http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090925_reflections_on_the_godfather_of_neoconservatism/?ln
...Kristol was not an original thinker and never claimed to be one. The actual origins of neoconservatism will provide material for historians for some time to come. Distinct streams of thought, in sometimes contradictory coexistence, made it up. Jewish Democrats with roots in the New Deal concluded that the Great Society had gone too far—especially with its programs of affirmative action for women and minorities. Technocratic skeptics like the political scientist James Q. Wilson thought that much government intervention failed and was socially counterproductive. Defenders of familial and religious values, often Catholic, thought that Americans should not trade their ethnic identities for what they saw as a sterile universalism. The theme of the superior wisdom of ordinary Americans triumphing over the unrealistic notions of educated elites was prominent. It contrasted with the views of the followers of the philosopher Leo Strauss, who did not think that citizenries could, or should, rule themselves. Yet they found themselves in the same movement....
....To this was added, as the originally Democratic neoconservatives drew away from their party, the idea of the efficiency and justness of the market. That was a favored theme of Kristol—who appropriated the ideas of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. Kristol was quite open in his appeals to American business to pay for the neoconservative advocacy of the sovereignty of the market. He warned bankers and industrialists that the money they gave to the colleges and universities was wasted—indeed, was used by academics critical of capitalism to depict the benefactors of the academy as asocial and rapacious, if not worse. Kristol taught for many years at New York University, but persisted in depicting American higher education in bitterly negative terms. He even declared that our institutions were so remote from American tradition that they ignored the Federalist Papers—an assertion falsified by a cursory glance at any college or university catalog. As for the anti-capitalism of the universities, it is singular that they produced economists who were, overwhelmingly and unthinkingly, partisans of the market.
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