Bring Back the Neocons

"They saw politics through the lens of not only polling and social-science data, but also literature, philosophy, psychology, and theology. They asked the big questions-not just How can we win the next election? but How can we create a civilization to be proud of ? The moral and spiritual tenor of their political writings could be a tonic for a society in moral and spiritual crisis."

"The poor immigrant kids who would go on to found the movement were the Trotskyists who sat in one alcove of that dining hall. They spent their days arguing with one another and with the Stalinists who sat in the neighboring alcove. In those days, Kristol, Irving Howe, Seymour Martin Lipset, Nathan Glazer, and others were convinced that communism was the future, and so it mattered what kind prevailed."

Neoconservatism emerged from left-wing dissidents who broke with Marxism during the Stalin era and later coalesced into a movement in the 1970s. Early neoconservatives such as Irving Kristol, James Q. Wilson, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan prioritized the intersection of morality and politics and drew on literature, philosophy, psychology, and theology as well as social science. The movement’s founders included poor immigrant Trotskyists from City College of New York who debated Stalinists and became Franklin D. Roosevelt-style Democrats. The movement foregrounded domestic policy and moral-cultural renewal as a potential antidote to populism and civic decline.

Read at The Atlantic