From Daniel Patrick Moynihan to Samuel Moyn: What Happened to the American Left?

I’ve always found it annoying when the concern trolls of the Left — or perhaps I should now say the Democrats, since we might need to redefine what it is to be “Left” in the same way we need to become more precise about who we call a “liberal” — practiced that old trick whereby the best Republicans were the dead ones.

Another way to put this is the Strange New Respect trick. Because the modern Left, the people wanting to get their picture taken with the Hasan Pikers of the world, have taken the old “the only good Republicans are the dead Republicans” line to a different place.

No, what I’m talking about is the lament that Republicans of old were smarter, more moral, and better Americans than the current crop. They did this for decades, and now it’s largely a defunct enterprise. The new DSA mob which has taken over their party makes no such judgments; anyone not possessed by their political demons is an enemy to be liquidated by whatever means necessary. Listen to them long enough and that becomes quite obvious.

And if we’re going to destroy parts of our society to attack perceived problems, maybe Yale Law School … would be a smart place to start.

And perhaps this means we on the Right have now inherited the Strange New Respect trick. If so, it’s probably appropriate. Perhaps we can wield that weapon more responsibly than did Democrats who went from demonizing Ronald Reagan to lionizing him as a much better man than Donald Trump, in the same way they went from demonizing Barry Goldwater to holding him up as better than Reagan.

So sure, I’ll say it: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was probably the best example of the pointy-headed Northeastern liberal in the latter part of the 20th century, might be deserving of more respect than we used to give him back in those days.

Moynihan, after all, might have spent a couple of decades as a Democrat senator from Massachusetts, but what perhaps exemplified his approach to politics and policy best was his record as a bureaucrat.

Specifically, in the early 1960s, Moynihan was serving in the Kennedy, and later, Johnson, Labor Department. In that capacity, he undertook an examination of postwar trends in family structure and public assistance and came back with some quite conservative conclusions. In fact, Moynihan’s study of data from New Deal welfare programs and in particular the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program led him to identify what he called a clear pattern of government assistance destroying the family, and further to identify the destruction of the family as a key driver of social pathology.

Per Moynihan’s data, illegitimacy rates among nonwhites rose from 16.8 percent in 1940 to 23.6 percent by 1963. The illegitimacy rate among white people at the time was mostly flat, though with a slight increase. At the same time, Moynihan noted, female-headed households grew; nearly a quarter of urban black marriages were dissolved and a large share of black children lived without both parents. Thus by the early 1960s, per Moynihan’s AFDC research, 14 percent of black children were receiving assistance (among white children, the rate was two percent), with extrapolations suggesting 56 percent of nonwhite children would receive it at some point in childhood.

He called this phenomenon, centered in the black community, the “scissors” effect. For most of the postwar period, male unemployment rates and new AFDC cases moved together with a high correlation. But Moynihan observed, toward the end of the period of his research, that welfare dependence was no longer a function of male unemployment. In fact, welfare dependency and family breakdown continued rising even as male unemployment went down. As such, Moynihan started noting that AFDC was a measurable indicator of the collapse of the black family and raised alarms that without an intact two-parent family structure, Black America would be destined for a “tangle of pathology” the welfare state was reinforcing even while government efforts to undo the effects of historical oppression should have led to across-the-board prosperity.

Now, this said, Moynihan’s work met with a fusillade of attacks from the Hard Left of the time; among other insults he was called a racist and accused of blaming the victim. The National Urban League president insisted that it was America’s racist system rather than bad behavior which accounted for the plight of Black America, and by the late 1960’s even Moynihan had largely stopped warning that our tax dollars were fueling a self-defeating effort at equality, though he did work in the Nixon administration on some welfare reform ideas.

And when Moynihan ran for office as a liberal Democrat he certainly downplayed all of that research. Political power was more important than the truth, at the end of the day, so he stopped rocking the boat.

Even so, Moynihan was someone with whom an intelligent debate could be had, and he did allow that the ideas of his party were sometimes wrong. He wasn’t crazy or evil. And what was true about Moynihan was that he certainly believed in America as founded and the social compact our constitution represented. The argument you would have with a Daniel Patrick Moynihan was over what methods would produce the social goods you could agree were desirable.

We’re so far from that right now, we can’t see it from here.

I’m not talking about the fact Democrats just nominated one of Hasan Piker’s best pals as their Senate candidate in Michigan. At some point I’ll do a column on Abdul El-Sayed, but that isn’t the comparison I’m making here.

Instead, I have Samuel Moyn.

You probably don’t know Moyn from Moynihan, and that’s perfectly forgivable. He isn’t an overly prominent public figure. But Moyn, a Yale law professor who recently wrote a book titled Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth ― and What to Do About It, appeared on Ross Douthat’s Interesting Times podcast, and it’s clear that we’ve come a long way in the 65 years since Moynihan was examining facts and trying to put government to good use in saving our social compact.

