David Brooks

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.

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.