Reply #2: Not really

[Lydia Leftcoast]

There was a subgroup of Democrats whose primary obsession was fighting Communism. As long as the Vietnam War raged, they were happy. They loved all foreign leaders who claimed to be anti-Communist, a trick that right-wing tyrants quickly caught on to. Fascist generals and assorted despots learned that all you had to do was call your domestic enemies "Communists" and the U.S. aid money would come rolling in.

However, then Jimmy Carter came in, and not only was he insufficiently enthusiastic about "fighting Communism" in Central America (the victory of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua occurred during his administration) but he insisted on putting human rights into the picture. This was especially infuriating to Jeane Kirkpatrick because she was a supporter of the Argentine and Uruguayan generals who were committing atrocities against their own people in the name of anti-Communism.

Then Ronald Reagan came along, and he seemed to be the perfect figurehead for continuing the militaristic tone that the hawkish wing of the Democratic Party loved.

I don't know about Wolfowitz, but some of the older neocons became overly enamored of militarism during World War II and were happy as Democrats as long as that philosophy prevailed.

Other neocons, like Norman Podhoretz, were actually Communists or Socialists in their early lives and switched 180 degrees when Khrushchev denounced Stalin in 1956, first to become fanatically anti-Communist Democrats and later to become fanatically everything Republicans.

I see the neocons as practitioners of black and white thinking. If they hold a certain ideology, everyone opposed to it is evil. If their ideology fails them, they can go only to the polar opposite that they once despised, not to some sort of reasoned alternative.