1970's Lifestyles and Social Trends | Neoconservatism

New Right.

Neoconservatism was the most influential and distinctive social trend to emerge in the 1970s, drawing its leaders from former leftists and liberal Democrats disillusioned with the political changes and popular democracy of the 1960s. Neoconservatives, called by wits "liberals mugged by reality," railed against radicalism disguised as liberalism and defended elitism. Unlike earlier conservative Republican leaders, such as Sen. Barry M. Goldwater and President Richard M. Nixon, the most prominent neoconservatives tended to be prolific intellectual writers, such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, and William Bennett.

Moynihan.

Moynihan was the most prominent of the neoconservative spokesmen and has served as Democratic U.S. senator from New York after 1977. Before entering politics he was a professor of government at Harvard University and made a...