Norman Podhoretz, senior fellow, Hudson Institute, and editor of Commentary from 1960 to 1995, delivered the fifth in AEI's 1995-1996 Bradley Lecture Series January 16, 1996 in Washington, D.C. Excerpts follow.

My title, "Neoconservatism: A Eulogy," implies that neoconservatism is dead. But is it? There are those who think that neoconservatism is still very much with us, including the so-called paleoconservatives, who have long regarded it as a vehicle for moving the Republican Party leftward, as well as liberals, who see it as the driving force behind everything symbolized by the name of Newt Gingrich. My argument is this: although neoconservatism no longer exists as a distinctive phenomenon requiring a name of its own, its enemies have no reason to rejoice--the legacy that neoconservatism has left behind will continue to plague them for a long time.

Neo suggests that neoconservatism was a new kind of conservatism, and so it was. The term entered into widespread usage in the late 1960s, when it was applied to a group of intellectuals who had begun voicing doubts about the leftist ideas and policies they themselves had helped to develop in the years just past.

The newness of neoconservatism began with the people who made up this movement: former liberals and even radicals who were, in Irving Kristol's famous phrase, "mugged by reality." Many of these ex-radicals were New York intellectuals of Jewish birth, while many of the liberals were Gentiles, such as James Q. Wilson, Daniel P. Moynihan, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Michael Novak, who initially rejected the label neoconservative as a pejorative.

The neoconservatives brought something new to conservatism besides their own persons. In domestic policy, they dissociated themselves from positions that had marked American conservatism since the days of the New Deal. They were not for abolishing the welfare state but for setting limits that would be guided by practical considerations of the precise point at which the incentive to work was undermined by the availability of benefits. And whereas the older conservatives were uniformly hostile to labor unions, the neoconservatives remained as friendly to the labor movement as they had been in their days on the Left. Some of this may have been rooted in the working-class background of many neoconservatives, but perhaps the most important reason was the fact that the leadership of the labor movement was so staunchly anti-Communist.

The older conservatives were ardently anti-Communist as well, but they tended to worry less about outside aggression than internal subversion. Few businessmen had ever met a Communist. Some of them seemed to think that the Soviet Union was one huge regulatory agency--a gigantic Federal Trade Commission with nuclear weapons--which was about as close as they could come to an image of absolute evil. By contrast, the neoconservatives all had firsthand experience with Communism and knew it for the totalitarian evil it was.

If anti-Communism was the ruling passion of the neoconservatives in foreign affairs, opposition to the counterculture was their ruling passion at home. Indeed, I suspect that revulsion against the counterculture accounted for more converts to neoconservatism than any other single factor. Here, too, the neoconservatives enjoyed a great advantage over other conservatives in being intimately familiar with modernist literature, avant-garde art, and bohemian libertinism, on which many of them had themselves cut their cultural teeth.

In looking over this list of things that made neoconservatism new and different, it becomes obvious that it no longer exists as a distinctive phenomenon. Not only are its founders now old enough to have spawned two generations of successors, but their ideas have also been losing their ideological distinctiveness. By now, most neoconservatives have given up on the welfare state, even if they disagree with other conservatives over the most humane way to phase out this or that of its features. With regard to affirmative action, the older conservatives came around to the neoconservative position that every person should be treated as an individual, not as the member of a group.

In foreign affairs, neoconservatism has not so much lost its distinctiveness within the larger conservative community as its own internal identity. While the end of the cold war has led to a resurgence of isolationism among some older conservatives, if there is a neoconservative extant who has become an isolationist, I do not know his name. At the same time, only a handful of neoconservatives still support the kind of expansive interventionism that grew out of anti-Communist passions at the height of the cold war. It has become impossible to define a neoconservative position on, say, Bosnia, NATO expansion, or dealing with China.

Unlike the cold war, the culture war rages on. But it has moved into a new phase in which the single most salient issue is abortion; on that issue, a clear neoconservative position is as hard to define as it is in foreign affairs. And while most neoconservatives do seem to differ from other conservatives on the question of immigration, that issue is not important enough to bring neoconservatism back to life.

Having been a neoconservative for so long that I ought perhaps to be called a paleoneoconservative, I have good reason to mourn its passing. And yet its death seems to me more an occasion for celebration than for sadness, for what killed neoconservatism was not defeat but victory.

It is obvious that the conservative revolution has only just begun.--

Neoconservatism came into the world to combat the radical lies of the 1960s. More passionately and more effectively than any other group, the neoconservatives undertook the job of rebuilding intellectual and moral confidence in the values and institutions on which American society rests. Driven by their anti-Communist passions and ideas, they urged a more determined resistance to Soviet power to encourage the forces of disintegration that had become visible within the empire itself. Admittedly, the neoconservatives were as surprised as everyone else by the speed with which the Soviet Union collapsed. But it was they who had held out the promise of precisely such a collapse as the ultimate reward of the policies they advocated.

We can also say that the neoconservative defense of traditional values against the assaults of the counterculture ended with a victory that, in its own way, resembled the victory of the West over Communism in the cold war. Who today shies away from the word capitalism, celebrates free and easy sex, or promotes drugs as the gateway to a higher consciousness?

Yet my intention here is not to adopt a triumphalist tone or to suggest that there is no work left to do. On the contrary, it is obvious that the conservative revolution has only just begun. But in contrast to the days of the neoconservative ascendancy, the philistine indifference to culture that once pervaded the conservative movement is largely gone. Everyone is now so fully alive to the importance of the cultural realm that there is less need for a distinctive neoconservative contribution.

And so it is a time not for mourning but for rejoicing the great victories that cleared the way and set the stage for other great victories in the years to come. And in those future victories, the legacy and the legatees of neoconservatism will play as indispensable a part as the neoconservatives themselves did in achieving the victories of the past.