In a message dated 8/12/02 8:48:56 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
<< I don't know what the term "neoconservative" means, nor do I understand why that particular label is relevant to this discussion. >> I'm not sure that anyone knows what it means or rather, that there's any common agreement on what it means. It seems to have started out referring to a group of Sixties liberals in America who decided that Big Government wasn't an effective way of pursuing the goals of reducing poverty et al, and thus became conservatives by the late 1970s. Many prominent ones like Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb (husband and wife, columnist and historian) and their son Bill Kristol (former chief of staff of veep Dan Quayle and now editor[?] of The Weekly Standard) are Jews, and Patrick Buchanan began to use the term "neoconservative" as a term of derision in order to covertly signal to the anti-Semitic right that he was one of them (although according to personal accounts supposedly he's not) without alerting good conservative Christians to his Jew-baiting (it actually plays quite poorly in Iowa). I briefly joined an email list years ago on which one fellow who seemed to like Buchanan (again Pat, not James) charged "neoconservatives" with wanting to have some sort of watered down "civic religion" instead of good old whatever the fellow practiced. Supposedly in orgin the term "neoconservative" distinguished between the newcomer refugees from liberalism and the old-time conservatives who had always had "the faith," although considering that Buchanan supported the statist-liberal Big Government policy of wage and price controls imposed by the Nixon administration (in which he served as an ardent statist) it seems a poorly descriptive term at best. David
