Reflections of a Neoconservative
Califano, Joseph A. Jr.
BOOK R E V I E W S I r v i n g Kristol, the graying guru of neoconservatives, never set foot in Washington until the late 1950s, after he had co-founded Encounter magazine with Stephen...
...essays are the reflections of a fullblooded conservative...
...Indeed, by 1979 it had gone down to 12 percent...
...The real economic growth of the middle sixties took care of the overwhelming majority of the American people without any government help...
...But with this book, Irving Kristol puts forth a thesis that entitles him to a doctorate in conservative letters, no "neD" about it...
...Reading his book of essays, Reflections of a Neoconservative, makes it clear that Mr...
...Ronald Reagan has taught us that we can rapidly wring inflation out of the economy because the remnants of a compassionate, interventionist government are there not only to keep the mobs off the streets, but to keep most families together and a good many adequately (if not well) fed...
...He applauds the President for "being bold enough to create a conservative deficit (one resulting from tax cuts) as a counterweight to liberal deficits (resulting from increased government expenditures...
...By and large, these are people who need the kinds of things the fortunate among us receive from our parents or other loving relatives...
...On the other hand, too many Democrats have scored three or less for their inability to perceive Reagan's true intentions in time to thwart them...
...These Joseph A. Califano, Jr...
...The Cold War, American higher education, obscenity, foreign policy, economics, politics, art, Judaism, psychoanalysis, Christianity, NATO, Einstein, and socialism are just some of the topics covered...
...None...
...If you like The American Spectator, you'll love Irving Kristol...
...y of what the Great Society achieved...
...REFLECTIONS OF A NEOCONSERVATIVE: LOOKING BACK, LOOKING AHEAD Irving Kristol/Basic Books/S19.95 Joseph A. Califano, Jr...
...The President's ability to drive down inflation with a ~ledgehammer was made possible b3/ the cushions Lyndon Johnson's Great Society provided: food stamps, unemployment compensation (which Reagan came to like so much as President that he kept recommending 13-week benefit extensions), Medicaid and Medicare, community health centers, work training, and a host of other programs...
...In economics, Kristol puts all his faith in the capitalist system...
...Kristol may lack the lifelong cardcarrying status of a Richard Viguerie...
...was Lyndon Johnson's Special Assistant for Domestic Affairs, and Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare during the Carter Administration...
...If you appreciate good writing about the serious business of making America work better, reorient its values, and get moving again, read it...
...He sharply draws the lines between socialist theory and the reality of what's happening in most socialist countries in the world...
...Kristol neither missed nor much liked the pre-Reagan carryings on in our nation's capital...
...Kristol understood, far better than most Democrats and (I like to hope) most Americans, what Ronald Reagan was up to with his massive tax cuts...
...To Mr...
...But I deplore Kristol's reluctance (at least in this collection) to accept the need for government to act as a redistributor of wealth to those who are unable, either temporarily or permanently, to fend for themselves...
...This is one devil Kri~tnl will not give his due...
...But he neglects to note that the kids of the sixties got broad-based support that hardcore radicals of the thirties never could muster...
...By 1982, the poverty rate had skyrocketed to 15 percent, the highest in seventeen years with 34 million Americans officially considered poor...
...The sixties were " a bewildering and selfdestructive tantrum," because we adults failed to transmit adult values to our o f f s p r i n g . Kristol's characterization of this tumultuous period is accurate enough...
...What has Reagan's economic and domestic policy achieved...
...Kristol, Mr...
...Most Americans believed that the draft was forcing millions of young men to risk their lives in a war that had a seemingly insatiable appetite for American blood and gave no adequate return on the investment of our national honor and power...
...In Kristol's view, the new President was determined to "put the welfare state in a moderately tight straitjacket for the rest of the decade at least...
...Despite the flat economy of the 1970s, the official poverty level did not rise...
...K r i s t o l ' s book is extraordinarily well written--a series of sprightly, provocative essays that also display a remarkable versatility of mind and matter...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1984 33 Capitalism is the best economic system the world has ever known...
...He is mercifully free of the political buffoonery of Howard Phillips...
...Item: In his essay on "Pornography, Obscenity and the Case for Censorship," Kristol rightly notes that in order to propound seriously 'that "no one was ever corrupted by a book, you almost have to believe that no one was ever improved by a book (or a play, or a movie...
...But ;ently fashionable world of neo . . . . . . . . ,ati~m, even as brilliantly articulated Mr...
...He is currently senior partner in the Washington office of Dewey, Ballantine, Bushby, Palmer, and Wood...
...For Kristol, it is a "startling absence of values" that is responsible for the urban crisis of our democratic urban nation...
...Kristol, cannot obscure the re...
...In the second group, I would put the temporarily unemployed, the people who need health care to repair their minds or bodies in order to work again but who cannot afford that health care, and those who need an education or training to master technical skills...
...Kristol has high marks for President ~ Reagan's shrewd economic policy and conservative deficits, his inability to see much good in governments PaSt allows him to miss another point I think Reagan understands far better than most Republicans and Democrats...
