Help: A book by a neocon about the movement

[Torie]

This link might help. One cannot write about neoconservatism, without writing about Irving "a liberal mugged by reality" Kristol (a far more arresting person and speaker than his son - I had the pleasure of listening to one of his lectures, and then mixing it up a bit with him afterwords about intelligent versus dumb uses of American power).

[Torie]

It depends on what you mean by religious right.  Neoconservatives have tended to be Jewish or Catholic, pro-immigrant and pro-civil rights, and so have traditionally been  less than comfortable with Protestant fundamentalists.  Major religious Catholic neoconservatives:  Richard John Neuhaus (former editor of First Things- RIP), Michael Novak, George Weigel, Bill Bennett.  Chuck Colson was one of the major figures bridging the gap between these Catholic neoconservatives and the Evangelical community.

Weren't many neoconservative originally Democrats, like Henry M. Jackson, but then they split with the party in the 70's when its dovish isolationist wing (George McGovern, Jimmy Carter) took over.

Some of them were New Deal supporters who split in the 1960s over the Great Society and Civil Rights. See Norman Podhoretz, 1963, "My Negro Problem—and Ours."

That reminds me that a lot of Jewish Neocons were freaked out over affirmative action/quotas. Non merit based criteria that don't serve Jews very well may have been hovering in the background.