Hello and welcome to The Reeducation with Eli Lake.

Today's show is all about the neoconservatives.

Later on, we will have guest John Podoritz, the executive editor of commentary magazine.

The neocons.

Villains. Heroes in error? Nerds. Intellectual. Broken windows. Iraq. So who are the neoconservatives?

Well, the answer depends on who's speaking. If you're talking to a British socialist, neocon has a foul odor.

Millions literally had to pay with their lives, blood, to bring about the destruction of the neocon idea.

I think the neocons are a busted flush.

Pseudo-sophisticated way of saying Jew.

If you're talking to a national conservative, neocon just means an inside the beltway type who opposed Trump. Think the Lincoln Project. To an anti-war

activist, neocon just means the military industrial complex. And to most people who follow politics rather vaguely,

neo-con sounds like something out of the early 2000s. Well, initially neoconservative was

meant as a job. Michael Harrington, a socialist historian, used it to denigrate the former liberals

who had migrated to the Republican Party.

And then the way that the gays and lesbians today have embraced queer, the slur was adopted by the

target. The great Irving Crystal explained in a memoir essay in 2005, my Republican vote in the

1972 presidential election produced little shockwaves

in the New York intellectual community. It didn't take long, a year or two, for the socialist

writer Michael Harrington to come up with the term neoconservative to describe a renegade

liberal like myself. To the chagrin of some of my friends, I decided to accept that term.

There was no point calling myself a liberal when no one else would.

So why did the former liberals like Irving Crystal throw up their hands and walk away from the left?

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