Neoconservative

My Republican vote [Nixon 1972] produced little shock waves in the New York intellectual community. It didn't take long--a year or two--for the socialist writer Michael Harrington to come up with the term "neoconservative" to describe a renegade liberal like myself. The the chagrin of some of my friends, I decided to accept that term; there was no point in calling myself a liberal when no one else did. ...

I had no patience with the old conservatism that confronted the tides of history by shouting "Stop!"

--Irving Kristol, Forty Good Years", The Public Interest, Spring 2005, pp. 8, 9


Recall that the original definition of the neoconservatives was that they fully embraced the reforms of the New Deal, and indeed the major programs of Johnson's Great Society. Skepticism was only evoked by the more speculative and theoretical extensions into "social engineering", as in the community participation effort in the War on Poverty, or the movement from civil rights to affirmative action in job and college and university admissions (which, of course, dates more to the Nixon than the Johnson administration). Had we not defended the major social programs, from Social Security to Medicare, there would have been no need for the "neo" before "conservatism".
--Nathan Glazer, "Neoconservative from the start", The Public Interest, Spring 2005, p. 15

(see Neoliberalism)


Update: Who Named the Neocons? by Benjamin Ross, Dissent, Summer 2007


Update 2: Neocon Nation: Neoconservatism, c. 1776, by Robert Kagan, review of The Assassin's Gate, by George Packer, World Affairs, Spring 2008
(via Arts & Letters Daily)