Talk:Roots of neoconservativism

The following was removed as being unsourced:

PNAC members

Directors

• William Kristol
• Robert Kagan
• Bruce P. Jackson
• Mark Gerson
• Randy Scheunemann

Staff

• Ellen Bork, Acting Executive Director
• Gary Schmitt, Senior Fellow
• Thomas Donnelly, Senior Fellow
• Reuel Marc Gerecht, Senior Fellow, Director of the Middle East Initiative
• Timothy Lehmann, Assistant Director
• Michael Goldfarb

Past/Present Members of Bush Administration

• John Bolton, Ambassador to the UN (2005-2006).
• Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, founding member of PNAC and Chief of Staff to the Vice President (2001-2005)
• Richard Perle, chairman of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee (2001-2003).
• Donald Rumsfeld, U.S. Secretary of Defense (2001-2006).
• Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense (2001-2005) and architect of the Bush Doctrine.

Neoconservative Writers

• Francis Fukuyama
• Michael Ledeen
• Norman Podhoretz
• Charles Krauthammer

Other

• Michael Gove, British Member of Parliament (2005-) and journalist.
• Henry Jackson, US Congressman and Senator (1941-1983).
• Alan Keyes, former diplomat and Senate candidate for Illinois.

Other names introduced by inaccurate headings

I have attempted to provide clarification by checking the source cited by earlier editor(s) by Francis Fukuyama; I quote the following passage from that article to illustrate how inaccurate earlier version of this article is: Fukuyama writes, e.g.:

The roots of neoconservatism lie in a remarkable group of largely Jewish intellectuals who attended C.C.N.Y. in the mid- to late 1930's and early 1940's, a group that included Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, Nathan Glazer and, a bit later, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The story of this group has been told in a number of places, most notably in a documentary film by Joseph Dorman called Arguing the World. The most important inheritance from the C.C.N.Y. group was an idealistic belief in social progress and the universality of rights, coupled with intense anti-Communism.

It is not an accident that many in the C.C.N.Y. group started out as Trotskyites. Leon Trotsky was, of course, himself a Communist, but his supporters came to understand better than most people the utter cynicism and brutality of the Stalinist regime. The anti-Communist left, in contrast to the traditional American right, sympathized with the social and economic aims of Communism, but in the course of the 1930's and 1940's came to realize that real existing socialism had become a monstrosity of unintended consequences that completely undermined the idealistic goals it espoused. While not all of the C.C.N.Y. thinkers became neoconservatives, the danger of good intentions carried to extremes was a theme that would underlie the life work of many members of this group.

If there was a single overarching theme to the domestic social policy critiques issued by those who wrote for the neoconservative journal The Public Interest, founded by Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Bell in 1965, it was the limits of social engineering. Writers like Glazer, Moynihan and, later, Glenn Loury argued that ambitious efforts to seek social justice often left societies worse off than before because they either required massive state intervention that disrupted pre-existing social relations (for example, forced busing) or else produced unanticipated consequences (like an increase in single-parent families as a result of welfare). A major theme running through James Q. Wilson's extensive writings on crime was the idea that you could not lower crime rates by trying to solve deep underlying problems like poverty and racism; effective policies needed to focus on shorter-term measures that went after symptoms of social distress (like subway graffiti or panhandling) rather than root causes.

How, then, did a group with such a pedigree come to decide that the root cause of terrorism lay in the Middle East's lack of democracy, that the United States had both the wisdom and the ability to fix this problem and that democracy would come quickly and painlessly to Iraq? Neoconservatives would not have taken this turn but for the peculiar way that the cold war ended.

See the full text of Fukuyama's article (now note 1 in the text). I've supplied the full citation. This Wik. article needs fact-checking, source-checking, and more work. Many of the names listed as if they were (still) considered "neoconservatives" are or were not. Some of those listed actually are defined in Wikipedia articles about them as being, to the contrary, Socialists, Liberals, Progressive legislators and Democrats and so on, not "neoconservatives" at all (or even ever). This article was and may still be extremely inaccurate and misleading. It needs an overhaul. --NYScholar 02:20, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

This subject is already covered and the Fukuyama article cited in the main article on neoconservatism. This material could be merged into it somewhat, and then a new actually accurate "list of neoconservatives" (if one is even desired) could be constructed and this article renamed from "Roots of neoconservatism" back to "List of neoconservatives"; but, as the article was in its earlier version, its title was simply misleading and unacceptable in my view. --NYScholar 09:25, 4 March 2007 (UTC)