a break with older Western values. Though speaking in the name of America and patriotism and even Conservatism, the neoconservatives are replacing attachment to America's older religious, moral, intellectual and cultural traditions with a form of universalism that has roots in leftist thinking. Additionally, Ryn argues that what he terms "Neo-Jacobin imperialism" threatens to produce interminable wars and poses a serious threat to American constitutionalism. Politics and Jewish identity Some Paleocons say they are honest Conservatives who were bullied and smeared by a corrupt ideology tied to Social democracy and globalism. Historian Edward S. Shapiro, tracing the debate back to the 1960s, wrote that many Neoconservatives saw their new political philosophy within a specifically Jewish context. This became an element in the dispute with the Paleocons. He said that at first these Jewish neocons equated Conservatism with country club exclusion, racism, and the "Protestant hinterlands," and so shied away from applying the label to themselves. They also considered the Burkean social order as a "premodern social order revered by Edmund Burke and the other pioneers of Conservative thought, a world which had ostracized Jews to the fringes of society." He continued: "For the Jewish Neoconservatives, children and grandchildren of immigrants from Eastern Europe, this was far too narrow a view of American culture. They emphasized the pluralism and openness of America and claimed that Americanism was less a matter of biological descent and European culture than of civic values and political ideology. Just as the neoconservatives stressed the ideological content of American diplomacy and asserted that American political ideology had well-nigh universal applicability, so they underscored the plastic character of American identity. Anyone was potentially a good American just as long as he or she affirmed the fundamental American political precepts of the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Gettysburg Address. The Neoconservatives, the traditionalists responded, exaggerated the appeal of American political principles to the rest of the world, and they underestimated the powerful hold which culture has, or should have, on its citizens. The Conservative War 1981: National Endowment for the Humanities The beginning rift is often traced back to a dispute over the directorship of the National Endowment for the Humanities by the incoming Republican administration in 1981. Senator John East proposed literary scholar Mel Bradford, a former Dixiecrat. Bradford withdrew himself from consideration after Neoconservatives argued that his record of academic articles criticizing the