Wow! There is a great history of "conservatism"

(that is, classical liberalism and neo-conservatism, neither of which is particulary conservative as the term is understood outside of America) at OpinionJournal, Investing in the Right Ideas:
How philanthropists helped make conservatism a governing philosophy., by James Piereson, who "taught political science at the University of Pennsylvania before joining the John M. Olin Foundation in 1981. From 1985 until this year, when it made its final grants, he served as the foundation's executive director."

He gives the two strains more respect than they give each other, and white-washes the main differences between them. Or, perhaps he gets to the root of those differences:

In contrast to Hayekian liberalism, neoconservatism never developed a full-blown theory of government, economics or society. (Instead of a movement, neoconservatism itself was more a "persuasion," as Mr. [Irving] Kristol called it, or a "tendency," as Mr. [Norman] Podhoretz described it.) Rejecting orthodoxies and abstract theories alike, the neoconservatives tended to operate in close proximity to ongoing events. Mr. Kristol, though sympathetic to Hayek, once wrote that "he too often gives the impression that he considers reality to be one immense deviation from true doctrine."

Then there's

Not that the neoconservatives were against a welfare state in principle, or necessarily embraced the unfettered market as an alternative. They criticized the welfare state because it demoralized the poor and made them dependent on government, but they hardly objected to well-crafted measures to aid the unemployed. A conservative welfare state, one that encouraged work, family and middle-class values, was something they could endorse. In foreign policy, they believed that the Cold War was a vital moral and political struggle, and rejected efforts to conciliate the Soviet Union as naive or worse. In another time, they might well have been called liberals; in the 1970s and beyond, they were most definitely conservatives.

The Libertarian position seems to be almost diametrically opposed to this summation. Though, of course, there are schisms within libertarianism, but all should read this not merely as a history of conservative philanthropy, but also as instruction for activism.