In his 2000 memoir, Blood of the Liberals, George Packer mentions a post-collegiate encounter with one of his Yale classmates, a young right-wing pundit who had hired Packer—then dividing his time in Boston between carpentry jobs at construction sites and volunteer stints at a downtown homeless shelter—to build him a bookshelf. This was the mid-1980s, and the conservative was a young man in a hurry, tacking confidently into the post-liberal zeitgeist. He was “an apologist for radical laissez-faire economics and a kind of high-Tory moralism on social issues,” Packer writes, “with an attitude toward the poor of contempt mixed with noblesse oblige: get rid of the welfare state and they would have to clean up their lives, emulating the behavior of their industrious and charitable betters.”
