BRING BACK THE NEOCONS

They could be an antidote to Trumpism.

- DAVID BROOKS

What comes after Donald Trump? What compelling social vision can replace MAGA's offerings and reverse the tide of global populism? In considering these questions, I find myself returning to an unlikely group of 20th-century thinkers: the neoconservatives.

These days, when people hear the word neocons, they tend to think of Republicans who supported the Iraq War. But the notoriety the neocons attained for supporting that war has obscured their origins as a dissident faction within the American left, one that was staunchly anticommunist but mostly preoccupied with domestic policy.

Here’s why the original neocon thinkers—people such as Irving Kristol, James Q. Wilson, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan—can be so helpful right now: They focused their attention on the bloody crossroads where morality and politics intersect. 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.

NEOCONSERVATISM coalesced into a movement in the 1970s, but it has its roots in the cafeteria of the City College of New York in the late 1930s. 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.