Capitol Ideas/A Chat with Irving Kristol

Bethell, Tom

CAPITOL IDEAS A CHAT WITH IRVING KRISTOL It was the day before Prof. Anita Hill's vindictive debut on Capitol Hill, and Irving Kristol was feeling depressed. Depressed? Normally he is the voice...

...And notice: government revenues increased markedly, as promised by Laffer...
...He said that President Bush was permitting the Vice President to "run with" the issue, but he wished Bush himself would do so...
...ristol had found persuasive a recent book arguing that the Republicans recruit people "who don't believe in big government and therefore do not make good politicians...
...We at the NEW OXFORD REVIEW are spearheading today's intellectual engagement with what Daniel Bell terms "the sacred...
...There were also conventional New Dealers—regarded as apolitical by the standards of the time...
...Politics will always prevent spending reductions anyway...
...Jack Kemp, secretary of HUD, has said much the same thing: Why should Republicans let Democrats outbid them in the compassion-stakes...
...His son, William Kristol, is the chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle, and his wife, Gertrude Himmelfarb, is an eminent historian...
...But it will take time...
...Even though he found the work relatively easy, he still had about two hours' homework every night...
...Maybe there was something about Communism, some peculiar virulence, that necessitated a homeopathic response...
...From Harvard to Berkeley, and amid inquisitive people generally, there's an undeniable renewal of interest in the questions traditional religion raises and seeks to answer...
...Encounter supported the Gaitskell wing of the Labour party, but you had to do that to influence intellectuals then...
...You can say that sort of thing as an intellectual exercise, "but not if you want to be taken seriously politically...
...It's becoming more and more the captive of ideological groups who are very influential but do not constitute a majority...
...The intellectual fight may have been between democratic socialists and Communists who shared the values of the left...
...He has never been back to City College—nostalgia is something that he resolutely eschews...
...We are particularly interested in exploring religious commitments that yield humane social consequences, as exemplified by such giants as St...
...What's happening to the Democratic party is the same as what has been happening to the Labour party in England...
...He was sitting in his "afternoon" office at the American Enterprise Institute, where he has long been a Distinguished Fellow...
...But I don't think I'll go there...
...His father lived for twenty years in the Los Angeles suburbs after retiring...
...Political discussions with Kristol havea way of turning swiftly from the ideal to the feasible...
...Reviewing the book here (MS, June 1990), John Muggeridge wrote: "Encounter got us used to the idea that any serious attack on Soviet totalitarianism must come from the left...
...Tax rate reductions were urged (the Laffer Curve first appeared in print in the Public Interest), and a few years later implemented...
...We are witnessing "the end of a major phase" of Western civilization, as Kristol pointed out recently in Commentary...
...In fact, his neoconservatism has often seemed more a matter of the Democrats' moving left than his moving right—as he himself has often said...
...The public schools are getting worse, not better...
...Kristol did much to disseminate supply-side economics in the late 1970s—a triumph of political advocacy...
...Yet, recently The New York Times Magazine carried an article on the "return to religion" among intellectuals...
...How about getting the government out of education...
...About the Republicans, he is inclined to speak tactfully...
...Secular humanism has severely eroded our domestic institutions—our schools, courts, churches, media...
...Francis, Gandhi, Bonhoeffer, Barth, Tawney, Schumacher, Mounier, Dorothy Day, Archbishop Tutu, Simone Weil, Martin Luther King Jr., and Archbishop Romero...
...They have this program of handing out condoms to high school students...
...Kristol vaguely recalls that there may have been a Newman Club, and about one professor there was a scurrilous rumor that he played golf: think of him as the college Republican...
...Normally he is the voice of optimism...
...Sneakers would have been out of the question...
...I don't care anymore...
...Rather, there's an awareness that, as Jean Bethke Elshtain put it, religious commitment "can help further social reform," and that religion can supply the ethical bedrock upon which to make political choices which are far more durable than those based on passing ideologies and enthusiasms...
...We bat around a wide variety of issues and defy easy pigeonholing...
...The opportunities are there...
...Oh, that doesn't matter really, in our society...
...For years he was a professor of "social thought" at New York University, without having gone to graduate school...
...I'd love to see the President or the Vice President get up and hold this up as an instance of lunatic liberalism...
...By far...
...I'd love to hear the Democrats oppose it...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1991 9 In England, the loony left was so labeled—by Margaret Thatcher...
...For this reason, and because he is basically an optimist, Kristol is predicting a religious resurgence: "Without a set of religious beliefs that anchor your way of life, everything becomes permitted, and then you get anarchistic lunacy, as we have in the arts today, or liberal lunacy, as we have in our social policy...
...The Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, a man of libertarian preferences, observed at the time that if it was true that a tax-rate reduction increased government revenue, the rate obviously hadn't been cut enough...
