Baby Kristol - Yuval Levin is the right’s new favorite intellectual
Paul Ryan works in a man cave in the Longworth House Office Building. It is bedecked with the paraphernalia of the football teams he loves, the Wisconsin Badgers and the Green Bay Packers. Last year, I visited the lair of the Republican Party’s philosopher prince to ask about his own personal philosopher, a 35-year-old named Yuval Levin.
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...Hardly a month passes without either David Brooks or Ross Douthat citing Levin’s work. But it’s also the reason that Paul Ryan has leaned heavily on Levin to sell his famous budgets. As Ryan explains it, “[Levin] does a very good job of articulating why these are good ideas and the right way to go and how they’re philosophically connected with one another and consistent.”
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...After graduating from American University, he enrolled in a doctoral program at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought—a cradle of neoconservative thinking. He buried himself in the writings of the eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish thinker Edmund Burke.
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Despite his youth, Levin had been anointed the next great neoconservative. And in 2009, Bill Kristol gave him a title to match those expectations. Four years earlier, Kristol’s father, Irving Kristol, had shuttered his legendary journal, The Public Interest. But with Obama’s victory, Kristol the Younger found himself longing to revive his dad’s publication. “The end of the Bush administration showed that conservatism wasn’t strong politically and even intellectually,” Kristol says. So he followed the old dictum: When intellectuals have nothing left to do, they start a magazine. Levin was appointed the editor of the new effort, National Affairs...
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...But what does it mean to be the Irving Kristol of our time? Like Kristol, Levin doesn’t want to explicitly demolish the welfare state.
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More:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112745/yuval-levin-rights-new-irving-kristol
