Intelligent Liberals

The following is an excerpt from an Article presented here by BBB--called what it takes to become a Neo-Neoconservative. I see this as a trend for the ranks of the Neo-conservatives to swell---by other other liberals who have been "mugged by reality".. What do you think? To me Neo-conservatives are much more valuable to the Conservatives because they are intellectuals who have read and repudiated Marx.

This is by James Atlas and was printed in the NYTimes recently:

In the early stages of their ideological development, neoconservatives saw themselves more as reformed liberals than as true conservatives. Mr. Bell, who predicted "the end of ideology," identified himself as a socialist; Mr. Kristol identified himself ?- in a famous formulation ?- as a liberal who has been "mugged by reality."

Yet in the end, all were liberals who, by the 1970's and the midpoint in their careers, were proud to identify themselves as neoconservatives, who were not the heirs of classical conservatism but rather had discovered the limitations of liberalism. A neoconservative, it might be postulated, is one who read and repudiated Marx; a conservative, one who read and embraced Hume, Locke and Hobbes.

This generation of liberal intellectuals, like its precursors, prefers to see itself less as a political coalition than as an assemblage of writers with diverse views ?- which of course it is. Ideological labels are always provisional. Yet however much their attitudes toward the war in Iraq differ from those of such contemporary neoconservatives as William Kristol and Robert Kagan, they are heirs of the same intellectual tradition. Given this, can they still be classified as liberals? Or could it be that they've become . . . neoconservatives?
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James Atlas is the president of Atlas Books and the author of "Bellow: A Biography."

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