Benjamin DeMott

by Tom Wicker.

A handful of American thinkers several decades ago sought to revitalize political liberalism by ridding it of platitudes and cant, and instilling an appreciation of the real world’s contrarieties. Over the years this critique of liberalism has been distorted and misinterpreted, and in our own time it has been used—wrongly—to justify the attitudes and policies called to mind by the term “neoconservative.”It is time, the author argues, to recover the original ideas.