What began decades ago as a cadre of liberals who questioned the economic policies entwined with LBJ’s Great Society are today not much more than Republicans who constantly auger for expanded arms programs and military intervention, whatever the circumstance. At least that’s how a Neoconservative is presently defined in the review for the appropriately titled Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement by Justin Vaïsse in the NYT Book Review this week.

The original pitch for this illustration was to experiment with portraits, (not unlike what was arrived at for this piece), but when photos didn’t materialize in as timely a manner as we’d hoped, we sought out a more typographic approach and landed on the above image.

The other directions that I was playing with in the early stages leaned way too much on the author and reviewer’s present, hawkish impression of neoconservatives and didn’t make any suggestion of the movement’s origin which, all things being equal, wouldn’t have been as complete a representation of the piece as the image that was chosen. In retrospect, I’m relieved that these other ones were not considered:

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Fair and balanced art direction by Nicholas Blechman.

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