A liberal who has been mugged by reality.

Irving Kristol, a leading figure in the rise of American neoconservatism, used this quip to characterize the movement’s origins in mid-to-late 20th‑century U.S. intellectual life. Many early “neoconservatives” had been liberals or anti-communist Democrats who became disillusioned with aspects of Great Society liberalism, the counterculture, and what they saw as policy failures in areas like crime, welfare, and foreign affairs. The line functions as a self-mythologizing capsule of that trajectory: a shift rightward framed not as ideological conversion but as a hard lesson taught by events—“reality” as the assailant that forces reconsideration.

The phrase compresses a political argument into a joke: experience, not abstract theory, is said to drive the change from liberalism to neoconservatism. “Mugged by reality” implies an abrupt, even violent encounter with facts—unintended consequences, stubborn social problems, geopolitical threats—that shatters optimistic assumptions. Rhetorically, it casts the speaker’s position as pragmatic and chastened while portraying the prior liberal stance as naïve or insufficiently attentive to real-world constraints. The humor also serves a defensive purpose: it reframes ideological reversal as common sense rather than betrayal, and it suggests that opponents remain untested by the same bracing encounter.

1) “A neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality.”
2) “A neo-conservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality.”