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ABSTRACT
With the recent release of his autobiographical narrative of the composition of the papal biography, Witness to Hope, prominent Catholic neoconservative George Weigel has invited a reexamination of the presentation of John Paul II to the world by Catholic neoconservatives. In his biographies, George Weigel crafts an often misleading portrait of Pope John Paul II as the pope of American liberalism and neoconservativism. Ironically, at the same time, the story of Weigel's biographies contains the story of the rise and fall of the Catholic neoconservative movement in America.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Jesse B.B. Russell is the author or a number of articles on twentieth-century Catholic political thought as well as works on the poetry of Edmund Spenser.
Notes
1 G.W. Hegel, Letter to Niethammer, October 13th, 1806.
2 While the term, “neoconservative,” can be used as an insult by those on both the left and the right, one of the principal Catholic neoconservatives, George Weigel, proudly appropriates the term for the movement in his essay, “The Neoconservative Difference.” For Weigel, what distinguishes Catholic neoconservatives from those Catholics who identify as “traditionalists” is the neoconservatives’ openness to those aspects of “modern intellectual life in which they have discerned openings to the transcendent,” 139. Although he attempts to deflect accusations that Catholic neoconservatives have attempted to shift Catholic thought (and the Catholic vote) in the direction of neoconservative economic and foreign policy, Weigel does imply that neoconservativism is fundamentally an attempted rapprochement between Catholicism and a specific strand of American liberalism that has its roots in the writings of Fr. John Courtney Murray SJ, or, as Weigel himself puts it, “the neocons have in fact taken up the … fundamental intellectual challenge laid down by John Courtney Murray, S.J., thirty-five years ago, namely, to devise a religiously grounded moral philosophy for the American experiment in ordered liberty,” 139. While not always acknowledged, the neoconservatives have intellectual roots in the French NeoThomists Jacques Maritain and Yves R. Simon in addition to Murray. However, as some scholars have noted, certain leftward trends in Maritain and Simon's thought are radically at odds with the neoconservative project. For discussion of the variance between neoconservativism and NeoThomism, see Thomas Rourke, A Conscience as Large as the World. For the leftward trends of Jacques Maritain's thought, see Bernard Doering, Jacques Maritain and the French Catholic Intellectuals. Similar to the claims of neoconservative godfather George Weigel himself, in The Smoke of Satan, Michael W. Cuneo suggests that Catholic neoconservatives are “considerably less antagonistic … toward the democratic and pluralistic ethos of American culture” than “traditional” Catholics, 189. For recent criticism of the Catholic neoconservatives, see Gary Dorrien's “Interrogating Neoconservative Religion” and Dennis Deslippe, “For Faith and Free Markets.”
3 Again, rather than shirking his status as a latecomer and, to a certain extent, outsider to the older inner core of first and second generation neoconservatives, in his recent autobiographical work, Lessons in Hope: My Unexpected Life with John Paul II, Weigel boasts of being introduced as a younger journalist to the
the first and second-generation leaders of what came to be known as ‘neconservativism,’ a largely Jewish network of thinkers who intersected at key points with Catholics and about-to-be Catholics who had also broken with the American political left for a variety of reasons … , 20.
4 The Bible of Catholic neoconservative economic thought is Michael Novak's The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. See also, among his many books, Novak's Business as a Calling. In a more recent essay, Novak summarizes his definition of “democratic capitalism” to which he devoted his colored life to promoting: “Democratic capitalism, therefore, is a system of three liberties: political liberty, economic liberty, and liberty in religion and conscience, in arts and in science, and in cultural expression,” “The Future of Democratic Capitalism: Why We Need to Renew Our Moral and Cultural System.”
5 Among the many articles in First Things Magazine, the flagship publication of the Catholic neoconservatives, George Weigel's “Just War and Iraq Wars,” penned at the height of the 2007 “surge,” is the most (in)famous. In The Neoconservatives, Peter Steinfels describes the Catholic neoconservatives’ rise to power:
Despite the consequent tensions with the hierarchy, Neuhaus, Novak, and Weigel eventually found receptive listeners in papal circles and among the growing number of conservative bishops that Pope John Paul II began elevating in the mid eighties. (Weigel wrote the quasi-authorized biography of John Paul). Convening seminars, publishing manifestos, battling against anything that appeared hostile to traditional religion and its moral norms, the religious neoconservatives could justly claim an influence stretching from megachurch evangelists to the White House and even the Vatican, xx.
