A neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality.
Irving Kristol, often called the godfather of neoconservatism, used the line from the 1970s to describe former liberals, himself among them, who turned right after watching the social programmes and urban policies of the 1960s disappoint. It became the movement's best-known definition of itself.
In practice
- A former reformer who ran a housing programme becomes its sharpest critic after seeing its results.
- A young teacher who believed every pupil needed only encouragement revises her views after a year in the classroom.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation, Kristol's, is experience: contact with the results of policy tests ideals. Another is age and responsibility, which make people more attentive to risk.
- In its favour
- Describes a real migration of American intellectuals from left to right in the 1960s and 1970s.
- Against it
- The quip frames political disagreement as naivety, and people move the other way too; a mirror-image joke about the conservative who has been arrested circulates on the left. Evidence that personal experience of crime shifts political views is mixed.
- Standing
- Compare not a liberal at twenty-five.
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- The paradoxes of democracy and the quips of partisans