Daniel Finkelstein has a must-read column on Seymour Martin Lipset, who died last week. Unlike most people who use the phrase 'neocon', Daniel understands what it means. But his most interesting point is at the end:

One more episode in the intellectual journey of Seymour Martin Lipset is worth recording. Very near the end of his life, before a debilitating stroke rendered him unable to speak, the great political scientist turned his attention to a new development — the third way social democracy of Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder.

America, he argued, was still different, but it had become less exceptional. Europe — now more meritocratic, more rights-orientated, more libertarian — was becoming like America, and it too no longer provided good soil for the traditional Left.

It’s a change I welcome but, reading Lipset, I wonder. Perhaps modern anti-Americans do not really dislike how different they are. They fear how similar we are becoming.

I think those last two sentences merit a column on their own.

I first came across Seymour Martin Lipset when I was at the Fabian Society, and I wrote a series of articles for the Fabian Review on his work (which I am trying to dig out from the pit which is my archive), and the neocons. Reading them, I realised that the neocons described almost my entire political outlook. It was a revelation, and I've called myself a neocon since the early 1990s, long before the foreign policy element came to wider notice (albeit in almost every instance, completely misunderstood).

Now, where are those articles...