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[Evan Zimmerman <evan.zimmerman AT gmail.com>]

At what point does it become true then? Must the persons themselves be
on the record saying, "My name is William and I am a Neoconservative"?
I don't see it as a slur, by the way, just as I don't see liberal or
conservative as slurs -- it's all in how it's practiced in my mind.

I look at articles like this at CS: 
http://www.csmonitor.com/specials/neocon/index.html
and feel pretty confident in the analysis there. I get the sense that
the word has taken on rather unfortunate (but in my mind, well
deserved) baggage for those who fit the mold, and as such there is a
lot of disavowal going on. That doesn't mean it simply stopped being
true.
The godfather you mention speaks out here
http://www.weeklystandard.com/content/public/articles/000/000/003/000tzmlw.asp
on the subject. I see no disavowal there, but in fact an effort to
suck more people in, including the president, rather than exclude
them. My reading was quick though so maybe I'm missing something.

I'm not trying to nitpick, but it seems commonplace these days to
simply say it ain't so when there is substantial evidence to the
contrary. Anyway :-)

> Y'all have a great week -

You too.

Evan

On Mon, 4 Oct 2004 06:47:45 -0400, James Dasher <jdasher AT ibiblio.org> wrote:
> 
> On Oct 3, 2004, at 7:01 PM, Evan Zimmerman wrote:
> 
> > The Neo-cons are retired or dead? Isn't that like saying because
> > Buckley is retired, Conservatives are retired? Sartre is dead, so
> > Existentialists are dead?
> 
> Not really.  Neoconservatives were a particular phenomenon at a
> particular time.  You can be an existentialist, or a conservative, or a
> Platonist, or Marxist, but neo-cons were "liberals mugged by reality".
> People who had been on the political left for a long time, who realized
> that the programs they advocated were not working; that, in fact, their
> positions had produced the opposite of their intentions.
> 
> But yeah: people like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, James Q. Wilson, Norman
> Podhoretz, Jeanne Kirkpatrick; some even call Richard John Neuhaus a
> neo-conservative, which is possible, though I'm only familiar with his
> work in the last 10 or fifteen years and wouldn't say one way or the
> other.
> 
> > Perhaps the founders of the movement are retired or dead, but many who
> > are widely acknowledged to be Neo-cons are still very much on the job
> > in the Pentagon and, depending on whom you believe, in the White
> > House.
> 
> "Widely acknowledged" in certain corners, but perhaps "widely accused"
> or "widely labelled" would be more accurate.  Calling someone a neocon
> sounds good, like calling someone a "paleoliberal" or "fascist".  But
> calling William Kristol or Paul Wolfowitz a neoconservative doesn't
> make it true.
> 
> I would imagine you're just using the term to describe a particular
> school of thought with which you take issue, and with which you
> disagree.  I would agree that there's a school of thought there, but I
> don't know what you'd call it, particularly since there's a lot of
> disagreement even within that school of thought over foreign policy.
> Most of the leading luminaries within it agreed about Iraq, though for
> differing reasons.  But they're still having their post-Cold War
> debate, and in some ways Iraq has only exacerbated some of the
> differences between them.
> 
> But that's a discussion for another time.
> 
> 
> 
> --
> James Dasher
> misterdasher dot com
> IM misterdasher
> 
> ---
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