The Neoconservative
Persuasion: Selected Essays,
1942–2009
By Irving Kristol; Edited by
Gertrude Himmelfarb; Foreword by William Kristol
(Basic Books, 390 pages, $29.95)
ALTHOUGH HE IS largely forgotten today, Albert Jay Nock is a
major figure in the history of American conservatism. A splendid
writer, Nock greatly influenced such conservative luminaries as
William F. Buckley, Robert Nisbet, and Russell Kirk. But Nock
didn’t think that American conservatism would ever become a popular
movement. In a 1936 article called “Isaiah’s Job,” Nock has God
order the prophet Isaiah to tell the people “what is wrong and why,
and what is going to happen unless they have a change of heart and
straighten up.” But then God adds, “I suppose perhaps I ought to
tell you that it won’t do any good. The official class and their
intelligentsia will turn up their noses at you, and the masses will
not even listen…. You will probably be lucky if you get out with
your life.”
The Neoconservative
Persuasion, a collection of Irving Kristol’s essays
spanning nearly seven decades, effectively demonstrates that
Kristol was the anti-Nock of American conservatism. He believed
that the official class, the intelligentsia, and the masses would
all listen to the conservative message, if it were properly
presented — and he proceeded to do so with an incomparable
combination of deep erudition and infectious high spirits. A
Kristol sampler:
• “An ordinary American reads about a woman
‘performing artist’ who prances nude across the stage, with
chocolate smeared over her body, and though he may lament the waste
of chocolate or nudity, it does not occur to him that she is
‘making a statement,’ one that the ‘arts community’ takes seriously
indeed.” (From “It’s Obscene but Is It Art?” 1995.)
• “The risk of being progressive is that
there is always some new version of ‘progress’ which seeks to
outgrow whatever was thought to be important by progressives a few
years earlier.” (From “On the Political Stupidity of Jews,”
1999.)
• “I once remarked, semi-facetiously, that to
be a neoconservative one had to be of a cheerful disposition, no
matter how depressing the current outlook. In America all
successful politics is the politics of hope, a mood not noticeable
in traditional American conservatism. The way to win, in politics
as in sports, is to think of yourself as a winner.” (From “American
Conservatism: 1945–1995,” 1995.)
To say that Irving Kristol thought of himself as a winner is a
gross understatement. His intellectual self-confidence was
astounding. For example, a year or so after taking up the serious
study of economics (when he was 56 years old, and had already made
a name for himself as a leading public intellectual, a professor,
and the editor of the Public Interest)
Kristol concluded that conventional economic thought had it all
wrong, and that some newfangled idea called “supply-side economics”
was the way to go. So he published an article in the Public Interest by a young man named Jude
Wanniski making the case for the “economics of growth.” Wanniski’s
article caught the eye of a young editor at the Wall Street Journal named Robert Bartley,
who proceeded to popularize it. The result, as everyone knows, is
that supply-side economics became the hallmark of the Reagan
administration, the basis of a prolonged economic recovery, and the
precondition for a sustained American military buildup that
eventually brought the mighty Soviet Union to its knees. Would all
this have taken place had Irving Kristol not decided to study
economics? Maybe yes, but then again, maybe no.
But it is primarily as a social and cultural critic that Kristol
has made his most enduring contributions. Kristol was at the center
— the “godfather,” so to speak — of an intellectual current of
thought that has come to be known as “neoconservatism.” This
“persuasion,” as Kristol called it, arose in response to the
student revolution and the counterculture of the ’60s and ’70s.
Traditional conservatives tended to blame all of America’s ills on
the growth of Big Government and the consequent decline of liberty
— but what did Big Government have to do with the rise of
student-terrorists like William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn? To
Kristol and other like-minded intellectuals, it seemed that the rot
went much deeper, and had to do with
the fundamental assumptions underlying liberalism itself. The
far-reaching cultural and moral critique of liberalism developed by
Kristol and a dozen or so other writers for the Public Interest, Commentary, and the Wall
Street Journal is the essence of neoconservatism.
Because so many “neocons” were latecomers to the conservative
cause, and also because some of their views were still suspiciously
liberal (traditional conservatives, for example, hated the welfare
state, which they blamed on FDR’s New Deal; neocons approved of the
New Deal, but strongly opposed LBJ’s Great Society) they were not
initially received into the conservative movement with open arms.
But neoconservatives had two things going for them. First,
religious and social conservatives were becoming increasingly
prominent in the conservative movement, and neocons, despite (or
maybe because of) the fact that many of them were Jews, had much
more in common with the Christian newcomers than libertarian-minded
conservatives.
MORE IMPORTANTLY, the leading political conservative in America,
Ronald Reagan, had marked neocon tendencies himself. As Reagan
wrote in his diary in January, 1982, “The press is trying to paint
me as trying to undo the New Deal. I’m trying to undo the Great
Society.” That’s exactly how the neocons saw it. Since they also
shared his intransigent anti-Communism, and his commitment to
supply-side economics, it’s not surprising that by the end of the
Reagan presidency, neoconservatism had entered the conservative
mainstream, leading Irving Kristol to observe (in 1995):
If the Republican Party today is less interested in the business
community than in the pursuit of the happiness of ordinary folk,
and if, as I think is the case, this has made the party more
acceptable and appealing to the average American, then I believe
the work of neoconservative intellectuals has contributed much to
this change.
Of course, neoconservatism has evolved considerably since Irving
Kristol wrote those words. Today’s neoconservatives (I’d prefer to
call them neo-neo-conservatives, if it didn’t sound so silly) are
mainly known for their ardent support for promoting democracy
throughout the Middle East. How they can reconcile their stance
with Kristol’s skeptical attitude toward democracy promotion (in
his 1960 essay, “High, Low, and Modern,” Kristol argued that
promoting democracy is futile absent such “dispositions of mind and
character” as veneration for the rule of law, a sense of community,
and a reliance on reason rather than passion — dispositions
notable by their absence from today’s Middle East) is a mystery to
me. I don’t know what Kristol thought of today’s neocons, but I
would like to believe that just as Karl Marx, disgusted by the
antics of his followers, is supposed to have remarked toward the
end of his life that “I am no Marxist,” so might Kristol have
entertained some reservations about the current state of the
movement he did so much to foster. But The
Neoconservative Persuasion focuses on the writings of
Irving Kristol, and not on those of his disciples.
In recognition of his contributions to the conservative
movement, on July 9, 2002, President George W. Bush bestowed our
nation’s highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom,
on Irving Kristol. “Irving Kristol is a wide-ranging thinker whose
writings have helped transform America’s political landscape,” Bush
said. “As young men, he and his fellow student radicals in City
College’s ‘Alcove Number One’ devoted themselves to solving the
ultimate problems of the human race. Today, Irving Kristol is still
grappling with ultimate problems, and in thinking them through, he
has vastly enlarged the conservative vision.” Which only goes to
show that given the right sort of education — early years in an
Orthodox yeshiva, college years as a member of the Young People’s
Socialist League, a stint in the U.S. Army during World War II, and
a lifelong immersion in the classics of Western philosophy and
literature — there’s no telling how far a working-class kid from
Brooklyn can go.
