Neoconservatism Updated

City Journal editor-at-large Myron Magnet eulogizes Irving Kristol with these (seen from a sufficiently perverse perspective) wonderfully felicitous lines:

[Kristol] had had his youthful flirtation with left-utopianism and, disillusioned by experience, became a neoconservative--a liberal, as he defined it, who's been mugged by reality. What he really meant, of course, was simply a liberal who'd been mugged--who'd seen that all the liberal, welfare-state ideals for the uplift of the poor, and especially the minority poor, had in the end produced a criminal underclass, exactly the opposite of the intended uplift.

You almost have to admire the deft invocation of hoary images of black criminality used here to discredit an entire political philosophy.

Doin' McLuhan

Today I've assigned a bit of Marshall McLuhan in my Political Sociology class. Impossible for me to think of McLuhan at all without flashing back to this classic scene...