David Brooks

City College is a great place to go.

And in the 1930s, there were a group of young, mostly Jewish kids who were communists.

And they had names like Nathan Glazer and Seymour Martin Lipset and Irving Kristol.

And they were a certain kind of communist.

They were Trotskyites.

And the Trotskyites were the smart communists, basically.

And there were another kind called the Stalinists.

And they were sort of the dumb conformists, to be honest.

And in the dining hall, the Trotskyites, like Crystal and Nathan Glazer, ate in alcove one, a little part of the dining hall.

And the Stalinists ate in alcove two.

And the Trotskyites were so much better at beating the Stalinists in argument, the Stalinists, in true Stalinist fashion, forbade their members from debating with the Trotskyites.

And so they were communists in the 30s.

And then along comes the war.

A bunch of the neocons like Irving Kristol served in World War II.

And they realized the communism was not going to work.

And so they became disillusioned with that.

And then they became pretty standard Franklin Roosevelt Democrats.

And some like Nathan Glaser went to work for John F. Kennedy.

And in the early 60s, there was great faith in social science.

Politics didn't have to be this big messy ideological thing.