EDITORIAL: The growing rift on Colorado’s left
The late conservative icon Irving Kristol memorably quipped that a “neo-conservative” — i.e., a reformed leftist, like him — is “a liberal who has been mugged by reality.”
Kristol, who came of age amid the economic upheaval of the Great Depression in 1930s New York City, emerged from college as a member of the Young People’s Socialist League. He even identified as a Trotskyite. (Remember Leon Trotsky, the onetime Bolshevik who was too far to the left even for Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin?) What a difference a little time can make; by Kristol’s death at 89 in 2009, he was one of the reigning patriarchs of the American right.