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 anti-communist 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.
The neoconservatives all broke with Marxism during the Stalin era, and most of them became Franklin D. Roosevelt–style Democrats. Kristol fought the Nazis in Europe and realized that if communism ever came to America, it would turn into a massively corrupt criminal enterprise, which is what eventually happened in the Soviet Union. After the war, many of the neocons went on to become social scientists at places such as Harvard, Princeton, and UC Berkeley. Others became journalists or editors of magazines such as Commentary and Encounter.
Their second big shift occurred during the 1960s and '70s. Glazer went to work in the Kennedy administration, at the Housing and Home Finance Agency (the predecessor to the Department of Housing and Urban Development). In 1965, Kristol and Daniel Bell founded a magazine called The Public Interest. Swept up in the intoxicating social-science confidence of the era, they believed that we now had the knowledge to settle old ideological feuds and solve social problems scientifically. "Men are learning how to make an industrial economy work," Moynihan wrote in the magazine's first issue.
That confidence underlaid the explosion of social-policy making that helped define the '60s. Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society brought a raft of new programs that aimed to eliminate poverty and inequality. The Nixon administration followed with more in the same vein—the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, along with a 20 percent increase in Social Security benefits and proposals for both a national health-insurance system and a universal basic income for households with children.
From 1960 to 1980, federal spending increased from about $91 billion to about $584 billion. In 1960, defense spending made up about half of the federal budget. By 1980, it was down to less than a quarter. At the start of 1960, approximately 250,000 people were on welfare in New York City. At the beginning of 1969, about 900,000 were.
The new programs did not produce the intended results. By the 1970s, the economy was in terrible shape, pushed into a recession by the Vietnam War, an oil embargo, and the high cost of Johnson's Great Society. In May 1975, the unemployment rate hit 9 percent. A few years later, the inflation rate neared 15 percent. The productivity rate started to decline in 1973—and the poverty rate ticked upward.
Social measures, too, painted a grim picture. From 1960 to 1980, divorce rates more than doubled. The share of children born out of wedlock more than tripled. Violent-crime rates also more than tripled. Drug use exploded. The public-housing projects that had been built with such promise turned into hellscapes. As someone who grew up in New York City in the '70s, I'm astounded by the level of social disorder we all learned to live with. Pretty much everyone I knew got mugged. In 1972 and 1973, there was a serial castrator and killer in Manhattan nicknamed Charlie Chop-Off. He was never caught, and such was the general chaos that it wasn't even that big of a story.
The neocons were mostly immigrant kids who'd grown up in places like Brooklyn, when the borough was still a haven for working-class New Yorkers. They had seen their families rise out of poverty by embracing the common bourgeois virtues: hard work, thrift, self-reliance, self-discipline, respect for tradition, and an intense focus on education. When the counterculture arose in the '60s, the neocons were dismayed to see affluent kids at Berkeley, Harvard, and Columbia dropping out, doing acid, denouncing the industrious and traditional culture of their parents, and embracing the social anarchy resulting from that culture's erosion.
The disillusionment of the '60s made neoconservatism bipartisan. Some neocons—such as Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and Midge Decter—became Republicans. Others—such as Moynihan and Glazer—stuck with the Democrats. But they remained a coherent and ever more influential intellectual force in American life.
The events of the '60s and '70s taught the men and women who would become neocons two big lessons. The first was that society is a lot more complicated than it looks, and that many attempts to reengineer it end up producing no benefits at all—or worse. A 1971 essay by Glazer in Commentary, "The Limits of Social Policy," captured the chastened mood. So did Kristol's famous definition of a neoconservative: "a liberal who has been mugged by reality." In 1973, in another essay for Commentary, the neoconservative political scientist Aaron Wildavsky observed that experts had a lot of information about society's problems, but nobody knew how to fix them. Consequently, "vast amounts of money and even vaster amounts of enthusiasm were poured into various programs that ultimately ended in failure and bewilderment."
Those commonly associated with the neoconservative crew were not against trying to use government to relieve poverty or inequality—Moynihan, Glazer, and Bell were not libertarians or even small-government conservatives. But their insight was that if you're going to launch a big federal program, you had better acknowledge that most programs—whether job training, education reform, or efforts to reduce juvenile delinquency—fail. You had better have a lot of evidence that your idea will work, and you had better proceed cautiously, experimentally, and without building big bureaucracies.
