a solid foothold from where there is no turning back. I have called it the rebirth of American fascism one hundred years later.

'Sapere aude'