The one point made in this article that made sense was that the conversions were formalized when George McGovern and other communists seized permanent control of the Demonrat Party. The "neoconservatives" knew their old communist enemies well and became Republicans to give the party intellectual heft in its struggle with the Demonrats.
The 1930s are dead and gone forever. We no longer have to trudge through the world dragging the carcass of Herbert Hoover's massive failures and making believe they were successes. Imagine if paleocons had been running WW II. Would you rather teach your children German or Japanese as their everyday language?
National defense and, frequently, interventionism are legitimate constitutional functions of the central government. Many paleocons would ally with the remnants of the anti-war New Left to deny that fact. That alone disqualifies the paleocons from the conservative movement. This is why the now retired Ron Paul was NEVER to be taken seriously. This is why Rand Paul has effectively rejected his father's looney tune notions as to foreign and military policy. Rand may not be a modern day Curtis LeMay but he has made definite progress on those issues.
They never converted to "actual conservatism." They converted actual conservatism to welfare-state liberalism, by making New Deal and later Great Society policies mainstream rather than anathema in the Republican Party. These are the same people that tell us how we're supposed revere Martin Luther King as some kind of conservative hero, after all.
“National defense and, frequently, interventionism are legitimate constitutional functions of the central government.”
The founders disagree. From the founding of the nation, we had the Barbary Pirates war, short and sharp, and in response to an external attack on shipping.
About 50 years later, we had the Mexican War in response to Mexican aggressive moves.
50 years later we had the Spanish American war. After all was said and done, the problem was Spain moving in violation of the well known Monroe doctrine.
So every 50 years,, we had a short and sharp foreign adventure. That is not what we have today.