...I n 1953 Kristol became co-editor I (with Stephen Spender) of Encounter, published under the auspices of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (with CIA funding, as was not known at the time by the editors...
...Nor does it imply a retreat from working for peace, justice, or human dignity...
...The people who are governing New York are so incredibly dogmatic ideologically, so incredibly stupid, so lacking in common sense, and they keep getting reelected...
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...Despite the comparative poverty of his upbringing—his father was a garment worker who suffered reverses during the Depression—Kristol looks back on the social milieu of his youth as a golden age...
...It's completely out of sync with the public...
...Kristol called this "peculiarly reactionary...
...It's also worth noting that the socialized institutions experienced by Kristol and others of his generation worked well at the time...
...Depressed about Clarence Thomas, about Elliott Abrams, all the other things happening," he said...
...But a lot of people talk as if there was a conservative intelligentsia that could have been mobilized, and there wasn't...
...way of flushing out the filthy water and flushing in some fresh water," he said...
...Berkeley, CA 94706 PAYMENT MUST ACCOMPANY ORDER 10 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1991 worse, not better...
...Why not the states as well...
...Lewis, Walker Percy, Flannery O'Connor, and Graham Greene...
...Pragmatism prevails over ideology...
...If you look at any index of social well-being, it's getting worse, not better...
...The commercial real-estate situation is getting Religion and the Life of the Intellect In many intellectual circles the myth still circulates that religion is the preserve of the dimwitted and unlettered...
...It's a little ridiculous to say that the last 150 years have been one vast error...
...altogther," he wrote...
...You have to go back "prior to about 1835" to find a precedent for that...
...But here, Republicans defer to each and every Democratic initiative, worriedly serving up their very own alternative (conceding the principle but quibbling about dollars...
...But the neighborhoods and the institutions of his youth stand in ruins now—ruined by the dominant ideology that repudiates individual responsibility and stigmatizes its critics as racist, sexist, etc...
...The economy blossomed...
...It's a beautiful city—you feel like you're in the center of history...
...Well, there's some truth in that," Kristol said...
...What could be done about the nation's capital...
...This fascination is largely a result of the failures of secular substitutes for religion (such as rationalism, narcissism, technological utopianism, aestheticism, and extremist political ideologies) to give abidingly satisfying answers to the truly significant puzzles in life: goodness, suffering, love, death, and the meaning of it all...
...aside from the fact that it will wreck the educational system...
...He sighed and lit a Carlton...
...An ecumenical monthly edited by lay Catholics, we've been characterized by George Will as "splendid," by the University of Chicago's Martin E. Marty as "lively," by Berkeley's John T. Noonan Jr...
...It speaks volumes about the leftist fanaticism to which we have all been subjected in recent years that the supply-side compromise was itself shrilly denounced as ideological extremism and ridiculed by journalists and Democrats...
...Cameron, John Lukacs, Henri J.M...
...Kristol touched on this when I spoke to him...
...I think Russia is going to become a very religious country...
...In 1936 he went to City College, in Harlem, where the main political division was between Alcove One (Trotskyist, to which Kristol belonged), and Alcove Two (Stalinist, and about ten times larger than Alcove One...
...At City College he found himself in a far more competitive and academically challenging atmosphere...
...And we probe the literary and philosophical riches offered by such greats as Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Buber, Auden, Eliot, Silone, Maritain, Waugh, Merton, C.S...
...It's peculiar to New York, but it's the Democratic party in New York that's doing it...
...There is of course an old Jewish belief that all Jews should go to Jerusalem to die," Kristol said...
...If you're keen on intellectual ferment and the life of the mind and spirit, subscribe today...
...His hallmark is a relaxed, lucid style—the commonsensical voice of one who refuses to be impressed by experts...
...More controversially, Muggeridge wrote that the Cold War was a "civil war on the left, a Marxist Protestant reformation, the great theological question under dispute being whether truth resides in the Communist party or in the hearts of individual believers...
...Make check payable to NEW OXFORD REVIEW...
...Since private enterprise would not do it, the state had to assume control of the economy...
...Louis...
...The Democratic party is falling apart," he said...
...The Reagan Administration, he added, had "mindlessly submitted to the tyranny of the budget...
...The city was orderly and there was no crime on the streets...
...That's why we were all socialists," he said...
...Retirement...
...He moved to Washington from New York four years ago...
...Nouwen, Robert Coles, Christopher Lasch, Eileen Egan, and others — express themselves with clarity, verve, style, and heart...
...The number of people on welfare who vote is so trivial that it's of no significance...
...You also flush out some good things, but that's the price you have to be prepared to pay...
...It would be nice to have a Republican party a lot more self-confident, more articulate, more political," he conceded...
