Definately some were former liberals and Democrats.Originally posted by: Drift3r
Of course it fails to mention that these neo-conservatives are all about big goverment and goverment spending. The major leaders and founders of this movement were all ex-liberals who believed that we needed a stronger more aggressive foriegn policy but that one should be more then happy to give more rights and powers to big goverment. They also believed that personal freedoms and privacy were things that just got in the way of creating a effecient big goverment.
Here's how I learned it
The term developed into its current usage to describe people of the conservative persuasion who were diverging from the standard conservative line as embodied by people like the late Barry Goldwater due to the influences of the Religious Right on the subject of morals (which Goldwater conservatives really didn't care about) and on the subject of the economy (supply-side is definitely not a classic conservative approach). In the late 1970s, there was a major struggle in the Republican Party between the old-school conservatives and the emerging group as described above and embodied by Reagan.