Elite backlash forced the neocons’ unilateralist agenda underground in the 1990s

Evidence

Writing in the 1980s and ’90s, Samuel Francis—a polemicist who would eventually migrate to the very far right of American conservatism—identified this same rejection of democratic processes in the context of David Duke’s campaign for governor of Louisiana: “Reagan conservatism, in its innermost meaning, had little to do with supply-side economics and spreading democracy. It had to do with the awakening of a people who face political, cultural and economic dispossession, who are slowly beginning to glimpse the fact of dispossession and what dispossession will mean for them and their descendants, and who also are starting to think about reversing the processes and powers responsible for their dispossession.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 648 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The 1992 hegemony doctrine drew bipartisan establishment backlash — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 430; Elite rejection of the hegemonic DPG report marked neocons as premature in 1992; Neoconservative empire-building ideas were publicly ridiculed in 1992 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Modern conservative backlash stems from threatened groups fearing dispossession, not policy disagreement #complicates (0.72) — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 648