Irving Kristol, William's father...

...and one of the founders of neoconservatism, died on Friday at age 89. I found this paragraph in his obit in the New York Times particularly ironic:

The Public Interest writers did not take issue with the ends of the Great Society so much as with the means, the “unintended consequences” of the Democrats’ good intentions. Welfare programs, they argued, were breeding a culture of dependency; affirmative action created social divisions and did damage to its supposed beneficiaries. They placed practicality ahead of ideals. “The legitimate question to ask about any program,” Mr. Kristol said, “is, ‘Will it work?’,” and the reforms of the 1960s and ’70s, he believed, were not working. (My emphasis.)

After two seemingly endless wars that were launched in part by neocons, and by an almost mindless adherence to supply-side economics and other ideological orthodoxies from the Reagan era, it would behoove Republicans to re-read these words spoken by Kristol all those years ago. When did a pragmatic reaction to an ideology (in Kristol's case the New Deal and the Great Society) morph into a rigid ideology of its own? I find it ironic that some of the worst ideologues today are the intellectual (and literal, in the case of William) descendants of Irving Kristol.