Regarding how the term "neoconservative" came about, sorry, but I was following the conservative movement closely during those years, and I was a Commentary subscriber for many years. Neoconservatives named themselves. If someone else did initially coin the term as a slur, the neos chose to embrace the term and at the very least were the ones who promulgated the term and the idea. You wouldn't find the word neoconservative outside of conservative publications back in those days.
I'm guessing that you're not a day over 30, or that you were a Democrat in those days, or you would know these things.
The word paleoconservative was derivative, and did indeed not arise until the mid 80s, and was coined by those who wanted to make a point out of differentiating themselves from neoconservatives. Self-styled paleoconservatives are not exactly the same breed as old-fashioned Republicans, by a long shot -- old-fashioned conservatives didn't walk around with chips on their shoulders. The Republican party has always been fairly diverse -- country club reputation notwithstanding, and a major strain throughout most of the 20th century has contained a strong dislike for war.
My family has been hard-core Republicans for generations, and they have always been pretty skeptical when it comes to war and foreign interventions the whole time. I used to get frustrated with my dad over this all the time, back when I was a young warhawk. It wasn't until I read Robert Taft that I realized that my family was just an old-fashioned Republican family, and that most of my Republican neighbors were the same. They didn't like any big government programs, especially wars.
As to taking anti-paleo rants elsewhere, this is a conservative website and paleos may be many things but "conservative" is not one of them. The Robert Taft emphasis in the GOP changed sharply immediately after Pearl Harbor. Taft himself advocated by the late 1940s that the US should have a foreign policy of letting Europe go to hell in a handbasket because it had experienced freedom and rejected it, but that the US should concentrate on emerging nations which looked forward to opportunities for freedom. In other words, Taft rejected the socialist Old Europe in favor of seeking markets and allies in the undeveloped world. He was right in the late 1940s as he and the pre-WWII isolationists were wrong all along as was effectively and finally proven at Pearl Harbor. The difference between taft and today's paleowhatevers is the Taft was smart enough to know when history had punched the ticket on his pre-war and anti-war errors. He was a very fine man as proven by his personal care of his dying wife while he was himself suffering the lung cancer that would kill him. His policies and the post-1964 GOP policies are very different EXCEPT on foreign policy.
The "neoconservatives" who named themselves such were the elderly former Democrats who saw their old party increasingly captured by those obviously anti-American and pro-communist. They opposed racial and ethnic quotas and had academic integrity and believed that street criminals should be rounded up and punished whether they were muggers or property-wrecking antiwar clowns. Some are still with us. Some are not. Nonetheless, "conservatives" are what constituted the post-WW II, Korean War, Vietnam War Cold War era conservative movement, the one that elected Ronaldus Maximus.
We were joined in that effort by the actual "neos." The rest of us never believed in the policies of FDR, HST, JFK (except his posturing in foreign policy which we hoped would be the platform for necessary attacks on the likes of Castro), LBJ or HHH on domestic policies much less the insanity of the George McGovern moonbats.
Neither YAF nor CRs nor YRs ever called their groups "neo." Nor did Phyllis Schlafly. Nor did Moral Majority. Nor did Right to Life. And so on. Nonetheless, liberals and paleos insist on using the term "neo" in describing actual conservatives because the liberals want to divide conservative forces by the use of the term and because the paleos use the term to claim some part of conservatism and then make arguments from nonexistent moral equivalency.
The paleos are a batch of social eccentrics defined by their personal idiosyncracies. Anyone who accepts the likes of Justin Lavender Raimondo (sometime columnist for Pravda) as any kind of conservative is not in touch with reality. See Justine the Lavender Queen's antiwar.com. Don't take my word for what Raimondo is on foreign policy. Read his/her/its disgusting website for yourself. During the Vietnam War era, I had an extreme and permanent bellyful of anything calling itself "antiwar." I am not going to change attitudes and I sometimes do not play well with others.
If you did not remain hawkish but gave in to the notion of peace at any price, that is too bad but the GOP is not your great grandfather's GOP and it won't be again. Few of us will be giving up our foreign and military policy principles voluntarily.
In the old days, the GOP also contained major groups of eugenics folks (Planned Barrenhood/Margaret Sanger) including Peggy Goldwater, wife of you know who, and she served as a national director of Planned Barrenhood from the purge of Sanger and of Lothrop Stoddard and their pals for ties with the Nazis in about 1940 until Peggy Goldwater's death in the mid-1970s. This reflects no credit upon the GOP. Read any of Sanger's books. Read Lothrop Stoddard's little gem: The Rising Tide of Color.
The New Right changed the GOP rather permanently (ask Christie Todd Whitman, a Demonrat in most respects except for her gilded ancestry, who is GOP for the time being to protect her stock portfolio and because Republicans sometimes throw parties down at the polo club that include only people like her).
Like most in the New Right, I did not come from an ancestral Republican Party family. I came from a family of Democratic labor folks. AFL-CIO President George Meany knew more about and did more in the way of anticommunism and national defense than the ancestrally GOP likes of John Vliet Lindsay, Charles Upchuck Percy, Charles Mathias, John Sherman Cooper, et al., (good riddance to them all) would ever know. Meany did not allow the AFL-CIO to endorse McGovern. Likewise Jean Kirkpatrick. We need no Blame America Firsters. Let them be Demonrats. We need no pro-abortionists or lavender canoodlers playing make believe marriage. What we need is a large influx of socially conservative folks who work with their hands for a living at something more substantive than antireligious sculpture and art.
Like Ronaldus Maximus, most New Right folks were coming in from the Democrat Party which had left us rather than vice versa. Without them, the GOP would not have been able to be elected or to govern. Main Street bank boardroom bean counters had failed politically 70 years ago. If it were not for military veterans, social conservatives, gun folks, tax rebels (Taft advocated a MUNICIPAL income tax in Cincinnati as a councilman or state representative in the 1930s) and other populist rightwingers including a healthy dose of previously Democrat Catholics, the GOP would be dead as the proverbial doornail.
Grown-up nations have grown-up responsibilities, including wars. I never imagined that I would be as delighted with Dubya as I am. Money counting and coupon clipping are the birthright of Americans but they are insufficient as a political platform. Ebenezer Scrooge before Jacob Marley's ghost showed up is no one's idea of a political icon or example, then or now. Neither was Lowell Weicker. Nor is Lincoln Chaffee. Nor was James Jeffords.
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All I said, 4 days ago, was that I hadn't heard the term "neo-con" before 2000. well Excuse Me for my ignorance.