Interesting. I'm confused about the whole neo-con issue. Some are saying one Reaganites are neo-cons.
The term "neo-con or neo-conservative" used to be used only as to a handful of New York intellectuals who had been very liberal or socialist, mostly served in the Great Society regime of Lyndon Johnson, were often, but not always, Jewish and often, but not always, alumni of the City College of New York in the 1930s or thereabouts.
Included were the following individuals and couples: Irving Kristol and his wife Gertrude Himmelfarb, Norman Podhoretz and his wife Midge Decter, Daniel Patrick Moynihan (an Irishman of somewhat Catholic disposition), Daniel Bell, Walt Whitman Rostow, Eugene Rostow, former Yale University Dean Donald Kagan and a few others. The survivors are mostly in their eighties now and somewhat retired except for an occasional book. Podhoretz was the long-time editor of the American Jewish Committee magazine: Commentary. It is a brilliant magazine and one of the best on the Right although it publishes occasional liberal artices as well.
The "neo-cons" defected from the Left over the Demonrats' inept handling of the Vietnam War. They tend to be war hawks and interventionists as conservatives usually are. They favor neither the United Nations nor futile exercises in CYA diplomacy, nor retreat nor surrender. Secondly, they despise quotas as a heresy against meritocracy. Thirdly, they are too honest and too familiar with the players to ever imagine that the Demonratic Party will ever come loose of the grip of McGovernite peace freaks and quislings and traitors as to its freign policy. They do not think that the most important issues are economic, at least since they abandoned the left.
The so-called "paleocons" are an embarassing little group of eccentric ids. They emerged in disappointment in the latter years of the Reagan administration over the fact that they finally conceded that Reagan would never employ them. Rather than face the fact that their eccentric views and extreme idiosyncratic personalities had made them not ready for prime time, they began screaming to the few who cared about their complaints that the movement had been hijacked by "neo-cons" by which the "paleos" mean anyone favoring the projection of American power by military force, as necessary or desireable to prevent or retaliate against such things as 9/11.
The "paleocons" at say, the Rockford Institute, here in Illinois, prefer poetry readings and a fine Beaujolais, sucking up to the French BECAUSE they are anti-American and advertising the CDs of the Dixie Tricks as a thank you for their anti-Americanism. What the Institute calls "neocons" would include not only the Kristols, the Podhoretzes and the others named above but Dubya, Rumsfeld (the greatest Defense Secretary ever and a former Institute board member when the Institute was pro-American), Young Republicans, College Republicans, Young Americans for Freedom and the rest of what sane Americans with a grip on vocabulary regard as simply "conservatives."
The ideological ancestors (charitably speaking) of the "paleocons" were finished as the Japanese bombs fell upon American battleships at Pearl Harbor. Men and patriots like John Flynn and Charles Lindbergh were finally realists and understood that Pearl Harbor was the end of isolationism for any American worthy of the name. Lindbergh even accepted a commission to fly military aircraft in WWII. Most 1930s isolationists in the United States were patriots unlike their modern counterparts.
Today's "paleocons" also have a near universal allergy to American allies and particularly to Israel and the Likud Party, to action rather than mere contemplation, however shallow, and to the conservative movement itself as exemplified by Bill Buckley. Bill Rusher, Frank Meyer, Will Herberg, Leo Strauss, the late Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (particularly despised at the institute because, sniff, sniff he was sooooooo unfair to some of Tom Fleming's parent's friends who are left unnamed to protect the guilty in all likelihood).
In short, the paleocons are the obsolete, the ineffectve, the eccentric, the idiosyncratic, the losers who are trying to graft themselves onto conservatism through the back door at a time when there has been little actual conservative movement activity for a couple of decades. They talk a good game on family issues but do absolutely nothing about them. They have embarassing "blood and soil" agendas that put one in mind of Otto von Bismarck. They besmirch the reputation of those who admire Confederate gentlemen and leaders and generals by trying to hitchhike on the lost cause and they obsess about nothing nations like Serbia and Montenegro as though they were models to emulate.
The "paleocons" have as their byword of late that "once a nation embarks upon the road to empire, its decline and destruction are inevitable." They preach this in history classes, literature classes and anywhere else where impressionable folks may gather or mistakenly submit their children unwittingly for indoctrination.
The paleos consort with and publish the likes of Pravda columnist and antiwar.com proprietor Justin Raimondo who is nothing more than a warmed over McGovernite yearning to have America crawl on its belly like a reptile apologizing for its existence and a raging lavender queen to boot, with the eccentric Llewellyn Rockwell, and with every sort of fruit, nut and vegetable posing as part of the conservatism. See also: the institute's chroniclesmagazine.org (as though there were an organization). Look at their websites. Decide for yourself. Your take may differ from mine.
This bunch of sad sacks have also done wonders for Pat Buchanan as you can see from his political influence today. They are neither capable nor fit to shine the boots of Anne Coulter or Laura Ingraham.