as I understand the Podhoretzian history, it was a socialist who became conservative/hawkish by way of anti-communism.
But to tell you the truth, I don't really care about the term, I find it pretty uninteresting. I'm just sick of people tossing it around because they find it a convenient boogie man
as I said, a new school of thought. Once that's been identified, then the term can be legitimately applied to anyone who subscribes to that particular ideology, regardless of what he used to believe in the past.
Fair enough but I don't think that has happened. "I'm a conservative and I supported Iraq war" is not a School Of Thought, it doesn't make me a "neo-conservative", so where does that leave you? When people make up their lists of sinister neo-cons and they include - well let's see - George Will and Ann Coulter and Jay Nordlinger and Rush Limbaugh and on and on and on, this is a dead giveaway that if there is such a thing as a coherent "neo-con ideology", most people don't know what it is.
The only common denominator among folks who get called "neo-cons", or are in danger of being called "neo-cons", is that they are (1) conservatives and (2) supported Iraq war.
That's not a good basis on which to claim to have identified some kind of New School Of Thought. Frankly it amounts to little more than facile slander of people whom anti-war folks disagree with, by way of lazy hijacking of a term they don't even really understand.
No, there's much more than that, as I described in my post. The common denominator is a passionate belief in Making the World Safe for Democracy. It fits all of the people I mentioned (to a lesser extent, as I indicated, with George Will). This is the specific contribution to the political debate made by the original neocons.