Kristol reminds me of one of my other heroes: George Orwell. Orwell was never a communist, God bless him. He was always a very English type of social democrat, who thought it was fascistic that the pubs were forced to close in the afternoon. Both Orwell and Kristol took the facts and evidence seriously, and they went where their intelligence and moral judgment took them — at a high personal cost in broken friendships and alienating former colleagues.

They were anti-communist Social Democrats associated with Irving Howe and Sidney Hook in the 1950s.

God and Buddah! I miss those guys. Wrong headed in part they may have been in hindsight they did love America and see it as something special to be protected. I’d give my sinister germinal organ to here a modern Democrat say something like this today:

We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage—and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this Nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.
Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.
This much we pledge—and more.

… And mean it.

They started out as Trotskyists at City College in New York in the ’30s and ’40s.

I often wonder if I would have been a communist, at least a Trotskyite, had I been around back then. A big chunk of my interest in libertarianism/free-market comes from the modern sciences of chaos theory and related fields. I am also heavily influenced by modern evolutionary theory and information theory. Perhaps the counterparts of those fields in the 1930′s would have pointed me in the direction of communism. I’d like to think not but who knows for sure why we hold the beliefs we do. (That is especially true of us atheist who are often just winging it morally. It makes it easy for us to run off the rails.)

I’d like to think that if I did, my empirical nature would have caused me to follow Kristol’s path.