But Kristol coupled his concerns about the excesses of contemporary social policy with a warning, as he wrote in a collection of essays that year, that capitalism was living off the “accumulated moral capital” of social philosophies that it had since supplanted. He worried that the relentless materialism of market advocates rendered them incapable of combating the forces behind the nation's cultural decline.

Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, loc. 529