6 In the 1980s, the Catholic neoconservatives attempted both to battle liberation theology in Latin America and to combat the pacifistic direction of the American Catholic hierarchy, encapsulated in their 1983 pastoral letter, “The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response.” Weigel's first major work, Tranquillitas Ordinis, argued in support of Reagan Era nuclear proliferation and American world hegemony as being consistent with the just war tradition established by St. Augustine of Hippo. In the 1990s, the Catholic neoconservatives continued to battle liberation theology as well as remnants of right wing Catholic thought in central and South America with works such as Michael Novak's Will It Liberate? and his This Hemisphere of Liberty. George Weigel largely served the role of defending the Persian Gulf War, which was opposed by many in the Church, including John Paul II. See Weigel's work with James Turner Johnson, Just War and the Gulf War.
7 Capitalizing on the success of the neoconservative appropriation of the American reception of John Paul II's complex and nuanced economic encyclical, Centesimus Annus, Michael Novak's Business as a Calling is largely a meditation on John Paul's writings in which Novak attempts to recruit the Polish pontiff as a spokesperson for Novak's own person economic policy. See a similar effort in Fr. Neuhaus's Doing Well and Doing Good, and the collection of essays edited by George Weigel in A New Worldly Order.
8 A work that deals with Catholic neo-conservativism as decidedly political phenomenon is Todd Scribner. A Partisan Church.
9 These works are often colored by bitter personal rivalry. Damon Linker, a former staff member of First Things wrote the hysterically titled The Theocons. See also Chris Hedge's American Fascists. While marketing itself as a “conspiracy” book released after fears of Evangelical political power had crested during the presidency of George W. Bush, Jeff Sharlet's The Family provides a rough but at times brilliantly detailed and narrated sketch of the rise of the conservative American evangelical political power in America that was so intimately intertwined with neoconservative thought.
10 In an interesting essay titled “Christianity, Judaism, Socialism,” originally published in 1979, Irving Kristol acknowledges that Christians have traditionally “despised business,” one of the many hindrances, in Kristol's view, to Christianity's application to the practical world … ,” The Neoconservative Persuasion, 429, 430. Nonetheless, in another 1979 piece, “The Adversary Culture of Intellectuals,” Kristol argues in favor of the “Judeo-Christian” tradition, which in a liberal society acts as “the Old Testament to the new evangel of liberal, individualistic capitalism,” supplying it “with a moral code for the individual to live by, and which also enabled the free individual to find a transcendental meaning in life … ,” The Neoconservative Persuasion, 121. Norman Podhoretz, especially in his 2009 Why are Jews Liberals? attempts to make the case that the “new religious right,” trumpeted by Richard J. Neuhaus in his 1984 Naked Public Square, was at least a safer home for Jews than the left – largely because of the new Christian Right's support of Israel and the New Left's broad based support of the Palestinian people. Podhoretz is, however, quick to note that among Paleocons and traditional Catholics such as Joseph Sobran, Patrick Buchanan, and Thomas Fleming there was an open hostility to Israel and a suspicion toward Jews in the West – Podhoretz has an entire chapter to “The Case of Pat Buchanan.”
11 As it became clear during the 2016 Republican primary that Donald Trump would become the nominee, neoconservative thinkers, George Weigel and Robert P. George penned in The National Review, “An Appeal to Our Fellow Catholics.” This attempt to prevent conservative Catholics from voting for Trump was largely unsuccessful. Sixty percent of white Catholics voted for Donald J. Trump in the 2016 election.
12 In Lessons in Hope, Weigel remarks that St. Mary's introduced him to “the adventure of disciplined abstraction,” 10.
13 17–18.
14 Novak stood as the Catholic voice for peace with the Protestant Robert McAfee and Jewish Abraham J. Heschel in Vietnam: Crisis of Conscience.
15 See Novak's 1970 Naked I Leave. For better or worse, like the other Catholic neoconservatives, Novak could never be called prudish.
