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The term "neoconservative" was popularized in the United States during 1973 by Socialist leader Michael Harrington, who used the term to define Daniel Bell, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Irving Kristol, whose ideologies differed from Harrington's.[10]
The "neoconservative" label was used by Irving Kristol in his 1979 article "Confessions of a True, Self-Confessed 'Neoconservative.'"[11] His ideas have been influential since the 1950s, when he co-founded and edited the magazine Encounter.[12] Another source was Norman Podhoretz, editor of the magazine Commentary from 1960 to 1995. By 1982 Podhoretz was terming himself a neoconservative, in a New York Times Magazine article titled "The Neoconservative Anguish over Reagan's Foreign Policy".[13][14] During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the neoconservatives considered that liberalism had failed and "no longer knew what it was talking about," according to E. J. Dionne.[15]
The term neoconservative, which was used originally by a socialist to criticize the politics of Social Democrats, USA,[16] has since 1980 been used as a criticism against proponents of American modern liberalism who had become slightly more conservative[11][17]
The term "neoconservative" was the subject of increased media coverage during the presidency of George W. Bush,[18][19] with particular emphasis on a perceived neoconservative influence on American foreign policy, as part of the Bush Doctrine.[20] The term neocon is often used as pejorative in this context.
Through the 1950s and early 1960s, the future neoconservatives had endorsed the American Civil Rights Movement, racial integration, and Martin Luther King, Jr..[21] From the 1950s to the 1960s, there was general endorsement among liberals for military action to prevent a communist victory in Vietnam.[22]
Neoconservatism was initiated by the repudiation of coalition politics by the American New Left: Black Power, which denounced coalition-politics and racial integration as "selling out" and "Uncle Tomism" and which frequently generated anti-semitic slogans; "anti-anticommunism", which seemed indifferent to the fate of South Vietnam, and which during the late 1960s included substantial endorsement of Marxist-Leninist politics; and the "new politics" of the New left, which considered students and alienated minorities as the main agents of social change (replacing the majority of the population and labor activists).[23] Irving Kristol edited the journal The Public Interest (1965–2005), featuring economists and political scientists, which emphasized ways that government planning in the liberal state had produced unintended harmful consequences.[24] Interestingly enough, many early Neoconservative political figures were disillusioned Democratic politicians and intellectuals, such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who served in the Nixon Administration, and Jeane Kirkpatrick who served as President Ronald Reagan's UN Ambassador.
Norman Podhoretz's magazine Commentary of the American Jewish Committee, originally a journal of liberalism, became a major publication for neoconservatives during the 1970s. Commentary published an article by Jeane Kirkpatrick, an early and prototypical neoconservative, albeit not a New Yorker.