David Brooks

And the crime was so bad in those days, Charlie Chopoff was not even a big story.

But so there was so much social decay.

And so the neocons, the people we now call neocons said, whoa, all the social planning that we had such faith in 10 years ago, we were wrong.

Like, well, the world's a lot more complicated than we thought.

And as Irving Kristol famously put it, a neoconservative is a liberal who's been mugged by reality.

And the second thing that happened in the 1960s was these immigrant kids believed in the bourgeois values.

Work hard, dress neatly, respect your parents.

Along came these rich hippies saying, don't work hard, drop out, do drugs.

And they were outraged.

They were just morally offended.

And so that's really the roots of neoconservatism.

It's not some right-wing Republican thing.

It started as a strategy of dissent within the Democratic Party.

Because I'm a human anachronism.

Yeah.

I think one of the things the neoconservatives can do is they teach us, first of all, some of the things they learned in the 60s.

Life is really complicated.

You should do social policy.

You should try to improve government.

But you should realize that most policies fail.