16 There is, in fact, a third thread to Weigel's unclear description of how Weigel came to write Witness to Hope. Weigel claims to have been scouted out in the early 90s by John Paul II's “efficient personal intelligence network,” which was keeping abreast of Weigel's attempt to “explain” John Paul to “an American audience,” 40. In Lessons in Hope, Weigel explains that he and fellow Catholic neocon, the late Fr. Richard J. Neuhaus, were personally invited by Stanisław Dziwisz to dinner at which John Paul II, after some inspired musing, encouraged Weigel to write the biography. Weigel pairs this narrative with a story of how he met with Joaquín Navarro-Valls to “have a chat” on who should respond to Tad Szulc's biography in a way that would “get the job done properly,” 86. As a final touch, Weigel provides the “The Mandatum Scribendi” from John Paul II that indicates that John Paul gave his “wholehearted thanks and encouragement” to Weigel's biography of the Polish pope, 97–98.
17 Weigel was quick to counter the arguments of Szulc's with an article, “The Biography that Might Have Been,” which Weigel wrote in 1995 for the neoconservative journal Crisis, founded by Michael Novak and neoconservative Thomist Ralph McInerney, Weigel explains in Lessons in Hope his need to counter “Szulc's ready acceptance of the standard caricature of John Paul II as socially progressive and theological reactionary” with Weigel's own portrait of the pontiff as a man amenable to neoconservative ideology, 84.
18 In A Pope and a President, the neoconservative thinker Paul Kengor uses John Paul II's alleged liberalism and image as the American pope to rework the traditional Catholic devotion to Our Lady of Fatima. Instead of the Virgin Mary's prophecies announcing an eventual victory of the Catholic Church over secularism, the prophecies of Our Lady of Fatima, become, in Kengor's view, the story of the triumph of American liberalism under Ronald Reagan over Soviet Communism. Likewise neoconservative John O'Sullivan crafts an image of John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan as a triumvirate for liberal democratic capitalism in The Pope, the President and the Prime Minister.
19 The number of both scholarly and inspirational books, in addition to newspaper, magazine, and academic articles, written on the life and work of John Paul II by American Catholics is almost overwhelming.
20 The German theologian Hans Kung has been a constant critic of John Paul II's. In an interview in the Frankfurter Rundshau, Kung argued that John Paul II, because of his allegedly reactionary policies, should not be canonized as a model for Christians, "Johannes Paul taugt nicht als Vorbild." Elsewhere, Kung, while recognizing the “good intentions” of John Paul, argues that the pope put a “brake” to the reforms begun at Vatican II, The Catholic Church, 191, 192.
21 See, for example, Christopher Ferrara and Thomas Wood's The Great Façade.
22 Weigel prides himself on his special relationship with John Paul II and ridicules those “Vatican ‘insiders,’ who more often than not were low-level curial bureaucrats with no access to serious information,” The End and the Beginning, 299.
23 Describing a recent visit to Poland, Weigel expresses his horror at “how poorly John Paul II's intellectual project had been received and internalized in Poland … ,” for the Church in Poland has remained, even in the twenty-first century, a very “partisan” and illiberal Church, Lessons in Hope, 337.
24 Weigel, God's Choice, 85. Weigel likewise seeks to rehabilitated the image of “JPII cool” in Lessons in Hope, writing that John Paul II's heroic opposition to Communism will always be remembered with his image as “a daredevil skier careening down a mountain in the Tatras,” 313.
25 Weigel, The End, 41.
26 Weigel himself invites comparison of JPII with Lincoln and Churchill in The End and the Beginning and even takes a shot at Catholic traditionalist and American paleocon Patrick Buchanan's book on Churchill's alleged responsibility for the Second World War, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. Weigel writes, “Churchill ranks as one of the few men in history who can be called saviors of civilizations as well as of countries is not much in dispute, save among cranks … ,” 402. Weigel had made a comparison between the deaths of Churchill and John Paul II in the new preface to the updated 2005 edition of Witness to Hope, stating “Reaching for historical analogies, some proposed that not since Winston Churchill's death in 1965 had the entire world had such a common sense of an epic life come to an end,” ix.
