Taki Magazine

2 (qualified) cheers for Irving Kristol

by Grant Havers on September 19, 2009

The recent passing of Irving Kristol, the popularly dubbed “godfather of neoconservatism,” has occurred long after “neo” already lost its relevance or meaning as a prefix fitting a now long-established and triumphant movement on the Right.  As readers and writers on this site are all too well aware, neoconservatism could not have succeeded as well as it did in displacing the Alternative Right without the formidable influence and journalistic talents of Mr. Kristol, who urged his fellow neoconservatives—most of whom had been liberal Democrats disillusioned with their party’s leftist social and foreign policy—to embrace and take hold of the Republican Party from the 1970s onwards.  In the process, the GOP morphed into a slightly more conservative version of what the Democratic Party had been before Vietnam, the Great Society, and George McGovern.  This transformation is now so complete and long-lasting that it seems absurd to associate it with anything neo.

Amidst the plethora of accolades and diatribes currently being written on the legacy of Mr. Kristol, I’d like to add my two cents, or perhaps two (qualified) cheers.  First, this pioneer of neoconservatism eventually expressed a healthy respect for the old bourgeois order which, as he repeatedly contended in his Two Cheers for Capitalism (1978), was going the way of the dinosaur thanks to the culture wars of the 1960s.  Unlike the nihilistic leftists whom he had once known as friends in his Trotskyite youth, the mature Kristol genuinely admired the bourgeois virtues of hard work, self-reliance, freedom of worship, and rugged individualism.  Second, Kristol sincerely respected the old Protestant heritage that had made these virtues possible and even excoriated many of his fellow Jews on the Left for irrationally fearing this Christian identity as intolerant and anti-semitic, when in fact American Protestants in the post-WW 2 era have been the best allies that Jews have ever enjoyed. 

That said, it is now time for one huge qualification.  Kristol’s praise for the dying bourgeois order did not sufficiently motivate him or his many comrades and followers to take up a decisive war against that order’s enemies on the Left.  His polemics against the “New Class”—that coalition of academics, bureaucrats, and statists who demanded the demolition of bourgeois society in the wake of the 1960s—were mainly directed against the architects and beneficiaries of LBJ’s Great Society, not the managerial state that had taken shape since the New Deal.  In famously quipping that neoconservatives were liberals “who were mugged by reality,” Kristol was denouncing the new and radical leftism of the 1960s in order to conserve the leftist liberalism that originated in the 1930s, not the liberalism of Thomas Jefferson or Calvin Coolidge.  It is well known that Kristol had zero sympathy with the Goldwater wing of the GOP that represented the last gasping effort to repeal the Old Left’s statism.  When Kristol famously told Pat Buchanan in the early 1990s that the Left had won the culture war, he was simply expressing his longheld conviction that American conservatives inexorably had to face the choice of two Lefts, one merely older and less radical than the other.  As much as Kristol admired the old Protestant bourgeoisie and its virtues, they were headed for the dustbin of history. 

As Sam Francis astutely observed in an essay on neoconservatism and the managerial state from the mid-1980s, Kristol and his new conservatism offered the Imperial Presidency, a more efficient welfare state, and an empire-building foreign policy to Americans on the Right, not a restoration of the old bourgeois order whose avatars would have despised all of the above.  The most bitter irony of this history is that the New Left could not have finished off the old conservatism without the complicity of an Old Left that had simply turned rightward.  And that is nothing to cheer about. 

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