David Brooks

And of course, you have to up the dosage when you're giving people edgy nihilism.

It just keeps us to get worse and worse and worse.

And as Richard Weaver, a philosopher from the 1950s said, the problem with the younger generation is they haven't read the minutes to the last meeting.

So you get a group of people who, when they see fascistic behavior, don't understand where that eventually leads.

I think it got attached, and I'll tell my story.

I think what happened was neoconservatives, as I said, really believe in the nature of a regime.

want america to stand for certain values and they're appalled by regimes that stand for evil values and the soviet union was like that and saddam hussein's iraq was like that so they wanted to they said if you have a regime that is internally and domestically poisonous and oppressive it will be dangerous to the world and so the argument was and i would say in my life in the 90s

I was covering the end of apartheid, the end of the Soviet Union, the reunification of Germany, the Oslo peace process in the Middle East.

I was watching democracy be created.

And it seemed to me we were on a tidal wave of creating societies with better democratic values.

And so I think a lot of neocons like me or others and our elders supported the Iraq War for that reason, because they thought fighting for a democratic wave was the right thing to do.

What they did not sufficiently appreciate, what we and especially me did not sufficiently appreciate, the other thing I had said earlier about neocons, epistemological modesty.

Be careful about trying to change complex circumstances because you're going to screw it up.

And we ignored one of the core tenants of our own belief system.

We are so swept up in the moment.

And if we'd only gone back to the single most famous neoconservative foreign policy essay of all time was written by Jean Kirkpatrick.

And her argument was that if you're going to try to create a democracy in an authoritarian context, you need generations of civic planning, of civic organization, of moral foundations of a democracy.

You can't just imagine you can do it overnight.

And we forgot that lesson.

Yeah, I mean, when we withdrew, our friend Robert Kagan wrote a book called The Jungle Goes Back, which say when there's no social order