27 Weigel writes that John Paul's magisterium constitutes “what may be the most consequential and influential body of papal teaching since the Reformation – and perhaps in the entire second millennium of Christian history,” God's Choice, 32. John Paul II seemed to have some understanding of himself as living in a fortuitously apocalyptic time. John Paul II speaks of the late twentieth century as “a season of a new Advent” in his first papal encyclical, Redemptor Hominis (1979). In his 1994 encyclical Tertio Millenio Adveniente, John Paul also writes of a “new springtime of Christian life,” which may arrive in the 2000 Jubilee Year. Similar apocalyptic optimism can be found in John Paul II's 2001 apostolic letter, Novo Millenio Ineunte.
28 God's Choice, 35.
29 The reception of John Paul II's Centesimus Annus in the United States is highly deserving of a narrative all in itself. However, in Lessons in Hope Weigel lets the reader know that it was Italian politician Rocco Buttiglione who is the one who pushed John Paul II to give a Centesimus seemingly pro capitalist slant and to reject the draft of Centesimus that the Pontifical Council for Justice and the Peace composed, by informing the pope, ‘This is not the way the economy works today and it isn't the way it will work tomorrow,” 42. Weigel's further description of the l’affaire Centesimus is worth quoting in full:
Rocco then helped John Paul, who never had a bank account and had long lived outside everyday life, understand that there might be economic laws roughly analogous to the natural moral law: meaning that some things worked economically because those things cohered with human nature, and some things didn't work economically because they cut against human nature. (42)
30 God's Choice, 48.
31 John Paul II's liberalism was rooted in his personalist-phenomenological and existentialist philosophy, which emphasized the freedom of the human person. Although he studied under the “conservative” Thomist, Fr. Garrigou- Lagrange, O.P., John Paul II's thought, while retaining some aspects of St. Thomas Aquinas's philosophy, has much more in common with the writings of NeoThomists such as Jacques Maritain, Yves R. Simon, and, to a certain degree Étienne Gilson. John Paul's major philosophical works (as Karol Wojtya) in English include The Acting Person and Love and Responsibility. For discussion of John Paul II's personalism in relation to human liberty, see Jaroslaw Kupczak, Destined for Liberty.
32 “Welcome Ceremony: Address of the Holy Father John Paul II, Logan Airport, Boston, Monday, 1st October 1979.”
33 105.
34 For many of the neoconservatives, liberal democracy is a sacrosanct political form, and John Paul II is the saint of this sytem. In The God that Did Not Fail, Robert Royal pairs John Paul II with Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and even Alexander Solzhenitsyn as being among “the main leaders” of the resistance to Soviet Communism “who had deep convictions about Christianity … ,” 258. It is not as though Royal is wrong in his assessement of these men and women's faith or their noble resistance to Soviet Communism; it is that, in the writings of the Catholic neoconservatives, a specific form of liberal democracy becomes enshrined as the new official political system of Catholic Christianity. Robert George writes even more strongly of democracy in his work In Defense of Natural Law.
35 Witness, 842.
36 Drawing from George Weigel's biographies by name, John O'Sullivan in The President, the Pope and the Prime Minister, argues that “both religious freedom and ecumenism were logically derived from the ‘Christian humanism’” of John Paul II, 7.
37 Suro, “Pope, on Latin Trip, Attacks Pinochet Regime.”
38 For expressions of neoconservative hope that Latin America would embrace a neoconservative political vision and skirt the neocon projected Scylla and Charybdis of fascism and liberation theology, see Michael Novak's works Will it Liberate? and This Hemisphere of Liberty.
39 As Catholic journalist John Allen notes in The Francis Miracle, John Paul continued to critique the capitalism championed by the neoconservatives late into his papacy.
40 Witness, 226.
41 Witness, 154.
42 Witness, 164.
43 Witness, 296. In his dismissal of Ostpolitik, the (in Weigel's view largely unsuccessful) attempt to establish friendly rapport with the Soviet Union by Pope Paul VI and Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, in Lessons in Hope, Weigel asks, “How could the ‘post-Constantinian’ papacy emerging from Vatican II and the pontificate of John Paul II be both a player in the game of power and a moral witness?,” 250. The answer, of course, for Weigel and the other Catholic neoconservatives is adopt the principles of Weigel's own, following Fr. John Courtney Murray, Jacques Maritain and other, reading of American liberalism channeled into neoconservative foreign and domestic policy.
