David Brooks: evaluation

Transcript context

…[laughs] You mentioned before that you used to be a neoconservative. Now we’re in 2025, and we see Russia has proven quite weak in some ways. Iran, extremely weak. Hezbollah, mostly devastated. Hamas, on its heels. Is it the case that, other than occupying countries, that the neocons were right about most things, and you should actually just be a neocon again? True or false? The neocons are anti-Trump. You’re anti-Trump. Are you, in some sense, headed toward being a revised neocon, where occupation is the belief you’ve jettisoned? Afghanistan didn’t work. Iraq was very messy, right? Does that make sense to you? I’m still consistent with that belief. To me, neocon was a specific group of people. They tend to have grown up in the 1920s and ’30s, usually Jewish from Brooklyn. Usually, they went to City College of New York. In those days in City College, they were all Marxists, but there were Stalinists, who were the dumber Marxists, and there were Trotskyites, who were the smarter Marxists. They ate in different alcoves in the cafeteria. Because the Trotskyites were smarter, the Stalinists did something intelligent, which is, they said, “You’re not allowed to talk to the Trotskyites. ” All the Trotskyites turned into neocons, or not all, but many. Irving Kristol was there, a guy named Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer. That was the cohort that I followed. They were, like me, totally fine with the New Deal. They thought that American culture began to go off the rails in the 1960s, with a rebellion against bourgeois culture, which their immigrant parents were really part of, with the spoiled rich kids who formed the New Left, and they became suspicious of some of the Great Society social programs, which they thought were counterproductive. I think they were pretty much right about all that. The second thing they were right about is, they emphasized that you can’t analyze society unless you’re willing to analyze — and do this dangerously — the moral fabric of the society. You’re sounding more and more neocon the more you go on.…

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