Given this hard-earned skepticism and epistemological modesty, it is ironic that many later conservatives—including me—who had supped at the neocon table would come to embrace a grand project to create democracy in Iraq. In fact, the single most famous neoconservative essay on foreign policy is Jeane Kirkpatrick's 1979 article "Dictatorships & Double Standards," also in Commentary, in which she explains that laying the groundwork for a democracy where one does not yet exist requires decades of civil-society work. "It seems clear that the architects of contemporary American foreign policy have little idea of how to go about encouraging the liberalization of an autocracy," she wrote. Somehow, 24 years later, that lesson was forgotten on the way to Iraq.
Another important truth the neocons learned from the '60s is that you can't separate policy making from moral character. The political scientist James Q. Wilson put it this way in The Public Interest in 1985: "The most important change in how one defines the public interest that I have witnessed—and experienced—over the last twenty years has been a deepening concern for the development of character in the citizenry."
When trying to effect social change, Wilson continued, "the essential first step is to acknowledge that at root, in almost every area of important public concern, we are seeking to induce persons to act virtuously, whether as school children, applicants for public assistance, would-be lawbreakers, or voters and public officials. Not only is such conduct desirable in its own right, it appears now to be necessary if large improvements are to be made in those matters we consider problems: schooling, welfare, crime, and public finance."
When neocons evaluated any policy proposal, the core questions they asked were: Does this moralize or demoralize the people it touches? Does this induce them to behave more responsibly or less? By morality, they didn't mean the kind of fancy notions explored by Thomas Aquinas and Immanuel Kant. They just meant the basics: Does this policy encourage people to work hard, be good parents and neighbors, delay gratification, and recognize not just their rights but their responsibilities?
Neocons like Kristol had no problem with Social Security, which reduced poverty among seniors. Giving seniors money doesn't give them a greater incentive to grow old. But neoconservatives noticed that the number of single-parent families surged following the War on Poverty's expansion of welfare. A guaranteed income, they argued, reduced labor-force participation and the desire to work. They noticed that when you give a country permission to rack up a huge federal deficit, you are giving people permission to behave more and more selfishly toward future generations. So the neocons put virtue at the center of their public-policy thinking; they were not afraid to be moralistic.
They rejected the privatization of morality, which they saw happening around them, especially in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s. During that hyper-individualistic moment, many Americans valorized the idea that a person's values, tastes, and cultural attitudes are a private affair. Because everybody's moral standards are different, no one should try to impose their morality on someone else. Live and let live. That idea is still with us.
The neocons, by contrast, believed that humans are social and spiritual creatures whose souls are either ennobled or degraded by the systems, cultures, and behaviors in which we are enmeshed. We're constantly influencing and being influenced by one another. We're all reliant on a shared pool of moral capital—the values, norms, behaviors, and institutions that make it easier for people to be good. When you privatize morality, you drain the pool of shared moral capital.
The neocons inspected each of society's systems, trying to identify ways they ennobled or degraded people. For example, their support for capitalism was ambivalent because, although capitalism encourages risk taking and industriousness (good for the economy), it also tends to inflame greed and philistinism (bad for the soul). Bell's 1976 book, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, noted that although capitalism relies on farsighted, self-disciplined people to create value and grow the economy, the advertising and the consumerist mentality that capitalism generates encourage shortsightedness and self-indulgence.
The neoconservatives also paid enormous attention to the mediating institutions of society, those entities that successfully transmit values from one generation to the next—families, neighborhoods, congregations, civic organizations. The neocons argued that the left, seeing society almost exclusively in terms of the individual and the state, gave short shrift to these valuable institutions. Because neocons saw them as seedbeds of character and as cultural shock absorbers for when times get hard, they were concerned that the expansion of the state seemed to be weakening and displacing these institutions. Though many neocons were not religious themselves, they were alarmed by the decline of religion and of congregational life. They were alarmed, too, by the policy of deinstitutionalization, which took mentally ill people out of mental-health facilities, put them on the street, and called it freedom. This kind of approach, neocons argued, was hopelessly hyper-individualized, placing the "freedom" of the individual before the safety of the community.
