Looking Back on Neo-Conservatism: Notes and Reflections

...Neo-conservatism today is an intellectual and political tendency in its own right, no longer merely a reaction against a dominant liberalism that seemed sterile and increasingly ineffectual...

...Spock had come out strongly for birching in schools, I could not have been more surprised and shocked...

...All of this led those of us who were becoming skeptical of social-democratic programs and policies, on the grounds that they seemed not to be working as expected, to broaden the grounds of our disaffection...

...world and its values that they found so suffocating, so empty of meaning...

...So an explanation of the neo-conservative impulse is not really hard to put forward...

...It is certainly not the best of all possible worlds—but the evidence of the twentieth century is quite conclusive that it is the best of all available worlds...

...Social tensions were increasing rather than decreasing...

...The neo-conservative cast of mind, in short, is—or should be—more philosophical than ideological...

...But all this means is that our society, like every other, has its inherent costs as well as its obvious benefits...

...For instance, the Purges, when all the old Bolsheviks, the men who had made the Revolution, the USSR's founding fathers, were fast humiliated publicly and then executed, on Stalin's orders...

...As one student put it, when asked to explain the reasons for his radicalism: "You don't know what hell is like unless you were raised in Scarsdale...

...A grand reformation, in whose spirit those now called neo-conservatives had originally been nourished, was turning sour...

...Notable examples were Bernard Shaw, the Webbs, Andre Gide, Lincoln Steffans, Julian Huxley, Henri Barbusse, and Harold Laski...

...It was this Irving Kristol is co-editor of The Public Interest, a member of the Wall Street Journal 's board of contributors, and senior fellow of the American Enterprise Institute...

...What was I to make of it...

...There is substance to practically every criticism that has been made, on the left or right, of modern democratic capitalism...

...Again, the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the betrayal over the occupation of Eastern and Central Europe after the 1939-45 war, the suppression of the Hungarian, East German, and Polish risings, and the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Red Army, not to mention Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin at the twentieth Party Congress, and the subsequent posthumous dethronement of the most adulated and wiliest of all the Soviet leaders...

...But if he starts taking an appreciative stance toward church and family, while indicating a strong dislike of pornography and homosexuality—that, in itself, will usually be enough...

...Irving Kristol Looking Back on Neo-Conservatism: Notes and Reflections According to Daniel P. Moynihan, who has a scholar's attentiveness to such things, it was Michael Harrington who first used the term " neo-conservatism," some half-dozen years ago...

...Neo-conservatism appreciates the criticisms of this order by such conservative cultural analysts as T. S. Eliot or Russell Kirk, or evenby such radical cultural critics as Herbert Marcuse and Jean-Paul Sartre, who do call our attention to elements that are lacking in modernity for a truly humane life...

...A welfare state, properly conceived, can be an integral part of a conservative society...

...It can fairly be described as an anti-political theory, in that all human relations are coerced into a model of economic activity...

...Neo-conservatism says that such visions may have their pedagogic or speculative uses, but that the real world should be treated with that kind of due respect we call prudence—which -is, in turn, the cardinal virtue of statesmanship...

...They had been born into "enlightened" upper-middle-class homes, raised in chic upper-middle-class suburbs, educated in "progressive" upper-middle-class schools...

...It goes without saying that the term was meant pejoratively and invidiously, representing an effort to read some people out of the liberal community, which is also where the intellectual sub-community happens to be located...

...The original cadres of this rebellion were recruited from the sons and daughters of liberal parents...

...But it rejects the romanticism inherent in the yearnings for a more "organic" order, just as it rejects any need to glorify a predominantly free-enterprise economy as being, always and everywhere, the best of all possible worlds...

...Almost all of them displayed a credulity about the regime, and about what they heard from its professional apologists, that would have shaken an African witch doctor...

...It is the cultural dimension—one's basic attitude toward traditional values as distinct from the inchoate "progressive" values of "selfliberation"—that is crucial...

...there was nothing, it seemed, they liked better than being shown round the anti-God museums, and, though mostly ardent pacifists at home, they heard with delight Malcolm Muggeridge is the author of many books on Christianity, including Jesus: The Man Who Lives and Something Beautiful for God...

...There are no virgin births in political thought...

...That model has its uses, but its presuppositions are such as to make it inadequate, by way of description or prescription, for a political community...

...It is true, of course, that the neo-conservative impulse did in fact arise out of dissatisfaction by liberals with the prevailing liberal ideology, which we may call the ideology of social democracy...

...For the past two centuries most of our political thinking has been ideological—i.e., dominated by utopian visions of social and human perfection...

...It is therefore relatively untroubled by group old-age insurance (i.e., social security), group unemployment insurance, group medical insurance (i.e., medicare and medicaid)—or even collective charity (i.e., welfare...

...I brooded long on this strange phenomenon, constantly expecting that some new instance of Soviet perfidy and resort to terrorism would produce a change of heart in the regime's liberal admirers...

...It is anti-socialist, of course, and anti-state-capitalist too...

...People will always want security as much as they want liberty, and the 19th-century liberal-individualist notion that life for all of us should be an enterprise at continual risk is a doctrinaire fantasy...

...What is new about this conservatism which constrains it to distinguish itself from the various conservatisms of yesteryear...

...Which is why the left-wing factions of all social-democratic parties are expressing an increasing dissatisfaction with a "mere" welfare state...

...Indeed, early on in the 1960s many of us did rather think of ourselves as "neo-liberals" or "revisionist liberals"—and, it must be said, some still do...

