http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE6DE1E3EF931A25757C0A961948260&sec=&pagewanted=printIn recent years, Mr. Hook has had close ties with the neoconservatives. If neoconservatism is the political culture of the old anti-Stalinist left ''preserved in aspic,'' as Sidney Blumenthal has suggested, Mr. Hook is a much purer relic of this culture, precisely because he denies that he is any kind of conservative when he describes himself as an ''unreconstructed believer in the welfare state and in a steeply progressive income tax, a secular humanist, and a firm supporter of freedom of choice with respect to abortion, voluntary euthanasia, and other domestic measures to which [ Ronald Reagan ] is opposed.''
What Mr. Hook shares with the neoconservatives is his passionate anti-Communism. Indeed, he might be described as the Ur-anti-Communist intellectual: his anti-Communism is older, more central to his world view and less alloyed with other independently held beliefs than just about anyone else's. He first turned against Communism when he realized, before most of the evidence was in, that Stalin had betrayed and cruelly perverted the principles of socialism to which Mr. Hook had been committed since his teens.
Comment how can one reconcile the income tax with anti-Communism ?
What is this 'neoconservative' business, anyway ? Who needs one more label without apparent necessity ?