Like Greg, I read Peter Beinart’s column analogizing today’s liberals to the early neoconservatives associated with the journal The Public Interest, and while the line about how ”we spent more time tearing down icons than building them up” jumped out at me and had me prepared to hate it, in the end I thought it was a good and provocative piece, and I don’t see the “insult” or “libel” that Greg sees.

Yes, the historical analogy is facile (Is that surprising? The facile-historical-analogy racket has been a rewarding one for Beinart.) but there’s something to it,

especially if when you hear the word “neoconservative” you don’t think of Donald Rumsfeld, Doug Feith or Michael Ledeen, but rather of people like Public Interest co-founder Nat Glazer or contributors like Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Daniel Bell. (I am omitting Kristol pere, but at the point when he helped found the magazine, he was not as far right as he is now.) At the height of its influence, the Public Interest neocons were not dishonorable or dishonest or -- as Greg would have it -- nihilists, which is not to say they were always right. What they were, for the most part, were liberals (and in some cases ex-socialists) and products of the era of liberal consensus, who had been deeply affected, sometimes excessively so, by the blind spots and errors of domestic liberalism. They believed, generally, that the idealism of Great Society liberalism failed to take into account the role of culture, ethnicity and community, that it rested on a naïve view of human nature. But there's was not a belief “that significant social progress was largely unattainable.”

When I think of that group, I think in particular of Moynihan, because that’s the only one of them I spent a lot of time around (much later, of course). Moynihan’s attitude was that you shouldn’t expect any government intervention to dramatically change the way the world works, but you do it anyway, and you try to do it a little better. He would frequently quote what he called “Rossi’s Law,” attributed to the social scientist and evaluation specialist Peter Rossi: "The expected value for any measured effect of a social program is zero." But that wasn’t an argument for doing nothing and giving tax breaks to the rich. It was an argument for modest expectations and more basic interventions - for example, giving poor people cash rather than constructing elaborate schemes to transform their communities. Moynihan’s opposition to welfare reform in the 1990s was very much of a piece with his Public Interest-era neoconservatism: He didn’t like welfare as it existed, but he didn’t believe for a second that the grand scheme dreamed of by the right, in which work requirements, state experimentation, and incentives would suddenly transform families that had needed welfare into self-sufficient players in the economic marketplace, would work or was worth the gamble.

We modern liberals are a long, long way from the technocratic dreaminess that led to LBJ’s Community Action Program, for example. But in the same way that the early domestic neocons were deeply aware of the excesses of liberalism, we are deeply aware of the excesses of free-market idealism (Medicare Part D, for example), as well as of foreign-policy extremism. As Beinart says, we do know more about how to critique such massive errors (compared to which, by the way, the excesses of liberalism are trivial) than to build up the alternatives that will lead to real, modest progress in the next era. But we’ll learn. We are products of the era of market fundamentalism in the same way that the early neocons were products of the era of liberal consensus.

Greg’s attitude that “muddling through, trial-and-error, building on successes, avoiding the repeat of past failures, and serendipity have led to great accomplishments” seems to me less a rejoinder to Beinart than proof of his point. This is a very different attitude from both the overambitious liberalism of the past and obviously the laissez-faire fundamentalism of the present, and is not entirely out of step with the attitude of the early neocons. Beinart’s right that there is a loose parallel between their relationship to their era and ours to our own.