...At PS 54 in Brooklyn, Kristol recalled, they even had fingernail inspection...
...Come on," he said...
...And it will end up like Detroit or East St...
...Mail to: NEW OXFORD REVIEW Room 925 1069 Kains Ave...
...It's not going to happen in five years...
...orn in Brooklyn in 1920, Irving Kristol belongs to a generation that grew up overwhelmingly dedicated to progressive politics...
...It's lunacy to encourage kids to have sex...
...Federal government, I assume...
...Only don't come to Washington begging for money...
...He wonders why they don't ever resort to ridicule...
...Compromise was at the heart of supply-side theory: if the government permitted people to keep a greater percentage of what they earned at the margin, the govby Tom Bethell ernment would reap greater revenues...
...Those who write for us — Robert N. Bellah, J.M...
...Senior Republicans in Congress (ever willing to enjoy the perquisites of office and cede policy to the Democrats) are opposed to term limits...
...as "indispensable," and by Newsweek as "thoughtful and often cheeky...
...It's still a great city," he said, "and its decline is not going to be precipitous, because there are institutions there with deep roots, like the financial community...
...It is the most popular issue in the United States today," Kristol said...
...So I think that [resurgence] will become more and more evident with every passing year...
...I do not see how that can change " He cited the f *sts, who already were baying on behalf of Anita Hill—long before they could have known whether she was telling the truth...
...Unemployment was high, factories were standing idle, and, as Kristol said, the solution seemed obvious enough at the time: put the unemployed workers into the factories...
...Conservatives were invisible, perhaps nonexistent...
...And could make a very big difference...
...How about John Stuart Mill's belief that those on "parish relief" (welfare) shouldn't be allowed to vote...
...But we'll have to wait a while...
...He went on to Boys' High, in Brooklyn, where the academic standards were rigorous...
...One wonders: Is he not rather too comfortable with big government...
...Kristol, on the other hand, was undisturbed by the prospect of more revenue flowing into the Treasury...
...And I don't mind...
...He continues to keep an eye on New York, though, sometimes returning there on business...
...The New York Times Magazine article discussed the NEW OXFORD REVIEW as part of this return to religion, and rightly so...
...I think I'll stay in Washington —although I must say, that cesspool inthe middle of the city is getting more and more noxious...
...All would therefore gain...
...Recently he had been selected to receive the Institute's Francis Boyer Award for 1991...
...Term limitations are a Tom Bethel...
...Nor does the new openness to religion signify a hostility to science, but rather an appreciation of the limits of science and technology...
...By no means, however, does this religious renaissance entail embracing the ersatz gods of dog-eat-dog individualism, consumerism, or superpatriotism...
...Implying, of course, that big government is popular and here to stay...
...Note to puzzled readers: A line was accidentally dropped from a sentence in last month's column, which should have read: "The mental escape route open to them [Republicans] is to see that it's not government's job to help anyone, any more than it is an umpire's job to help anyone in a tennis tournament...
...Kristol added that he might say something about the "loony liberals" himself...
...Socialism has failed in every other field...
...But it might happen in fifteen...
...Which is lucky for us...
...Give me something you would do to reduce it...
...Anyway, the Cold War is over now, Communism is dead, and Alcove One has prevailed over Alcove Two...
...Crime is getting worse, not better...
...The magazine was established to resist the "Soviet mythos," as Peter Coleman calls it in his recent book, The Liberal Conspiracy...
...But that's not what the Cold War was—there was a Soviet Army and the American Army, countries were occupied and millions were killed...
...They're not going to get it anyhow...
...I'm watching with great interest what is happening in New York City," he said...
...is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...All one can do is shrug one's shoulders and say, If that's what the people want, let them have it...
...We are now threatened with an "upsurge of anti-biblical barbarism that will challenge Christianity, Judaism and Western civilization THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1991 11...
...He is also publisher of the National Interest and coeditor of the Public Interest, where he has a "morning" office...
...It is so absurd to imagine a 13- or 14-year-old girl coming home waving a condom, telling her mother, 'Mom, look what I got in school today,' and her ten-year old sister saying, 'Hey, I want, one of those.' This is not the way life is supposed to be in a civilized country, let alone a democracy...
...But the city is in gradual decline And I don't see what can reverse it...
...He has been called the godfather of neoconservatism, his articles in the Wall Street Journal having been particularly influential...
...Calling for an increase in social security payments in 1987, Kristol deplored the Republicans' tendency to "deny themselves any interesting initiatives in social policy, because such initiatives always cost some money...
...And the media is populated by these same people, which gives them tremendous resonance," Kristol added...
...Washington is a beautiful city, in the middle of which there is this cesspool called the United States Congress...
...It's not happening, as far as I know, in any other country...

Vol. 24 • December 1991 • No. 12


 
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