It’s easy to overgeneralize and get the idea that a small group of neoconservatives have worked some voodoo on a sitting President—you may remember Hillary Rodham Clinton’s initial reaction to Monicagate on NBC’s Today Show, that it represented "a vast right-wing conspiracy." It may be easy to insist that this small, concerted group of men and women have propelled an entire nation’s foreign policy toward the radical concept of "benevolent hegemony," wonk-speak for an American Empire that brings democratic ideals to dictatorships around the globe. But that, as the neoconservatives say themselves, would be simplistic.

"I have been amazed by the level of conspiracy-mongering around neocons," said David Brooks, an editor at Mr. Murdoch and Mr. Kristol’s Weekly Standard, and author of Bobos in Paradise. "I get it every day—the ‘evil Jewish conspiracy.’ The only distinction between ‘neoconservative’ and ‘conservative’ this way is circumcision. We actually started calling it the Axis of Circumcision."

That’s the kind of knowing humor that neoconservatives often allow themselves to indulge in; it’s almost impossible to imagine the embattled and shredded remains of the liberals having that kind of laugh on themselves! But political security breeds gentle good humor.

For instance, when asked if she was a neocon herself, the best-selling right-wing pundit Ann Coulter replied, "No, I’m a gentile. That’s only partially a joke. These days, the term ‘neoconservative’ is almost always used to insult someone. More recently, the term has become a liberal epithet to mean ‘Jew conservative.’"

That kind of brusque humor is endemic to the movement.

The core of the neoconservative movement couldn’t be more precise. Take the beginning of Mr. Murdoch’s Weekly Standard, for example. It was founded, as so many New York ideas were, in a coffee shop on West 72nd Street—the very place where so many ideas were hatched by the progenitors of the neoconservatives, back when they were lefties in the 1930’s and 1940’s. And in an exquisite irony that would have been appreciated by that generation of ideologues—most of whom experienced their own conversion to the right, which then brought them to power and allowed them to make possible the current neoconservative moment—it had just the right name. Saul Bellow could hardly have done better: The Weekly Standard was spawned in the Utopia Coffee Shop.