“Neoconservatism’s central defining characteristic is its repugnance to the genuine American conservative tradition. The views of [neoconservatives] would not only be unrecognizable as conservatism to anyone born before 1914, but…would have been repudiated with disgust by the leading figures in the first two generations of American history. The American tradition from the revolutionary period to the present has been fixated on the dangers of power, and on the tendency of power to corrupt. And it has been quite explicit on the kind of corruption it feared. Either the state apparatus would become an aristocracy in its own right, from the love of power and privilege, or it would function in the interests of an aristocracy of corporations and moneyed interests. Empire, to the revolutionary generation and the American mainstream up until 1941, was inconsistent with the survival of American constitutional traditions. Its concomitants, a large permanent military establishment and a powerful executive, were themselves great threats to liberty.”
(Kevin A. Carson, “Horowitz, Chomsky, and the Neoconservative Ideology“)
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