If there's a term that gets many people frothing at the mouth, it's neo-con. For some, it seems that it's almost a term of abuse.

With this in mind, I would like to note the passing of Irving Kristol, on Sept.18, at 89. In the words of one headline writer at the Wall Street Journal, Kristol was "the man who put the neo into conservative."

In his lifetime, Kristol was often called "the godfather of neo-conservatism" and much ink has been spilled over him since his death. (Many of these obits and appreciations are collected on that most useful of websites, Arts and Letters Daily.)

Now, you may not hear the term neo-con as much as you used to when George W. Bush was president.

Irving Kristol was known as the 'godfather of neo-conservatism.' (The Weekly Standard/Associated Press)

But for editorialists at the Wall Street Journal, "the tension between neo-conservatism and its critics still lies at the heart of our (American) division today, or much of it."

It is a tension that is felt here in Canada, too. Conservatives, especially in the Harper government, would occasionally get lambasted with the term by their opponents in Parliament and the media.

Those days are largely gone, it seems. The concept is rarely bandied about now that Bush has left office and now that the Conservatives have embraced big government spending.

But tracing the origins of the movement is still hugely instructive. It shows how a modest moral and political insight can morph into a hardened, ideological position.

Moving right

Irving Kristol was a persuasive and formidable man, as his numerous chroniclers have pointed out. He was one of those New York intellectuals who, in the words of a PBS documentary, spent their college days "arguing the world." And they never really stopped.

Kristol once said of himself that he was always a neo-something. He was a neo-Marxist once, a follower of Leon Trotsky in his youth. That meant he was part of the anti-Stalinist left in the 1930s and '40s.

These were people who were horribly suspicious of the bullying ways of the dictatorial Communist Party, which eventually pushed them politically rightward.

Kristol moved from Marxism to becoming more of progressive Democrat.

He helped found an influential little magazine called The Public Interest and wrote long, thoughtful essays with his friends and colleagues. (New York intellectuals wrote for tiny magazines that spread their ideas in a trickle-down fashion, the way trickle down economics is supposed to work.)

But in the 1960s, during the Lyndon Johnson years, Kristol, along with others, began to question the premise of the liberal worldview.

As James Q. Wilson, the conservative scholar, writes in his appreciation of Kristol, some intellectuals began to doubt whether all the social engineering that liberals were proposing in the Great Society experiments really worked.

Worse, these progressive interventions were discovered to have unintended consequences. As Wilson puts it, "launch a big project and you will surely discover you have created many things you did not intend."

Unintended consequences

In his short obit, Wilson does not go through the litany of conservative grievances but it would be familiar to those who read publications such as City Journal.

The program called Aid to Dependent Children was said to have helped dismantle the African-American family by effectively banishing low-earning black males from households, as their incomes would get in the way of the welfare cheques.

Bus black kids to better schools and whites flee the neighbourhoods. Good intentions create crumbling cities.

That is not the way progressive social policy is supposed to work, argued the neo-conservatives. It is supposed to help people, not harm them.

Supposedly, these early neo-cons were not arguing against help for people in need. Their view was said to be a reflexive modesty about how much government could do.

What happens, they simply asked, when good intentions produce flawed public policy?

Mugged by reality

Furthermore, behind this growing suspicion of social engineering lay a more profound philosophical criticism: the view that people are more intractable than liberals want to believe.

People change slowly and often with great resistance. (Even Machiavelli pointed that out in the 16th century.) So do the social conditions they live in.

Just as the former Marxists had to adjust their ideological vision, so should liberals. As Irving Kristol so famously put it, a neo-conservative was a liberal who was mugged by reality.

Kristol also argued that neo-conservatism is not an ideology, it is a "persuasion." Or, as Wilson puts it, "a way of thinking about politics more than a set of principles and rules."

But it did have one, almost godly law that oversaw its insights: the principle of unintended consequences.

Whatever you do, something unexpected almost always happens. From a public policy perspective, reality can bite you in the ass.

Power and money

Looking back, it is plain to see that neo-conservatism was not immune from its own cherished, iron principle.

With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the taste of political power, wads of corporate cash flowed into hospitable think-tanks.

Neo-conservatism began to seem less like a persuasion, a cautionary stance, than an ideology.

Power and money has a way of turning wariness into marching orders.

So, what irony that a movement that started out with a learned and considered resistance to large-scale meddling would end up advancing the case for risky foreign adventures on a massive scale.

As thoughtful critics pointed out, neo-conservatives had become world-changing Woodrow Wilson interventionists who wanted to re-engineer other nations to make the world safe for democracy.

Kristol himself was silent on the invasion of Iraq. A prominent (and younger) neo-con, Francis Fukuyama, eventually thought the invasion a costly mistake.

But it may be that the principle of unintended consequences is too paralyzing for a policy maker.

While useful to ruminate on if you're a scholar or critic, once in power, you feel you have to do something. After all, it can be argued that everything has unintended consequences, including leaving a dictator (like Hitler) in power.

Still, wariness is commendable. When to cast caution aside and act is at the heart of grand politics. Even if bold acting is always, as a former prime minister once observed, a roll of the dice.