The Neo-Centrist Alliance

This passage from Christopher Hitchens’ new Vanity Fair piece about the intra-Republican civil war really stuck with me. (No link, not online.)

It’s not the only attack from the old right that describes the neocons as Johnny-come-latelies: chancers who had changed their party allegiance just in time to catch the Reagan tide, but who remained liberals and cosmopolitans under the skin. Indeed, William Kristol has proved Buchanan’s point, by telling The New York Times that, if pushed, by which he clearly meant “in any case,” he would prefer an alliance with liberal hawks to one with anti-war Republicans.

Sometimes I wish the neos could form their own party: the neo-liberals and neo-conservatives against the Democrats and the Republicans. Not gonna happen, I know. But that is the “party” I feel like I belong to these days.