The term “neoconservatism” was coined by and adopted by former liberals who felt like they had been “mugged” by Islamic fascism.
Led by the late Irving Kristol, they remained liberal on social issues and had no problems at all with the growth of the federal government or with big spending.
“Neoconservatives” was a poor choice of a label for what essentially were hawkish liberals. They had much more in common with LBJ than with Ronald Reagan.
- JP
A few days ago I downloaded The Betrayal of the American Right by Murray Rothbard from the Online Library of Liberty, which contains this paragraph from the 1991 preface:
At the present time, many conservatives have come to realize that the old feisty, antigovernment spirit of conservatives has been abraded and somehow been transformed into its statist opposite. It is tempting, and, so far as it goes, certainly correct, to put the blame on the Right's embrace of the 1970's of Truman-Humphrey Cold War liberals calling themselves "neoconservatives," and to allow these ex-Trotskyites and ex-Menscheviks not only into the tent but also to take over the show.Now, Rothbard was a hard-core libertarian, but I think this observation has the ring of truth. Rothbard places the ultimate cause of the takeover of conservativism by the neocons to the founding of National Review, a position which I think is guaranteed to start an argument around here.
But it's also true, if not a truism that in order to understand where we are it's important to understand where we've come from.