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The Godfather of Neo-Conservatives speaks: Quotable:

Neoconservatism is the first variant of American conservatism in the past century that is in the "American grain." It is hopeful, not lugubrious; forward-looking, not nostalgic; and its general tone is cheerful, not grim or dyspeptic. Its 20th-century heroes tend to be TR, FDR, and Ronald Reagan. Such Republican and conservative worthies as Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower, and Barry Goldwater are politely overlooked. Of course, those worthies are in no way overlooked by a large, probably the largest, segment of the Republican party, with the result that most Republican politicians know nothing and could not care less about neoconservatism. Nevertheless, they cannot be blind to the fact that neoconservative policies, reaching out beyond the traditional political and financial base, have helped make the very idea of political conservatism more acceptable to a majority of American voters. Nor has it passed official notice that it is the neoconservative public policies, not the traditional Republican ones, that result in popular Republican presidencies.

And I must do a bit of fisking. Irving Kristol has admitted that he had never read Hayek's The Road to Serfdom. That's right, never read it. But Kristol has attacked both Hayek and his book for beliefs that Hayek does not hold and for ideas that are not contained in The Road to Serfdom. On the otherhand, Kristol has read Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty -- you won't know this because of any citations contained in Kristol's work, but you will know it if you've read both Hayek's Constitution of Liberty, and some of Kristol's best-know essays. Key themes from Hayek find there way into Kristol's work (example, the Britain vs. France theme). Anyway, Hayek always left room for the welfare state in his works, and never argued that a welfare safety-net was a necessary threat to liberty or a first step on the road to serfdom. If Kristol had ever bothered to read Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, rather than to merely criticize it unread, he would know better. In fact, Hayek in such books as Law, Legislation and Liberty was all about studying "alternative ways of delivering [welfare state] services" -- even when (or especially when) these services are delivered by the state (and the same could be said of Milton Friedman's work on social services). So what follows from Kristol hits a deeply false note -- a false note which is the product of having failed the basic responsibility doing your research and knowing what you are talking about:

This leads to the issue of the role of the state. Neocons do not like the concentration of services in the welfare state and are happy to study alternative ways of delivering these services. But they are impatient with the Hayekian notion that we are on "the road to serfdom." Neocons do not feel that kind of alarm or anxiety about the growth of the state in the past century, seeing it as natural, indeed inevitable .. People have always preferred strong government to weak government, although they certainly have no liking for anything that smacks of overly intrusive government. Neocons feel at home in today's America to a degree that more traditional conservatives do not.