Krauthammer said his politics were shaped by growing up in the post-Holocaust years with Jewish parents who had escaped the Nazis in Europe. He grew up attuned to the "tragic element in history," he once told a C-SPAN interviewer. "It tempers your optimism and your idealism. And it gives you a vision of the world which I think is more restrained, conservative, if you like. You don't expect that much out of human nature. And you are prepared for the worst."