David Brooks

We could just sick a lot of economists at a problem and they would devise a rational technocratic solution.

And Irving Kristol and another vaguely person called neoconservative, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, formed a magazine called The Public Interest.

And in the very first issue, Moynihan said, we've learned how to make a society work.

And they were just standard issue Democrats.

And then along comes 1968, 69.

A lot of the policies that they had so earnestly championed in the early 60s were not working.

And so you saw rising crime.

American cities went into decay, rising crime rates, rising divorce rates, more kids born out of wedlock.

There was just a lot of social anarchy.

I was a kid in New York City in the 1970s, and everybody got mugged.

The crime rates were incredible.

There was a guy, there was a serial castrator on the Upper West Side who would take kids, lead them into Central Park, castrate them, and then murder them.

And his nickname was Charlie Chopoff.

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.