He is single-minded in his attacks on narrow thinking, dogmatic in his devotion to pragmatism. And in the cause of civility, he calls a great number of people some pretty nasty names. Of these, the worst -- certainly the most frequent -- is that vague epithet "neo-conservative." It is the neo- conservatives, he argues, who have placed the idol of greed upon the altar of politics -- well, he writes like that -- in contrast with the more generous vision of "traditional" conservatives like himself.

This would be more interesting if anyone had the slightest idea what neo- conservative means. In its original sense, as applied in the early 1970s to that group of disillusioned New York liberals centred around Irving Kristol and The Public Interest magazine, the term had quite the opposite sense to that which Segal -- and nearly everyone else -- now ascribe to it. It was the neo- conservatives, against the reflexive hostility of traditional conservatives, who thought that the distributionist concerns of the welfare state could be married with the dynamism of the free market.

"What distinguished neoconservatism from the 'old' conservatism?" William Safire writes in his Political Dictionary. "The novel feature of the new conservatism is a relaxed attitude toward collective responsibility." Kristol himself was clear in his rejection of laissez-faire: "People will always want security as much as they want liberty," he wrote, "and the 19th century liberal-individualist notion that life for all of us should be an enterprise at continual risk is doctrinaire fantasy." It was pre-eminently a philosophy of moderation, best expressed in the title of Kristol's famous book, Two Cheers for Capitalism.

The neo-conservatism Segal attacks sounds a lot like the conservatism he would wish to defend. But then, the neo-conservatism he describes is not a movement that anyone would wish to be associated with: xenophobic, extremist, divisive, and exalting no higher purpose than the gratification of base individual desires. At times, Segal seems to equate this with libertarianism, which if not exactly fair, is at least a consistent caricature: "a selfish, barbed-wire politics," based on the "law of the jungle." But whom does he identify as the political voices of "neo-conservativism"?

The followers of Pat Buchanan, arch-advocate of protectionism and tougher law enforcement. And the Christian right, agitators for government regulation of everything from drugs to sex to prayer in the schools. What unites both these groups, of course, is their unswerving devotion to the very communal values and responsibilities-before-rights that Segal declares to be his own credo.

So Segal wants to attack loony libertarians, but can only find loony authoritarians to knock about. Indeed, forced to identify any of the usual suspects, he can find almost no one at all who fits the neo-conservative profile. "I am not thinking of Thatcher, Reagan or Mulroney," he writes at one point. Elsewhere, both the Klein government in Alberta and the Harris Tories in Ontario are excused from suspicion.

So whereas those on the left have taken to slapping the neo-conservative label across an ever wider range of opinion, from Michael Coren to Bob Rae, ultimately embracing everyone who does not share their own peculiar taste for statism -- which is to say, most people -- Segal is forced to define it in narrower and narrower terms: not even the Reform party, but "the more extreme elements of Reform." But either way, it comes out meaning next to nothing. It is simply an insult.

Now, I have no use for the authoritarian right. I don't even much care for some of the conservatives that Segal is willing to embrace. But if neo- conservatives are to be found only on the political fringe, how are they a movement worth attacking? Or if they are not represented among those commonly identified as such, then who are they?

They are phantoms. They are straw men. There are some genuine libertarians about. There are even a few of the harsher kinds of conservative Segal talks about, who somehow combine a preference for a life of "continual risk" in matters of social and economic policy with a nanny-state intrusiveness in matters of morals. But neither is representative of that great mass of opinion that is commonly identified as "right-wing," let alone "neo- conservative."

For all his talk of moderation and "bringing people together," Segal is engaged in the time-honoured political tactic of inventing an enemy. He needs to create a division, however tenuous, between "extreme" and "mainstream" conservatives, just as others depend upon the supposed divide between "right" and "left" to organize their thoughts. But where these terms have any meaning, they are less and less useful as guides to today's debates - - a subject we will take up next time.