Postscript 283from the party line, at any rate by Republicans, became more difficult to jus-
tify. There were three major reasons for this. First, the changing politics of
the South has meant that many conservative Southerners have moved from
the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. Thus a major divisive fac-
tor within both parties, that between conservatives and liberals, has become
less important and has been transferred to the division between the parties,
making them more partisan in character. Second, the emergence of the neo-
conservative philosophy, adopted by many Republicans, gave an ideological
tinge to the American political scene not experienced since the height of
Roosevelt’s New Deal policies in the 1930s. Third, the terrorist attacks on
America in 2001, followed by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, inevitably
demanded an almost unquestioning support from a Republican Congress for
a Republican president exercising his powers as commander-in-chief. The
realignment of politics in the South is almost certainly going to persist, and
perhaps go even further than at present. This will undoubtedly give to the
party political debate a different quality from that in the 1970s and 1980s,
strengthening the sense of party unity in the Republican Party; however, it is
unlikely to result in the kind of persistently high party unity common in Eu-
ropean states. Senators and congressmen are very sensitive to local interests
and local pressures. Where their perception of the views of their constituents
differs on individual policies from those of the president or of other members
of Congress, they will vote the way their constituents wish, not the way their
party leaders would hope.
It is more difficult to determine the continuing effect of the neoconserva-
tive philosophy. Undoubtedly it will continue to influence many people, but it
is already coming under considerable criticism. The credibility of the neocon-
servative approach to foreign policy is inextricably bound up with the success
or failure of the war in Iraq. The loss of American lives, the continued insur-
gency in Iraq, the revelations about the prison of Abu Ghraib, and other de-
ficiencies in the aftermath of the invasion have had a considerable impact on
American public opinion, with over half of Americans considering that it was
a mistake to enter the war. The neoconservative approach to foreign policy
centred on the assertion of the right of the United States to take pre-emptive
action, to wage pre-emptive war, in furtherance of the American national
interest – the so-called ‘Bush Doctrine’. One of the signatories of the 1998
letter to President Clinton from the neoconservative group, The Project for
a New American Century, demanding ‘regime change’ in Iraq, was Francis
Fukuyama. In 2006, however, Fukuyama published After the Neocons: America at
the Crossroads, in which he announced that he could no longer support neocon-
servatism as either a political symbol or a body of thought. He predicted that
‘one of the consequences of a perceived failure in Iraq will be the discrediting
of the entire neoconservative agenda and a restoration of the authority of
foreign policy realists.’ However, the volatility of the situation in the Middle
East, the way in which American policy impacts upon the Israeli–Palestinian