The entire podcast can be found here. Perhaps the most poignant sequence of it was this…

I try to keep an open mind about new ideas and opinions, but this take on parents and children is the dumbest thing I’ve heard in a long time. Douthat’s response is perfect: pic.twitter.com/tx26XZxpxw

— Caleb Wait (@calebwait) August 4, 2026

Is America a gerontocracy? Arguably, though if that’s so, it is one due to a confluence of factors which don’t appear permanent. Among those are the increase of the average life span in the country over the past half-century (an increase which has largely halted), the presence of an older generation which is abnormally large, and a certain rigidity which has affected political and corporate institutions. Douthat leads the podcast by noting the advanced age of so many of our politicians — Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell and so on — and it’s brought up that Corporate America’s C-suites are generally older than they’ve ever been.

Everybody knows we have a political gerontocracy on our hands, but on the other hand most of the worst offenders in that number are going away. Pelosi and McConnell are in their final year in office (McConnell might already be gone and we’re just not being told yet); Biden is finished, Trump has two and a half years left, Chuck Schumer is unlikely to survive his next election. There are very few politicians older than 70 who appear ascendant in America. And while older voters do wield outsized political power in America, and that’s certainly a mixed bag, it’s hard to recognize this as a problem requiring structural change to American society.

Ninety percent of the problems of our political gerontocracy get solved when we impose a mandatory cognitive test on Congress, the federal courts, and all executive branch agency appointees subject to Senate confirmation who are older than 70. The Senate gerontocracy problem goes away when we bring back a talking filibuster and force members of the Senate to stand and speak for hours at a time; the ones who can’t do that will sort themselves out of those jobs.

And then there is the problem of gerontocracy in corporate America, assuming that it is, in fact, a problem. If you’re a Gen X’er stuck in middle management and all the bosses above you on the totem pole are 60-somethings and 70-somethings who won’t go away and retire, one can certainly sympathize. But this is a problem only if you choose for it to be one. As a middle manager in corporate America, it can be assumed that you’re either (1) living a perfectly prosperous and rewarding life and there is not much reason why you can’t wait your turn for the next 10-15 years to get to your company’s brass ring, or (2) quite capable of finding a hole in the market you can fill by starting your own company and becoming the boss.

The problem of restrictive corporate hierarchies, if they really are a problem, is solved very completely by a more robust marketplace full of startups. It’s interesting, then, that people of Samuel Moyn’s political persuasion will almost immediately impose draconian regulatory regimes which strangle new business formation.

For the eight years that Barack Obama was president, for example, fewer businesses were extant in America than the previous year. Every year he was in office that was true. Why would you be surprised that 10 years later the tops of the corporate pyramids are full of old guys?

A young Daniel Patrick Moynihan would observe this situation and allow that small business formation and growth would be the preferred solution and then come up with some liberal approach to it. Which might or might not have merit.

But a Samuel Moyn sets about using these facts as a cudgel to destroy American society in order that he and people who think like him might have more power.

It isn’t intellectual curiosity or good faith which underlies the arguments he’s making with Douthat, who to his credit immediately swats away Moyn’s idea of giving college kids proxy votes for children as “daft.” It’s far more sinister than that.

He’s not an idiot and he’s not insane, and he’s certainly not just wrong. He’s evil.

And what’s easy to see is his complaints about gerontocracy aren’t founded in an attempt to better society. They’re founded in destroying it, that it might be replaced with something else.

Moyn admits as much, if perhaps unwittingly, when he assails older Americans and older voters in particular as “white” and “conservative.”

This is about winning elections. It’s not about making America better. And giving the franchise to children, which is universally recognized by every society which has given the franchise to members of the public as utterly absurd, isn’t about improving the electorate. Moyn even threw out the idea of mandatory voting, which is so completely foreign to the concept of a free society as to hang a blaring siren around his neck as a wannabe totalitarian monster.

Giving college kids extra voting weight means giving deranged academics who teach college kids extra voting weight. Which is the underlying point to all of this. It’s almost a Maoist Cultural Revolution thing he’s proposing — it was easy to radicalize the kids against their parents, so the Chinese communists did that as a way to terrorize the people and amass more power.

You can be impatient with Boomers who’ve held on too long to a Senate seat or the district manager job at your company and still realize this guy’s ideas are worse than the status quo.

Moynihan was often wrong, but nonetheless he tried to save the Republic through honest debate. Moyn is attempting to grift his way into dragging the abominable and absurd into the Overton Window.

Which is a hallmark of this new Hard Left which has dispatched the old liberals from the heights of the Democrats’ party structure.

We’re certainly not a better country for it.

And if we’re going to destroy parts of our society to attack perceived problems, maybe Yale Law School, which has given tenure to this dishonest madman, would be a smart place to start.

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