Andrew Sullivan has two interesting posts ( here and here).on the first usage of the phrase. It seems, so far, that Dwight MacDonald was the first to use the word. What’s interesting about this is that it runs against the settled explanation of the last couple decades. For years, it was accepted that it was Michael Harrington and the editors of Dissent who coined the term. More recently, if memory serves, Norman Podhoretz suggested that he used the term before Harrington.

But while the fact that MacDonald used the term first is interesting, it’s not necessarily significant. Similar or identical words are often used to describe profoundly different movements and ideas. Saudi Wahhabis, British Tories, French Monarchists and American free-marketers are all called “conservatives,” but they hardly all subscribe to the same ideas. I can’t count how many “New Rights” there’ve been in the US. The people MacDonald called “neoconservatives” weren’t neoconservatives in the way we understand the term today or in the way Harrington understood it back then. Same term, labeling different things.