...That makes it very much worth defending...

...Later on, to be sure, the rebellious counterculture, as it gathered momentum, swept up all kinds of young people into "the movement...

...the roar of Soviet war planes overhead and the rattle of Soviet tanks across the Red Square...

...But it is not upset by the fact that, in a populous, complex, and affluent society, people may prefer to purchase certain goods and services collectively rather than individually...

...Neo-conservatism in this country was quickened into being by the evident or utterly predictable failure of the Great Society programs of Lyndon Johnson's administration...

...Neo-conservatism, unlike the kind of liberal individualism6 The American Spectator November 1977 centered in the business community—that social democracy has taken for its enemy, is not opposed in principle to the welfare state...

...These young people had seen the future promised by their liberal parents and were repelled by it...

...Political orders were becoming less stable, not more so...

...But it wasn't just that...

...If one is merely critical of liberal policies, but accepting of the political metaphysics which generated these policies, the term "neo-liberal" would have been more appropriate than "neo-conservative...

...And neo-Keynesian economic policy—the economic basis for social-democratic politics—began to promote a crippling inflation...

...A politician or a social critic will not usually find himself tagged as any kind of "conservative" merely because he is erratic in his loyalty to particular social-democratic policies that are being urged upon government...

...I had been brought up to regard these western intelligentsia as the chosen elite, the Samurai of our time, and there they were adulating to an extravagant degree the most ruthless and comprehensive dictatorship the world has yet seen...

...It had the connotation of "renegade liberal," and so long as "neo-conservative" was embraced by quotation marks—in Time, Newsweek, etc.—that connotation lingered...

...But without the anticipated consequences...

...But those quotation marks have gradually disappeared...

...The performance of visiting clergymen was particularly striking...

...0 Malcolm Muggeridge Operation Death-Wish It would appear the liberal mind is possessed with a passion to abolish freedom in the name of freedom, involving the many in the death wish of the few...

...Another political god was all set to fail...

...But the leadership and the ethos remained that of the sullen and discontented children of the liberal upper-middle class...

...If the Pope had suddenly issued an encyclical in favor of wife-swapping, or Dr...

...No immaculate conceptions, either...

...It was not, for the most part, conservative professors who were heckled and harassed on campus—it was the "liberal" professors, surrogates for liberal parents...

...The world since 1945 had gradually been transforming itself along the lines prescribed by the social-democratic vision...

...And if such a modest conception of politics fails to excite one's sensibilities—well, one can always retire to one's library and read a book...

...November 1977 7...

...That is always the way new intellectual-political impulses arise—by people learning from experience and changing their minds...

...I think there are two important differences, one in the area of social policy, the other in the area of political philosophy...

...What is sometimes called "pragmatic liberalism" (and can more accurately be called half-disillusioned liberalism) is a step toward neoconservatism, but on its own it never really gets there...

...In truth, the cultural infrastructure of modern liberalism is so sensitive that, if he does nothing more than come out in favor of capital punishment, that alone will make the media and the academic community tongue-tied when it comes to calling him a liberal...

...It appeared in Esquire magazine, then edited by Harold Hayes, and attracted a certain amount of attention, being reprinted in various periodicals, including, surprisingly, the Soviet magazine, Literaturnaya Gaxeta, along with an explanatory, and by no means wholly critical, commentary...

...The important thing to remember is that this rebellion was not primarily directed against conservative, old-fashioned, capitalist America, though it sometimes talked that way...

...At the beginning of the seventies I wrote an article entitled "The Decade of the Great Liberal Death-Wish...

...In each case, after some momentary disconcertment and protest, the old The American Spectator...

...It was our disengagement from cultural liberalism that led to something that could fairly be called "neo-conservatism...

...This may well be the most important thing about it...

...He has published two volumes of his memoirs, Chronicles of Wasted Time, and is presently writing the third...

...Indeed, one of the frustrations of social democracy is that so many of its initial reforms, once established, serve as bulwarks against a further socialist transformation...

...Politics has to do with practical virtue, not with the regeneration of humanity by passionate commitment to any sovereign ideal...

...The major intellectual effort of neo-conservatism is to deutopianize political thinking...

...Moreover, encouraged by their "permissive" and "broad-minded" parents to be "creative" in all their attitudes and social relations, they promptly engaged in a "creative" repudiation of, not only traditional America, but liberal America as well (or even most especially...

...Somewhere below the surface there was—there must have been—a growing uneasiness about the future of conventional social democracy, and of conventional social-democratic reforms, in the twentieth century...

...The interesting question is: why neoconservative rather than simply conservative...

...As a matter of fact—and for some of us it is a pleasing irony—more and more people these days are putting the word "liberal" in quotation marks, which is a way of putting the category itself into question...

...In political philosophy, the dominant influence has been the late Professor Leo Strauss, who—together with his students—has shown how it is possible to understand and support the modern liberal order while having a detached intellectual perspective on it...

...After all, a large segment of the liberal population—including many liberal politicians—has by now become skeptical of liberal programs, but nevertheless retains its liberal identity...

...Perhaps the most disillusioning experience of all, for those who were to move in a neo-conservative direction, was the youth rebellion of the 60s, and the counterculture associated with it...

...The theme is one that has haunted me ever since, as a young journalist in Moscow in the early thirties, I observed the truly extraordinary antics there of visiting intelligentsia from Western Europe and the United States...