Buchanan’s Definition of a Neo-conman

From Pat Buchanan’s Where the Right Went Wrong (p. 250):

“The neoconservatives are not really conservatives at all. They are imposters and opportunists. They were Leftists in the 1930s, New Deal and Great Society Democrats through the 1960s, and slid to the right and the Republicans after Nixon and Reagan began rolling up forty-nine state landslides. They defected from liberalism only when they saw conservativism in the ascendancy, and they rode the Reagan revolution into power. Their heroes — Wilson, FDR, Dr. King — are men of the Left. Their tracts denouncing rivals and critics as traitors, fascists, and anti-Semites come straight out of the hard Left. Their agenda — endless struggle and war if necessary to impose secular democracy and social revolution on the Islamic world — is neo-Jacobin, out of the French, not the American Revolution.”

The ideological tradition of the neo-conmen, Buchanan correctly points out, lies either with Leon Troskly or Leo Strauss.

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11:32 am on September 20, 2004