44 Witness, 552.
45 Witness, 847. A typical example of this preference for religious freedom over the Church's influence can be found in Weigel's celebration of John Paul II's revision of the Lateran treaty in 1984: “Roman Catholicism was no longer considered the official religion of the Italian state, religious education in state schools became optional, and clergy subsidies from the state were to end by 1990,” Witness, 476.
46 For recent discussion of John Paul II as the pope of classical liberalism, see Edward Barrett, Persons and Liberal Democracy.
47 God's Choice, 241.
48 The End, 257.
49 Witness, 268.
50 Paraphrasing Cardinal Franciszek Marcharski, Weigel sees Poland, due to alleged seeds of liberalism present in Medieval and Early Modern Krawók, as being especially “well prepared by its history … to appreciate Vatican II's Declaration on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis Humanae,” 60.
51 Witness, 164.
52 God's Choice, 46.
53 God's Choice, 48.
54 Witness, xx. Weigel traces part of John Paul's affection for democracy to his reading of Jacques Maritain's “moral defense of democracy as the modern method of government most reflective of human dignity,” Witness, 139. For Weigel, Catholicism and American (or at least American-friendly) liberal democracy are inseparably paired. In Lessons in Hope, Weigel argues that it was “ … Catholic and democratic solidarity” saved Eastern Europe, 68.
55 Witness, 349.
56 Ibid.
57 Witness, 237.
58 “In the late 20th century, John Paul II deepened the analysis by arguing that the moral core of this universal common good is composed of basic human rights, including the first right, the right of religious freedom,” God's Choice, 223.
59 Witness, 585.
60 God's Choice, 29.
61 The End, 127.
62 Ibid.
63 The End, 84.
64 The President, the Pope and the Prime Minister, 181.
65 163.
66 Witness, 1.
67 Witness, 458.
68 Witness, 6.
69 The End, 73.
70 Witness, 233.
71 Witness, 603.
72 Witness, 610.
73 Witness, 617.
74 In Lessons in Hope, Weigel describes an interesting conversation with Charles Krauthammer he had after the fall of the Berlin Wall in December of 1989 in which Weigel explained that the neocons would be very busy for the future: “I told him that I imagined there would be plenty to keep us occupied, as I didn't buy Francis Fukuyama's ‘end of history’ thesis and was confident that ‘history’ had a few surprises left in her pocket,” 39.
75 The Project for a New American Century, “Statement of Principles.”
76 Weigel rhetorically asks
Was there some connection between this internal European debate over Europe's constitution-making and the events that caught the attention of American headline writers and TV news anchormen – the harsh words between Europeans and Americans over Iraq; the portrait in the European press of Americans (and especially an American president) as religious fanatics intent on shooting up the world; the vastly different respect afforded the United Nations by Europeans and Americans. (5)
77 In the afterward to the 2009 edition, Weigel expresses his disappointment that John McCain was not elected to continue the fight in Iraq, Faith, Reason, and the War against Jihadism, 160.
78 Faith, Reason, and the War against Jihadism, 18. Weigel argues, “from a theological point of view, Islam is ‘other’ in a relationship to Christianity and Judaism in a way that Christianity and Judaism cannot be to one another,” Faith, Reason, and the War against Jihadism, 28.
79 Faith, Reason, and the War against Jihadism, 63.
80 Witness, 859.
81 John Paul II did not seem to see Islam as an adversary of Christianity; rather, he saw “a deeper knowledge and esteem” as the goal of religious dialogue with Islam and even spoke of the Church's “high regard for Muslims,” at his May 5, 1999 General Audience.
82 Witness, 624.
83 Ibid.
84 Witness, 620. In Lessons in Hope, Weigel curiously changes the story of John Paul II's response to the war, revealing that French Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran allegedly told Weigel that, in Weigel's own words,
… John Paul II had called President George H.W. Bush the night before the ultimatum to Saddam Hussein requiring him to evacuate Kuwait or face allied military action expired: the Pope said that if diplomacy couldn't resolve a violation of international law that must not stand, he hoped the allies would win, Saddam would be ejected from Kuwait, and there would be as few casualties as possible. (147)
“John Paul's view was that the pope should press until the last possible moment for reason and diplomacy to work, even as he understood that the just war criterion of ‘last resort’ was not infinitely elastic but a judgment of prudence.” (147)
85 Witness, 623. In Lessons in Hope, Weigel further takes aim at the Vatican foreign minister at the time, Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran (who, as Weigel admits, had been a valuable source of information for Witness to Hope) for suggesting that the United States was violating international law by attacking Iraq in 2003. Weigel very arrogantly states that due to Vatican resistance to the ware, “January, February, and March 2003 will not, I think, be remembered as high points of modern Vatican diplomacy,” 294. In Lessons in Hope Weigel also attacks Italian Archbishop Renato Martino, President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, for criticizing Colin Powell's now infamous February 2003 “Weapons of Mass Destruction Speech,” 300–1.
