To equate the Dem party in any iteration with being in some neighborhood adjacent to Communism, gets the conversation off on the wrong foot in my opinion. It is just not a helpful label.
I would agree with this sentiment.
At the time that neoconservatism became distinguishable as an actual movement in response to the Democratic Party's foreign policy after Vietnam, no Communist state, even those outside of the Soviet sphere of influence such as Albania, had embraced what we would consider the fundamental elements of Western society. The Soviet Union itself was a repressive, totalitarian regime that significantly curtailed the freedom and rights of its populace to facilitate the Party's absolute control. Whatever your political ideology, opposing the Eastern bloc because of a belief in civil liberty was not only a perfectly rational position, but effectively the norm here. The Socialist Party of America was never a supporter of the Soviet system; I believe the Frankfurt Declaration of the Socialist International was very explicit in its objection to the same. Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, a prototypical neoconservative, was a Socialist in college and an otherwise extremely liberal Democrat who turned to Reagan because of his hard line stance on Communism, eventually becoming a nominal Republican at best. Norman Podhoretz, however, who wrote the "Neoconservative Anguish over Reagan's Foreign Policy" article in Commentary, has undergone a total transformation and is now openly sympathizing with Sarah Palin's political platform, which is rather incongruous with the historical conception of a neoconservative.
Of course, when I think of neoconservatism today, I associate it with the idealistic foreign policy of the Project for a New American Century and other similar organizations rather than the domestic liberalism that was a defining characteristic of its original practitioners. Given that its influence is largely confined to trying to articulate Republican national security strategy, I think the neoconservative future is inseparable from whatever interpretation of conservatism is fashionable at the moment. Its acolytes will enhance their credibility by advocating for regime change in Iran, Syria and wherever else (see John Bolton casting himself as a Korean expert and exhorting for decisive action against the North), and take solace in the fact that we are generally more amenable to a stronger military than the Democratic Party. Meanwhile, those who believe that the Republican Party isn't sufficiently conservative on the whole will continue to use the term in a derisive and all-encompassing manner, which normally elicits a smile from me -- because I know not to take anything else they have to contribute seriously.
