Just as they did in the 2020 election, the neocon dissidents who once led the Republican Party are backing Democrat Kamala Harris for president.
The latest wave of the left-wing movement that took control of the Republican Party during the Reagan administration and reached the height of its power during the administration of President George W. Bush comes from about 200 Republicans you've never heard of.
They worked for President Bush 43 and on the legislative and failed campaigns of Sens. Mitt Romney and the late Sen. John McCain.
Open Letter
The open letter from Trump's opponents lists some powerful titles: “Finance Intern for Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney,” “White House Internet Director for President George W. Bush,” “USDA Communications Specialist for President George W. Bush,” “Office Director for Ann Romney (Romney 2012 Presidential Candidate),” “Scheduler/Executive Assistant to Senator John McCain,” and “Political Intern for Presidential Candidate McCain (2008 Presidential Candidate).”
That means Republicans would do well to listen, because the former intern, scheduler and internet director knows the direction the country needs to go — and that's the direction Harris and her left-leaning running mate, child sex abuse advocate Tim Walz, want to go.
“Four years ago, former colleagues of President George W. Bush, the late Senator John McCain and then-Governor Mitt Romney came together to warn Republicans that President Trump's reelection would be a disaster for our country,” the political giants wrote.
In these declarations, we stated the plain truth and predicted that four more years of President Trump would irreparably damage our beloved democracy. We made these announcements months before lies about election fraud became commonplace and six months before Trump incited an insurrection and cheered on a competitive mob of thugs and loyalists who sought to use force to overturn the will of the American people.
Now, this group is here again to “jointly declare that we will vote for Vice President Kamala Harris and Governor Tim Walz in November.”
The group “has many honest ideological disagreements with Vice President Harris and Governor Walz, but the alternative is simply unacceptable.”
Trump may advance the “dangerous goals” of the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, but they “will harm real, everyday lives and undermine our sacred institutions.”
But what's worse than that is that if Trump were to become president again, dictators around the world would run wild.
Overseas, democratic movements would be irreparably endangered as President Trump and his top adviser, J.D. Vance, turn their backs on our allies while kowtowing to dictators like Vladimir Putin. This cannot be allowed.
Translation: Trump threatens the neoconservatives' long-standing control of American foreign and military policy and adventurism abroad.
Greenwald's explanation
Before the letter was made public, Honest Left's Glenn Greenwald described what he called “one of the most remarkable political developments of the past eight years…the very vocal and visible transition of a group of people who in the Republican Party were called neo-cons to the Democratic Party.”
Many of the people who supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 and President Joe Biden in 2020 were affiliated with the administrations of George W. Bush 43 and Dick Cheney and were “extreme supporters of the war on terror who wanted torture, kidnapping and detention camps without due process,” Greenwald said on his System Update show.
These are the neocons who pushed for the invasion of Iraq before the 9/11 terrorist attacks and then used those attacks to justify intervention in the Middle East on Israel's behalf, including the hope of overthrowing Saddam Hussein in Iraq and invading Iran.
“These are people who believe war is always the answer, who support endless war, who see the world through a militaristic lens,” he said.
Support the War Party
But, he continued, they were Democrats, even hard-core leftists, before they became Republicans, and now that Trump has taken control of the Republican Party, they are returning home not just because they hate Trump, but because the party of Biden and Harris is now the party of permanent wars overseas, he said.
Greenwald noted that in her combative convention speech, Harris “consistently affirmed these core neocon worldviews about America's role in the world and the duties of the American president.”
The speech “was met with great acclaim from neoconservatives, who were ardent supporters of George Bush and Dick Cheney at the time, because they were the ones who were pursuing the neoconservative militarist agenda.”
He said neoconservatives haven't changed their views, but “they realize that whereas before, the Republican Party was the best vehicle for implementing this worldview, now the Democratic Party is the best vehicle.”
They think Trump might withdraw from NATO and stop supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia, which is why Harris is their candidate.
Greenwald continues.
Harris has given Democrats even more reason to be hopeful, because the foreign policy vision she presents could have come straight from the mouth of George Bush — and, indeed, it nearly did at the 2000 and 2004 Republican National Conventions, and John McCain at the 2008 convention.
Who are the Neocons?
Greenwald's observation leads me to reflect on a March 24, 2003, column by Pat Buchanan in The American Conservative, in which he described the March 20 invasion of Iraq as “the war party won the war.”
Buchanan recounted the history of neoconservatives and their home base in the far-left Democratic Party.
The first generation of neoconservatives, he writes, were “former liberals, socialists, and Trotskyists, sailors of the McGovern Revolution who drifted into the Republican Party at the end of conservatism's long march to the rise of Ronald Reagan in 1980.”
They were a snobbish class of sharp-headed intellectuals who “knew more about the inside of think tanks than they did about Abrams tanks.”
Their heroes are “Woodrow Wilson, President Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Martin Luther King, and Democratic Senators Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington and Pat Moynihan of New York.”
And, “They are all interventionists who see Stakhanovite support for Israel as a racial trait of their own.”
The speechwriter for former President Richard Nixon continued:
Their publications include The Weekly Standard, Commentary, The New Republic, National Review, and editorials in the Wall Street Journal. Though they are few in number, they wield disproportionate power through their control of conservative foundations and magazines, syndicated columns, and connections to powerful figures.
As the Cold War ended, these neoconservatives began searching for a new movement to give meaning to their lives, and on September 11, their moment came: they sought to use that horrific atrocity to channel American rage into all-out war to destroy their sworn enemies: Arab and Islamic “rogue states” who resisted American hegemony and hated Israel.
But as Greenwald points out, Trump and his supporters now dominate the Republican Party, threatening the neoconservatives' global ambitions.
So, these are letters from over 200 anonymous people.