The neocons also paid enormous attention to the prevailing ethos of their time—what we might call the spirit of the age. They believed that this ethos was not driven primarily by economic and political forces, but shaped by shifts in culture and ideas. "Individuals, families, churches, and communities cannot operate in isolation, cannot long maintain values at odds with those legitimated by the state and popularized by the culture," Gertrude Himmelfarb, a neoconservative historian, wrote in The Public Interest in 1994. So if the wider assumptions of society are shaped by hyper-individualism, antinomianism, and (as Christopher Lasch put it) a culture of narcissism, then society is likely to deteriorate. One of Moynihan's famous essays, published in The American Scholar in 1993, was "Defining Deviancy Down," which theorized that as the amount of deviant behavior in a community rises, people tend to define behavior that was once considered deviant as normal and acceptable.
While old-fashioned conservatives cited Edmund Burke and libertarians cited Adam Smith, neocons never tired of quoting Alexis de Tocqueville. He shaped how they saw society—as a single civilization in which politics and culture, economics and morality, democracy and spirituality were all fundamentally inseparable. The spirit of civilization shapes who people are, how they perceive reality, and what they think is right and wrong. In every endeavor, the crucial question is: What sort of people are we nurturing into being?
The neoconservatives believed that they were living amid a crisis of values. Not a clash between two different value systems but a crisis in the very idea of value. Seduced by social-science rationalism, moral relativism, or political partisanship, people had trouble thinking clearly about what separates a morally healthy society from a morally unhealthy one. This created a void in the soul of society and engendered a sense of alienation. "Secular rationalism has been unable to produce a compelling, self-justifying moral code," Kristol said in 1991. The result is nihilism—an amoral culture in which people grow up without coherent values.
So how can neoconservative thinking help us today? The first big lesson of neoconservatism is that character is destiny. That lesson applies whether you're talking about the character of a leader, an organization, or a nation. If you disregard truth—as many Republicans plainly do these days—you will wind up in some pretty ugly places.
If you want to improve the character of a nation or an organization, you have to change its culture so that it nurtures basic decency. Which leads to the second lesson of neoconservatism: The most important values in a democratic society are the pedestrian bourgeois virtues. Aristocratic societies may do better at inspiring heroism, genius, love of honor. But democratic societies rely on showing up on time, working hard, being there for your neighbor, listening with curiosity, respecting traditions.
The third crucial insight from the neoconservatives is that culture drives history. The assumptions people rely on, the mental categories in their heads, the things they admire and disdain, the way they process the world, their norms and habits—all of this will determine how they behave.
But perhaps the most important belief that the neoconservatives can impart to us is that the American dream is real. The original neocons, the sons and daughters of immigrants, aspired to make it in America and contribute to their adopted home. If libertarians oriented their politics around freedom, and progressives oriented their politics around equality, the neocons tended to orient theirs around social mobility. They wanted to create a world in which poor boys and girls like themselves could rise and succeed. They understood that this ascent required not just economic opportunity, but also the right values.
Today, roughly 70 percent of Americans say they don't believe in the American dream. That loss of faith is like a giant bomb detonated in the middle of our society, robbing us of our central, unifying vision. Absent that shared vision of possibility, people revert to a tribal, us-versus-them morality. If the ghosts of the original neocons have anything to tell us about specific policy choices, it's that we need to do what we can to expand social mobility and restore faith in the American dream.
The other thing the ghosts of the neocons would tell us is that the fight for the American dream is as much moral as political or economic. When he was running for president in 2020, Joe Biden was right to say that the election was a struggle for the soul of America. The problem was that neither he nor the people in his administration knew how to wage a moral and cultural battle. Trump, in contrast, is a genius at cultural warfare. Because of their history going back to the New Deal, Democrats are more comfortable talking about expanding health insurance, investing in infrastructure, and reducing prescription-drug prices. All of that is important. But they will continually lose to MAGA's cultural warriors unless they can connect those policies to a story about reversing America's moral decline. This is where a new and repurposed neoconservatism can help them.
This article appears in the January 2026 print edition with the headline "Bring Back the Neocons."
