More than half the time, it is whatever those who dislike it say it is. Those aside, I've long been interested in a definition relatively neutral, that allows for applications of the doctrine (if we call it that) to have numerous validities, or invalidities. Here's one, from a J. Goldberg-penned review of the book Human Accomplishment by Charles Murray (a book I own and enjoy for its unparalleled span):
This is an astoundingly neoconservative book. Back in the days before the left transmuted the word "neoconservative" to mean war-mongering Jew, a prevailing understanding of the term was that it referred to a certain group of intellectuals who imported the sociological method to conservatism. What made, say, the Public Interest a neoconservative magazine was that it attacked issues of public policy with social science--then the lingua franca of the serious left--in order to reach conservative conclusions. Hence, one of the main criticisms of neoconservatism from the right was that it did not work enough from first principles. It had to prove everything that earlier generations thought self-evident. Neocons were too concerned with immanentizing and not concerned enough with the eschaton, to mangle a phrase from Eric Voegelin. Indeed, even the benefits of religion could not be taken on faith. The neocons had to prove that believing in God tended to keep societies more orderly, families more intact, and children more successful.
Well, here we have "Human Accomplishment," a book written by an avowed libertarian that, quite literally, puts all of humanity through the algorithmic wringer. What comes out the other end? Unsurprisingly, the rediscovery of what conservatives had said all along: The combination of the West's indebtedness to Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome set the foundations for an exceptional civilization that, in turn, created the Enlightenment and, eventually, the United States of America. The postmodernists and critical theorists, who shriek that the edifice created by these many giants should be dismantled, are taking sledgehammers to the very platforms from which they shriek.
In other words, a difference between conservative and neo-conservative is one of methodology. That is something that strikes me as both novel and plausible. I doubt it is the entire story (another includes the fact that many of the original neo-cons were ex-Lefties sympathetic to both the merits and limits of the New Deal), but it appears to me to be a fundamental one, in any event.
