Neoconservative

In the NY Post, John Podhoretz sounded a tiresome refrain:

It's kind of flattering, this notion that a group of people called "neoconservatives" - a term hostile people use to refer to Jewish Republicans with hard-line foreign policy views in and out of government without using the word "Jewish" - have seized the reins of power in the United States.

Look, neoconservative is a good, descriptive term that has been around for twenty-five years. If Pat Buchanan uses it as a synonym for Jewish conservative, that doesn't mean everyone does so. If the neoconservatives want to drop the term because it has been distorted by prejudice, then they should come up with another term to substitute for it. Conservative alone is too broad. We need words to describe the various currents within conservatism of which neoconservatism is one among many.

For the record, neoconservatism originally had nothing to do with the Republican party. It represented an attempt to keep the Democratic party from going too far left. The neocons's greatest electoral victory was when Democrat Pat Moynihan defeated conservative Republican James Buckley in New York in 1976 for the Senate.