from Jonah Goldberg from National Review, The Term ‘Neocon’ Has Run Its Course

At first, neocons weren’t particularly associated with foreign policy. They were intellectuals disillusioned by the folly of the Great Society. As Irving Kristol famously put it, a “neoconservative is a liberal who was mugged by reality and wants to press charges.” The Public Interest, the first neoconservative publication, co-edited by Kristol, was a wonkish domestic-policy journal.

Kristol later argued that neoconservatism was not an ideology but a “persuasion.” William F. Buckley, the avatar of supposedly authentic traditional conservatism, agreed. The neocons, he explained, brought the new language of sociology to an intellectual tradition that had been grounded more in Aristotelian thinking.

The neocon belief in democracy promotion grew out of disgust with Richard Nixon’s détente and Jimmy Carter’s fecklessness, but it hardly amounted to knee-jerk interventionism. When Jeane Kirkpatrick articulated a theory of neoconservative foreign policy in Commentary magazine in 1979, she cautioned that it was unwise to demand rapid liberalization in autocratic countries, and that gradual change was a more realistic goal than immediate transformation.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/429255/neocon-outdated-term

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