Irving Kristol died yesterday at the age of 89. From the Wall Street Journal, we have this story by Stephen Miller, this editorial, and this set of Kristol quotes. Here is the one most on-topic for this blog:

Or take the issue of crime. It is not sufficiently appreciated how extraordinary--one can even say unique--the situation with regard to crime is in the U.S. today. Ours may well be the first society in all of human history in which the average citizen lives with the constant fear of being victimized by criminal assaults against his person--assaults perpetrated, not by the government or its police forces, but by one's fellow citizens. It is a novel condition. . . . How did it happen?

A good part of the answer is that our sociologists and criminologists and jurists have applied their theories and their presumed expertise to create a criminal justice system that was supposed to reduce criminality but has instead caused it to proliferate wildly. It is an ironical fact that those so-called "less-developed" nations, which have far fewer criminologists than we do, also have much lower crime rates. That is what results when one permits "sophisticated" theories--elaborate ideologies, really--to prevail over common sense and traditional wisdom. In modern societies, crime (like education) becomes a problem when our expert theorists make it one.

I also like this one:

"All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling," wrote Oscar Wilde, and I would like to suggest that the same can be said for bad politics. . . .

It seems to me that the politics of liberal reform, in recent years, shows many of the same characteristics as amateur poetry. It has been more concerned with the kind of symbolic action that gratifies the passions of the reformer rather than with the efficacy of the reforms themselves. Indeed, the outstanding characteristic of what we call "the New Politics" is precisely its insistence on the overwhelming importance of revealing, in the public realm, one's intense feelings--we must "care," we must "be concerned," we must be "committed." Unsurprisingly, this goes along with an immense indifference to consequences, to positive results or the lack thereof.

I don't know if he was thinking of the soft-on-crime crowd, but that captures them perfectly. They have such a high opinion of themselves as great humanitarians with their generous sympathy for people who rape and murder, and they rationalize away the very real consequences of causing more rape and murder.