Neocons, Neoconservatism

Truthfully, it is hard to get much better than this Wikipedia article on Neocons, and I recommend you read it. But in short, when I say "Neocon," I mean a person who is, or was, basically a cold-war, anti-communist, FDR liberal, and who, with the close of the original Cold War, found himself and his hawkish attitudes more at home in the Republican Party than in the Democratic Party. Some have become more genuinely conservative over the years, some have not. They are all along the spectrum.

A frequent flaw with Neocons is that they are often ideologues indissolubly wedded to an idea or ideas that have little or no track record of actually working all that well. For instance, they have commonly (and accurately, I think) been blamed for the Bush administration's apparent assumption that all people everywhere will embrace Western-style representative government, if only they have the chance--a notion that no sober student of Scripture and history could seriously entertain, at least in my opinion. Likewise, they are often ardent free-traders, despite free trade not actually having all that hot a record in the real world.

Neocons are valuable allies with more traditional conservatives on some subjects and not so much on others. Because they vary in opinion from person to person, it is probably better not to generalize more than I already have.