Politics & Power Quote by Edward Abbey

Abbey’s line is a knife-twist disguised as a definition. By putting “neoconservatives” in scare quotes, he signals that the label is marketing, not description: a glossy prefix slapped onto something ancient, aggressive, and morally rotten. The joke is blunt but engineered. “Neither new nor conservative” isn’t just a semantic dunk; it’s an accusation that the movement’s self-branding depends on misdirection, that its supposed novelty and restraint are cover stories for power politics.

The pivot to “old as Babylon” does heavy cultural work. Babylon isn’t merely “ancient”; it’s a shorthand for imperial decadence, conquest, and hubris in the Western imagination. Abbey recruits that baggage to suggest neoconservatism isn’t a fresh ideology but a recurring empire-script: the same old drive to reorder the world, dressed up for a new audience. Then he escalates from historical critique to moral condemnation: “evil as Hell.” It’s not policy disagreement; it’s a verdict on character and consequence.

Context matters. Abbey, a fierce anti-authoritarian environmental writer, distrusted state power, militarism, and the language that launders them. Though “neoconservative” rose to prominence later, the sentiment fits the late Cold War turn toward interventionist certainty and the culture of think-tank righteousness. The subtext is Abbey’s broader warning: when politics becomes a branding exercise, the public ends up debating labels while the machinery of domination rolls on, ancient in impulse, modern only in its public relations.