86 Witness 621–2.
87 John Paul II's subtle but in the end clear condemnation of the Iraq War can be found in his Christmas 2002 address and even more pointedly and clearly in his January 13, 2003 address to the diplomatic corps.
88 The End, 323.
89 The End, 264. In Lessons in Hope, Weigel presents an extended and very revealing depiction of how he and Joaquín Navarro-Valls waged a covert war against a number of Vatican critics of United States foreign policy after September 11. Mocking those European cardinals (and perhaps even John Paul II himself) in the Holy See who suffered from what Weigel calls, “functional pacifism,” Weigel argues that there was “little serious just war thinking inside the Leonine Wall … ,” which created a “conceptual vacuum” in the Vatican, 293. In this extremely insulting passage, Weigel reveals that the only “serious thinking” on the just war tradition would have to be thinking in according with neoconservative foreign policy. Weigel further states in Lessons in Hope that he and Navarro-Valls feared that “ … John Paul II was being interpreted as a kind of trophy chaplain to what styled itself a ‘peace movement’ but was in fact an anti-American-power coalition … ,” 294. It was thus the role of Weigel, and for some odd reason, the Spanish head of the Vatican Press Office, Joaquín Navarro-Valls, to defend American foreign policy interest at the Vatican and before the world.
90 The End, 264. To create the impression that John Paul II was a personal supporter of George W. Bush, Weigel tells the story of a dinner after the 2004 American presidential election with John Paul II that included Archbishops Stanisław Dziwisz and Stanisław Ryłko at which, allegedly, “[t]here was considerable satisfaction expressed over President Bush's reelection … ,” Lessons in Hope, 304. Weigel is clearly implying here that John Paul II personally supported George W. Bush. However, we have no clear evidence of this support outside of Weigel's innuendos.
91 The End, 280.
92 The End, 206.
93 The End, 282.
94 The End, 324. Like much of his writing, Weigel repeats this point in God's Choice, emphasizing that it was John Paul's concern for Christians, not his opposition to American policy, which inspired His Holiness's opposition to the wars: “Deeply concerned about the fate of minority Christian communities a Middle East increasingly marked by Islamist extremism, he [John Paul] tried to forestall the Iraq Wars of 1991 and 2003, without success,” 36.
95 The End, 324.
96 Ibid.
97 God's Choice, 324–5.
98 God's Choice, 231.
99 God's Choice, 231. For a critical discussion of the use of St. Augustine by Catholic neoconservatives and Straussians, see Eric D. Patterson, ed. Christianity and Power Politics Today. See also Joshua Mitchell, “The Use of Augustine after 1989.”
100 God's Choice, 231.
101 God's Choice, 235.
102 Ibid.
103 God's Choice, 238.
104 With his rehabilitation of liberation theology and his decidedly leftward shift of Church politics, Pope Francis (along with, ironically, the election of the “populist” Donald J. Trump) has become something of a nightmare for neoconservative Catholics At the beginning of Francis's pontificate, Catholic neoconservatives attempted to moderate Pope Francis's statements. Michael Novak, for example, wrote an attempt to deflect Pope Francis's apparent critique of Reaganomics in Evangelii Gaudium, titled, “Agreeing with Pope Francis.” However, the neoconservatives have changed their tune, hoping to wait out the Franciscan pontificate and returning to the writings and life of John Paul II for consolation and subtle response to Pope Francis's apparent leftism; see, for example, George Weigel, “Whose Bourgeois Morality?” M.J. Heale argues that it was the 2006 midterm elections that sounded the death knell of for neoconservativism; with the election of a Democratic congressional majority, the “neoconservative aspiration to world hegemony had effectively been rejected by the electorate,” Contemporary America, 256.