They mostly support, in retrospect, the early Civil Rights Acts, and they join with the neoconservatives in favorably contrasting Dr. King's vision of a color- blind society with the balkanizing quota schemes of today's civil rights establishment. Finally, of course, divisions among anti-Communists have long since disappeared and McCarthyism remains an issue only in textbooks. This pattern of convergence means that neoconservatism has lost its ideological distinctiveness. Neither Kristol nor Podhoretz finds grounds for regret in that. Neoconservatives have lost their particularity but won their war.
Communism is dead and the left is in disarray.
It is not surprising, in retrospect, that things should have turned out as they did. And once Ronald Reagan won the presidency and made conservatism the political establishment, traditionalist conservatives dropped their sectarian mentality and met the neocons coming the other way. Podhoretz somewhat misreads Reagan's role in all this. In fact, few if any neoconservatives were early supporters of Reagan, whom they correctly viewed as a traditionalist conservative with strong libertarian leanings. Prior to 1980, most neoconservatives regarded him with a combination of condescension and mistrust.