- Update 9/26/09 - Mary Eberstadt offers an entertaining and insightful look at the man and his work. She tells what it was like working as an intern in the Public Affairs office (fascinating reading), and offers substantial guidance to many of Kristol's articles and ideas. Melanie Phillips (below) offers a wonderful introduction, and Eberstadt takes the introduction to a deeper level in her brilliantly written piece.
- (Original Post) - I have read many tributes to this great man, but the one I have chosen to link to is by the British writer, Melanie Phillips. She begins by saying,
I am very sad indeed to read of the death in Washington DC of Irving Kristol at the age of 89. Kristol was one of the intellectual titans of our age, and his influence on the course of American thinking, culture and politics was simply immense. As the godfather of neo-conservatism, the philosophy which has been so much misunderstood and grievously misrepresented as the ‘war-mongering’ doctrine behind the administration of George W Bush, Kristol – along with his wife, the scarcely less intellectually formidable Gertrude Himmelfarb -- was the first public intellectual to understand and articulate a defence of western civilisation against the onslaught mounted by the moral and cultural relativism of the nihilistic left.
She continues:
It wasn’t conservatism; although it embodied certain recognisable conservative instincts, it was also classical liberal thinking in that it was not reactionary but progressive in its core aim of promoting moral, intellectual and social improvement. It was not a movement; Kristol himself described it as a ‘persuasion’. He spoke thus about the difficulty of classifying it:
The steady decline in our democratic culture, sinking to new levels of vulgarity, does unite neocons with traditional conservatives--though not with those libertarian conservatives who are conservative in economics but unmindful of the culture. The upshot is a quite unexpected alliance between neocons, who include a fair proportion of secular intellectuals, and religious traditionalists. They are united on issues concerning the quality of education, the relations of church and state, the regulation of pornography, and the like, all of which they regard as proper candidates for the government's attention. And since the Republican Party now has a substantial base among the religious, this gives neocons a certain influence and even power. Because religious conservatism is so feeble in Europe, the neoconservative potential there is correspondingly weak.
And then, of course, there is foreign policy, the area of American politics where neoconservatism has recently been the focus of media attention. This is surprising since there is no set of neoconservative beliefs concerning foreign policy, only a set of attitudes derived from historical experience. (The favorite neoconservative text on foreign affairs, thanks to professors Leo Strauss of Chicago and Donald Kagan of Yale, is Thucydides on the Peloponnesian War.) These attitudes can be summarized in the following ‘theses’ (as a Marxist would say): First, patriotism is a natural and healthy sentiment and should be encouraged by both private and public institutions. Precisely because we are a nation of immigrants, this is a powerful American sentiment. Second, world government is a terrible idea since it can lead to world tyranny. International institutions that point to an ultimate world government should be regarded with the deepest suspicion. Third, statesmen should, above all, have the ability to distinguish friends from enemies. This is not as easy as it sounds, as the history of the Cold War revealed. The number of intelligent men who could not count the Soviet Union as an enemy, even though this was its own self-definition, was absolutely astonishing.
Neoconservatism grew out of liberalism; Kristol famously defined a neoconservative as a ‘liberal who has been mugged by reality’. Above all, his thinking was a moral project. Galvanised by the perception that Lyndon Johnson’s ‘Great Society’ welfare programmes had not liberated the poor but enslaved them, he was outraged and appalled by the cultural relativism, the moral inversion and the nihilism that had destroyed the concepts of duty and personal accountability and was driving western civilisation into anarchy and barbarism. To this one-time Trotskyite, ideology was the enemy of reason and it had to be fought.
He developed this thinking into an alternative discourse to take on the hegemony of the west-bashing Left entrenched in the universities, not least by starting up the influential journal The Public Interest which became a must-read in political and intellectual circles. During the seventies and eighties he was the principal force behind the radical re-tuning of American political culture across the spectrum around the core idea that the enemies of liberty, morality and justice, both at home and abroad, had to be fought and defeated rather than accommodated and appeased. It was this thinking that lay behind Ronald Reagan’s stand against communism, as well as the welfare reforms that were eventually embraced by Bill Clinton.
The Washington Times described Irving Kristol’s influence thus:
Fighting communism was the cornerstone of Mr. Kristol's rightward shift. Nearly three decades before Mr. Reagan was elected president, Mr. Kristol wrote the highly controversial essay ‘Civil Liberties, 1952 -- A Study in Confusion’ in which he chastised Hollywood liberals for stonewalling security investigations -- including those by Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy -- into communist subversion in Tinseltown. The resulting furor was so intense that he reportedly sought solace for a time in Europe.
... His journey from Trotskyite to cheerleader for capitalism happened not because he wanted different ends, but because he believed the means employed by the welfare state actually harmed lower classes, instead of helping them. By framing welfare reform as beneficial to recipients, ending the ‘cycle of dependence,’ Republicans finally won the war on an issue that was once exclusively the domain of liberal Democrats.
I had the privilege of getting to know Irving Kristol a little in the last years of his life. His mind was still razor-sharp and his moral and intellectual analysis as unflinching as ever. ‘Explain about Britain’ he would say to me more than once. ‘Why hasn’t anyone done there what we did here, set up publications and think-tanks and talk radio to break the power of the Left in the universities? I just can’t understand why everyone is just sitting there and letting it happen! What’s wrong with them all?’
The answer is that only America could have produced and nurtured Irving Kristol and run with his ideas. Now that light has been extinguished – but the illumination that is his legacy will surely endure, even as the shadows lengthen.