As in Moynihan’s time, race is becoming a defining cultural fault line, and once again, the Left has committed itself to unstable movements with questionable agendas. Black Lives Matter has at least some sympathetic concerns, and many conservatives are already at work on them, looking for ways to improve police transparency and prudently reduce our reliance on incarceration. Those goals are not advanced when protesters seize on any excuse to start torching police cars and smashing shop windows. Given that violent uprisings like the one in Charlotte almost certainly help Donald Trump more than they do Hillary Clinton, it seems clear that the Left, in whose self-interest it would be to control the activities of Black Lives Matter, is unable to do so. Just as Moynihan was repelled by the Left’s obtuseness in denying glaring pathologies in black culture, so today’s progressives may eventually be attracted to a political movement that offers more than racial pieties.

What we offer must be more than just a redux of the war-on-crime narrative. In the 1970s, conservatives could plausibly argue that laxness in the justice system was facilitating cultural collapse. That’s a much harder sell today, and it’s certainly not a promising starting point for recruiting disaffected liberals. The good news is that we can offer compelling solutions to crime and racial tensions; we do not have to resurrect anachronistic memes. We should point out repeatedly that crime and social collapse are especially egregious in longtime Democratic strongholds such as Chicago. Blue states including California have reformed their penal codes in haphazard ways that precipitated crime spikes. Meanwhile, red states including Texas and Georgia have had much greater success on the reform front, launching new initiatives that address over-incarceration without sacrificing public safety.

In short, conservatives are well equipped to reform our justice system reasonably, to everyone’s benefit. The Left is not, because Democrats are hopelessly beholden to surging social movements and hysterical interest groups. This argument might prove compelling for many disaffected liberals as they arrive at the (classically neoconservative) conclusion that reality is more complicated than they once believed.