Did You Call Me A Neo? What Do You Mean By That?
I freely admit that the term neo-conservative puzzles me. If I ask what makes a neo new, I get a response that they are new because these conservatives wish to spread democracy as a strategy to thwart the world's evils, (something like that, I don't think I've corrupted the basics), that they are proactive about it rather than isolationist. I then frustrate my tutors with a statement like; they are just paleo-conservatives, they didn't change, the world has gotten smaller, thus what they believe in just gets a wider audience. If your eyes just rolled back into head, well, I am getting used to witnessing that reaction.
So, given that I am such a pain, I expect that my friends will be just as grateful for this explanation as I am. For Julia Gorin covers the term from its origins, its current uses, including its use as a slur, and it is a surprising perspective as well. Witness this:
As a new staple of mainstream American vocabulary, "neoconservative" warrants a reminder of the term's beginnings, before it became chic newspeak. It originally referred to a movement of largely Jewish liberals who gave leftism an honest and protracted effort, who dutifully reviled every Republican president through Eisenhower, who did their time in inner cities, and who gave peace and social engineering a chance, until the real-world consequences of their good will forced them to acknowledge that what they were doing wasn't working but in fact backfiring.
And this note on the poignant evolution of words.
For a while, I couldn't tell whether the word was a euphemism or a slur, but from the resentful tone with which it was being employed by certain contingents ("pushy neocons" is another popular one), I could discern that the term's usage was undergoing a transition. After all, ethnic slurs can start out as euphemisms (meant to avoid identifying anyone blatantly by nationality) before evolving into derogations. "Colored" was a way to avoid the N-word, but today it doesn't go over very well itself. And a century ago Jews jokingly called one another by their Ellis Island designation "keikle" (Yiddish for "circle")--until the joke was co-opted by those hostile to Jews.
[I tip my Stove Pipe hat to Allah]
