Irving Kristol's Clear Thinking

Irving Kristol's Clear Thinking

"I am so nostalgic." That's the phrase I associate most with Irving Kristol, who died last week at the age of 89.

What piqued Irving's nostalgia, at an American Enterprise Institute conference I worked on in 1992, was old-fashioned censorship. In the good old days, he explained, local communities were able to determine their own standards without inviting lawsuits from the ACLU and overwrought invocations of "Fahrenheit 451." In fact, hanging a "Banned in Boston" banner in a bookstore window, he explained, was the surest way to sell that book in New York. Local censorship, tethered to common sense...