The overthrow of this old, crusty, opportunistic politician in favor of a younger, more charismatic, and more conservative candidate is what is needed in order for American conservatives to convince themselves and others that the neoconservative Republican is about to be relegated to the dustbin of history.

As Rachel Alexander recently reminded us, National Review has cast its vote for John McCain over J.D. Hayworth in Arizona's Republican primary race for the United States Senate. That a publication long recognized by friend and foe alike as the staple of American conservatism would endorse a politician like McCain definitively confirms what some of us have known for quite some time: National Review is decidedly and emphatically not a genuinely conservative outlet at all.

This isn't to say that there wasn't a time when it was. Yet for a great many years now NR — not unlike The Weekly Standard, Wall Street Journal, FOX news, and virtually all of so-called "conservative" talk radio — has become but an appendage to the Republican Party. To put this point a bit differently, NR is a venue, not for conservative, but neoconservative thought.

As I have argued in past articles, "neoconservatism" is not, as some of its more defensive exponents have asserted, a pejorative term; rather, it designates a distinctive political-moral orientation that differs in kind from conservatism as it has been traditionally understood by those over the centuries who have contributed to its self-image. The formal epistemological, moral, and political philosophical presuppositions underwriting neoconservatsm are the inheritance of what is fashionably referred to as "Enlightenment liberalism," "Enlightenment liberal Rationalism," or, as I prefer to say, just plain "Rationalism." The substantive policy prescriptions — particularly, his prescriptions regarding foreign policy — contributes in no small measure to the formation of the neoconservative's identity, but from the specific substance of those positions it is not at all difficult to discern a more or less internally self-consistent constellation of assumptions regarding the natures of reason, morality, and a modern state.

For one, the neoconservative shares with his eighteenth century forbearer the commitment to a conception of Reason on which the latter transcends, or at least could be made to transcend, all limitations of space and time. That is, neither the encumbrances of the Intellect thrown up by history nor those issued by culture are ultimately intractable, for all agents, if they will but avail themselves of this universally shared faculty — "a common power of rational consideration, which is the ground and inspiration of argument," as Michael Oakeshott described it — can access eternal verities that are Reason's province.

Secondly, these eternal truths — Reason's contents — are principles of morality. Such "principles" can be characterized in any number of terms — "Human Goods," "Human Rights," "Natural Law," "Natural Rights," "the Principle of Utility," "the Categorical Imperative," etc. — but the main point to be grasped here is that the neoconservative, like his rationalist counterparts of other political persuasions, thinks of morality primarily along the lines, not of tradition, habit, or custom, but of "principles," propositions that can be readily gathered up, packaged into an ideology, and explicitly articulated at any time and/or place.

Finally, the neoconservative wishes to see imposed upon the United States — as well as other states — the character of a community, an association all of whose members are related to one another in terms of their choice and sustained pursuit of a "common good," a substantive satisfaction or set of such satisfactions to the realization of which government is expected to lead (hence, the ubiquitous view of politicians as "leaders").

The neoconservative's zeal for not just revolution, but violent revolution throughout the Islamic Middle Eastern world; his uncompromising devotion to the prospect of deploying all of the resources that the American military has to afford in the prosecution of "the War on Terror," what even he never denies can't but be a "war" without end; his determination to labor without ceasing until "Democracy" is the only form of government left standing; his equation of "Democracy" with the substantive engagements of government, not the terms in which its office of authority is constituted; the rhetorical homage that he pays to "Limited Government" and his identification of the American order as a system of "Free Enterprise"; his insistence that the United States was consciously founded, not upon the wealth of resources of a culturally-specific northern, western European tradition centuries in the making, as well as the sorts of "accidents" — violence, ambition, corruption, etc. — from which no society has ever escaped, but an idea free of debt to the contingencies of time and place, "the proposition" that "All men are created equal"; his embrace of a potentially unlimited number of immigrants, legal and illegal, that are both utterly unfamiliar with the Eurocentric traditions that have made the United States the country that it is, and, to no slight extent, unwilling to become so; and his reticence to disengage himself from contributing toward the formation of the Welfare State (after all, wasn't this what "Compassionate Conservatism" was all about?), are all positions that rely inescapably upon the aforementioned formal beliefs regarding Reason, morality, and the character of a state.