...One only wishes the author had subjected his new-found conservative faith to the same pragmatic harpoons that he so brilliantly directs at the intellectual and political foibles of American liberals...
...Nonetheless, by 1981 Mr...
...And he does not subscribe to the ridiculous litmus tests of Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority...
...Contrary to conservative myth, the Great Society was not a set of programs designed to pour money into the hands of the lazy poor so they could atrophy, smoking cigarettes, drinking beer, and sending the bill to the American taxpayer...
...Diplomacy becomes a substitute for, rather than a tool of, foreign policy...
...President Reagan occasionally says something that approximates such an affirmation, but the State Department quickly blankets it with an obfuscatory "explanation...
...Yet, taken with a few grains of salt, there is much for liberals to learn about their own excesses and hypocrisies from Kristol's thirty-year intellectual tour...
...When Lyndon Johnson left office in 1969, that percentage had dropped to 13 percent...
...But there's a lot to learn in the way he pointedly--but always goodnaturedly--reminds you of your haunting mistakes and lingering hypocrisies...
...I heartily agree...
...Rather, he almost one-dimensionally attributes the decline of the American city to the establishment in America of a moral code that asks not why, but "why not...
...Kristol is purer than Reagan, more economically pristine than Martin Feldstein...
...Here, I think Kristol has scored a top-of-the-scale l0 in political perspicacity...
...Item: In his 1977 essay, "Memoirs of a Trotskyist," Kristol contrasts the radicalism of the thirties, "decidedly an adult movement" in which young people participated, with the radicalism of the sixties, a childish, generational movement...
...For there is nothing "neD" about him...
...34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1984...
...The Great Society was first and foremost a program of economic policy that gave this country some of the most prosperous times in its twohundred-year history...
...Therein--as throughout his later essays--Kristol reveals how misleading the title of his book is...
...Government can and should help these two groups, but one finds precious little support for that humane role in Kristol's neoconservatism...
...Kristol claps his hands for Reagan's domestic ideological coup in the same essay that condemns the President's foreign policy as soft: What single bold action has this administration taken in foreign affairs...
...In the first group I would include the aged who need Social Security or other support, the permanently disabled who are so physically or mentally ill that they cannot work, and the millions of little children born into our society of parents who either neglect, abuse, or ignore them, and who certainly do not fulfill their obligation to support them...
...Kristol's son, Irving...
...Fortunately for Mr...
...BOOK R E V I E W S I r v i n g Kristol, the graying guru of neoconservatives, never set foot in Washington until the late 1950s, after he had co-founded Encounter magazine with Stephen Spender...
...These numbers come from the same Administration that pays Ed Meese to make hungry children disappear...
...One of Kristol's devils, clearly, is interventionist government--of Franklin Roosevelt, and particularly of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society...
...If you are a committed liberal, you'll get your dander up as you go through its pages...
...In 1960, 22 percent of the American people lived below the official poverty level...
...Kristol, the Reagan Administration has so defanged the Federal Trade Commission that there is little, if any, likelihood it will enforce laws against false advertising, much less invoke the Truth-in-Packaging Act of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society...
...Though Mr...
...And you'll discover that there's nothing neo about Mrs...
...You'll enjoy...
...Reagan is "just about the only conservative in his administration who appreciates the full ideological significance of his economic policy...
...Again and again, Kristol punches holes in Marxist economic and historical theory...
...Item: In the essay "Urban Civilization and It}Discontents," Kristol plays down the special problems, concentrated poverty, and physical deterioration of large urban centers...
...I find it remarkable that many of the same liberals who so fervently seek t o ban boxing as a public sporting event should place no limit on the human degradation to which they would permit men and women to sink in X-rated films and sex-0riented nightclubs...
...But if we count (as David Stockman does when it supports his budget-cutting points) the income effects of the Great Society service programs, such as those for health care, job training, aid to education, and rehabilitation for the handicapped, by the mid-1970s the poverty rate had been reduced to six percent...
...When all is said and done, what do I think of Kristol's book...
...The tone of Reflections is relentlessly that of the convert who has become purer than the lifelong ideologue, like the born-again Christian who totally eschews things material, or the newly convinced vegetarian who considers it a moral outrage to kill cattle or chickens...
...If the majority of Americans are to reap the fruits of a capitalist society with a clear conscience, then they must recognize that even the finest economic policy cannot, without government intervention, deal with two kinds of people: those who are literally unable to care for themselves, and those who need some help, above and beyond what the market place provides, to share in the general economic well-being...
...He even finds distasteful some of the action under the current Administration...
...With characteristic wit, he notes that "no one, not even a university professor, really believes that...
...What single bold ideological affirmation has this administration uttered in foreign affairs...
...Every civilized society has put some limits on public amusements...
...Most of the essays have such pace that, once begun, it's hard to put them down...
Vol. 17 • March 1984 • No. 3
