200-Plus Neocon Nobodies Endorse Harris; Greenwald Explains: They Were Democrats Anyway

As they did during the 2020 election, neoconservative malcontents who used to run the GOP are supporting Democrat Kamala Harris for president.

The latest from the leftist movement, which took over the GOP during the Reagan years but reached the peak of power during President George W. Bush’s administration, comes from some 200 Republicans you’ve never heard of.

They worked for Bush 43, and either in the legislative offices of or on the failed campaigns of Senators Mitt Romney and the late John McCain.

Open Letter

An open letter from the never-Trump gang contains powerhouse titles such as these: “Finance Intern, Mitt Romney for President,” “White House Internet Director, President George W. Bush,” “Communications Specialist, USDA, President George W. Bush,” “Director, Office of Ann Romney, Romney for President 2012,” “Scheduler/Executive Assistant, Sen. John McCain,” and “Political Intern, McCain for President 2008.”

And that means Republicans better listen. Because former interns, schedulers, and internet directors know what direction the nation must take, and that’s the direction Harris and her leftist running mate, child-grooming advocate Tim Walz, want to take it.

“Four years ago, President George W. Bush, the late Sen. John McCain, and then-Gov. Mitt Romney alumni came together to warn fellow Republicans that re-electing President Trump would be a disaster for our nation,” the political giants wrote:

In those declarations we stated the plain truth, each predicting that another four years of a Trump presidency would irreparably damage our beloved democracy. We made those announcements months before lies about a stolen election became everyday talking points and six months before Trump incited an insurrection, cheering on a mob of sore losers and sycophants as they tried to use force to overturn the will of the American public. 

Well, the gang’s all here again to “jointly declare that we’re voting for Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz this November.”

Though the group has “plenty of honest, ideological disagreements with Vice President Harris and Gov. Walz … [t]he alternative … is simply untenable.”

Trump might advance the “dangerous goals” of Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which “will hurt real, everyday people and weaken our sacred institutions.” 

But worse than that, dictators across the globe will run amok if Trump is president again:

Abroad, democratic movements will be irreparably jeopardized as Trump and his acolyte JD Vance kowtow to dictators like Vladimir Putin while turning their backs on our allies. We can’t let that happen. 

Translation: Trump threatens the neocons’ longtime control of American foreign and military policies and adventurism abroad.

Greenwald Explains

Before the letter went public, honest leftist Glenn Greenwald explained what he called “one of the most notable political developments over the last eight years … the very vocal and visible migration of the group of people who had been called neocons in the Republican Party” to the Democratic Party.

Many of the people who supported Hillary Clinton in 2016, then President Joe Biden in 2020, were Bush 43-Dick Cheney insiders, “maximalist supporters of the war on terror, who wanted to torture and kidnap, and have due-process-free camps,” Greenwald said on his System Update program.

Those were the neocons who pushed for the invasion of Iraq before the terror attacks of 9/11, then used those attacks to justify intervention in the Middle East on behalf of Israel, including toppling Saddam Hussein in Iraq with the hope of moving on to Iran.

“These are the people who believe that war is always the answer, who support endless war, who see the world through this militaristic lens,” he said.

Supporting the Party of War

But, he continued, they were Democrats and even hard-core leftists before they became Republicans. Now that Trump has control of the GOP, he said, they have returned home not just because they hate Trump, but because the party of Biden and Harris is now the party for perpetual war abroad. 

In her bellicose convention speech, Greenwald observed, Harris “continuously affirmed the core worldview of these neocons … about the U.S. role in the world, about what the United States president is obligated to do.”

The speech “provoked enormous praise from exactly those neocons who back in the day were hard-core supporters of George Bush and Dick Cheney, because that’s who was pursuing the militaristic neocon agenda back then.” 

The neocons haven’t changed their views, he said, but instead “now recognize that, unlike before, when the Republican Party was their optimal vessel for implementing this worldview, now the Democratic Party is.”

They believe Trump might pull out of NATO and stop backing Ukraine in its war against Russia. So Harris is their candidate.

Continued Greenwald:

Harris gave them even more reason to be excited about the Democratic Party because the foreign policy vision she laid out could have come directly out of the [mouth] of George Bush — in fact pretty much did, both at the 2000 and 2004 Republican conventions, and then out of the mouth of John McCain in the 2008 convention.

Who Are the Neocons?

Greenwald’s observations invite a look back at Pat Buchanan’s column for The American Conservative on March 24, 2003, four days after the “war party [had] gotten its war,” as he described the invasion of Iraq on March 20.

Buchanan offered a history of the neocons and their homeland: the hard Left of the Democrat Party.

The first-generation neocons, he wrote, “were ex-liberals, socialists, and Trotskyites, boat-people from the McGovern revolution who rafted over to the GOP at the end of conservatism’s long march to power with Ronald Reagan in 1980.”

They were an effete class of pointy-headed intellectuals “more familiar with the inside of a think tank than an Abrams tank.”

Their heroes: “Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Harry Truman, Martin Luther King, and Democratic Senators Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson (Wash.) and Pat Moynihan (N.Y.).”

And “all are interventionists who regard Stakhanovite support of Israel as a defining characteristic of their breed.”

Continued the former speechwriter for Richard Nixon:

Their publications include the Weekly Standard, Commentary, the New Republic, National Review, and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. Though few in number, they wield disproportionate power through control of the conservative foundations and magazines, through their syndicated columns, and by attaching themselves to men of power. …

When the Cold War ended, these neoconservatives began casting about for a new crusade to give meaning to their lives. On Sept. 11, their time came. They seized on that horrific atrocity to steer America’s rage into all-out war to destroy their despised enemies, the Arab and Islamic “rogue states” that have resisted U.S. hegemony and loathe Israel.

But now, as Greenwald observed, Trump and his supporters control the GOP, which threatens the neocons’ global ambitions.

Thus, the letter from the 200-plus nobodies.