Since this description of the neoconservative is intended to be impressionistic, not exhaustive, only on a misreading of it could anyone accuse me of attributing all of these positions to the neoconservative, and it is only a similar confusion that could account for anyone thinking that I ascribe them uniquely to him. I argue for a more modest claim, namely, that the neoconservative characteristically holds some such beliefs that are distinctive of his orientation.

Let me further say that while I reject neoconservatism, some of their ideas are less intolerable than others, and it is not altogether without value. In fact, there are contexts within which the neoconservative has done his country services of immeasurable worth. For example, he has fought gallantly against the Democrats' efforts to implement their socialist agenda (even if he is as much to blame for the trajectory upon which our country is currently traveling as is his leftist counterparts), and the neoconservative of FOX News and talk radio has done incalculable good in exposing the corruption and bias of left-leaning media while bringing to the public's attention news to which they would otherwise have remained obliviousness (even if he has more frequently than he would care to acknowledge given his own share of twists and turns in strengthening the Left's "politically correct" hold over the popular culture).

However, the point to be taken hold of here is twofold: first, neoconservatism is not only distinct from conservatism, the formal assumptions upon which its vision of the world depend are radically at odds with those on which classical conservatism has historically relied; secondly, the Republican Party, "the alternative media," and John McCain are neoconservatives.

But there is more.

There is no shortage of issues with respect to which the neoconservative Republican will compromise, but there is one issue and one issue alone regarding which he is inflexible: "the War on Terror," or what is sometimes alternatively, and more euphemistically characterized as "American Exceptionalism." Anyone — but especially anyone on his right — who dares to suggest that the American military is overstretched, or that America is in dire need of a new (possibly more "humble" foreign policy?) is persona non grata to the neoconservative.

This explains the shameful reception that the neoconservative supplied Ron Paul and, to a slightly less extent, his son Rand. And it explains just as persuasively, and just as powerfully, his refusal to turn his back on a hawk like John McCain.

A final note: the neoconservative's understanding of the United States was decisively, resoundingly repudiated in 2006 and 2008. Far from courting "moderates" and "independents," his "Compassionate Conservatism" — with its unprecedented expansion of government and its concomitant exorbitant expenditures on all manner of activity, from new prescription drug benefits programs, to federally subsidized embryonic stem cell research, from "faith-based initiatives," to "No Child Left Behind," from nation-building at home and abroad — only succeeded in driving scores of such voters away, along with a not insignificant portion of his own "conservative" base.

The neoconservative Republican now says that he has learned from his mistakes. Yet if he reelects John McCain, a career politician who more than any other emblematizes exactly that vision of the world and its politics for which the American electorate has long since lost its stomach, he will have vindicated his opponents' charges of insincerity and cynicism.

What this means is that the Arizona Republican primary has a significance that transcends its individual participants: by bestowing the Senate nomination on J.D. Hayworth, Arizonans will show, not necessarily that they love the latter, but that they are serious about cleaning up their house. The retiring of McCain by the Republicans of his home state, unlike any other act, will unmistakably convey to the country both that Republicans have indeed learned from their mistakes, and that they are resolved to insure that they don' replicate them ever again.

For the Obama administration and the Democrats I have nothing but contempt, but the notion that the America of 2010 is radically discontinuous with the America of the pre-Obama years is a piece of propaganda that has been invented by the neoconservative Republican in order to conceal the monumental role that he has played in pushing us to this juncture. McCain has been disastrous in so many ways. The overthrow of this old, crusty, opportunistic politician in favor of a younger, more charismatic, and more conservative candidate is what is needed in order for American conservatives to convince themselves and others that the neoconservative Republican is about to be relegated to the dustbin of history.