In other words – they always liked FDR. A welfare state – but not so much as to corrode morals and work-ethic and inspire multi-generational dependency and social pathology. Also limited in motivation to reduction of hardship and suffering deriving from poverty, and increasing opportunity – instead of being obsesses with oppression-driven narratives of Social Justice. They were disillusioned of their Communist sympathies by admitting the wickedness and broken economic models and stopped apologizing for Stalin and the Soviets, and so they wanted a US that was assertive in foreign policy. Finally, they wanted the government to be able to enforce law and order on the streets and without Warren-Court innovations or any special preoccupation with matters of gender or race or sexuality.

In other words – these were people who wanted the evolution of American Left politics to stop in the 1940’s. When it did continue to evolve, and start to change the culture quickly and dramatically in the 60’s, they were indeed ‘conservatives’ in the sense of wanting to go back a generation, even ‘standing athwart History yelling ‘Stop!’. Non-neo paleo-conservatives wanted to go back to 1932. Today, wanting to go back to the Eisenhower administration is considered ‘paleo’.

Neocon governance is probably best exemplified by the Giuliani-Bloomberg pair of NYC Regimes. A Pushed-Back Left that doesn’t let the ideological currents get in the way of governing.

Says who? I’ve heard the neocons described as progressives who thought the left went too far with taxation and felt the Democratic party was insufficiently hawkish, so they opportunistically switched sides. But their “policy” doesn’t seem to fit conservatism and certainly not libertarianism otherwise: they are better described as political opportunists than anything else.

Here’s a laughable quote from Brooks:

“The kind of conservatism that Irving Kristol embodied was cheerful and at peace with modern America. The political heroes for this kind of conservatism, Kristol wrote, ‘tend to be T.R., F.D.R. and Ronald Reagan.'”

Really? You’re going to lump in Theodore Roosevelt, who split the party and who many Republicans hated, and Franklin Roosevelt, who almost all conservatives hate to this day (except for his time leading the war effort), with Reagan? That just goes to show what a joke the neocons are.

The neocons are completely discredited, in almost everything they push. I hope they’re purged from the discourse, that the Tea Party and libertarians can rhetorically bludgeon them till they’re out. Their current positions and sock puppets, Liz and Dick Cheney, John Bolton, Brooks, Peter King, are beyond laughable. This is the end for them, but I suspect they won’t go down easy.