The Neoconservative Imagination/The De-Moralization of Society
Kristol, William & Himmelfarb, Gertrude & DeMuth, Christopher
T he Neoconservative Imagination is a kind of executive summary of the life and thought of Irving Kristol. Co-edited by William Kristol, his son, and Christopher DeMuth, president of the...
...For Kristol to have written those words in 1952 testifies either to his great courage or his extraordinary foolhardiness...
...No, there is only one way to fight the culture war, and that is the way the Fabian socialists fought it at the close of the nineteenth century—through what Sidney and Beatrice Webb called "gradualism" and "permeation...
...One way that has appealed to religious thinkers in every age is censorship—and Kristol makes no bones about his support for censorship...
...Their basic idea, as Himmelfarb has written, was that "a small group of knowledgeable, capable, well-placed people . . . would permeate the institutions that were the source of power and . . . would institute the necessary reforms...
...Himmelfarb challenges this assumption...
...Over the years, Irving Kristol has helped place a good many talented young men and women in positions of influence throughout the culture, earning for himself in the process the sobriquet, "Godfather of the neocons...
...Kristol acknowledges the centrality of God and is obsessed with problems of good and evil...
...Given Himmelfarb's intense antipathy to Beatrice Webb, I doubt that the Kristols have consciously modeled themselves on the Webbs...
...But it is not only—or primarily—external manifestations of evil that claim Kristol's attention...
...He is even more concerned with "the evil that lurks in the hearts of men...
...For there is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy: he, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist...
...He was always the hottest of Cold Warriors, and his anti-Communism was so unflinching that he even found kind words for Joe McCarthy: Joseph Shahan is a writer living in Silver Spring, Maryland...
...But if neoconservatives reject left-wing approaches to the politics of virtue, they also reject the conventional right-wing approach, which consists, in essence, of calling for the devolution of power away from the government and toward the institutions of civil society—charities, nonprofit organizations, voluntary groups—that, it is assumed, still adhere to the traditional virtues...
...It is reasonable to assume that, as with the Webbs, the Kristols aim to permeate the culture with as many right-thinking people as possible, in order to effect a gradual and cumulative transformation—an extraordinary strategy being pursued by an extraordinary pair...
...It is one of those books in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts...
...About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing...
...What the whole suggests is something that a number of Kristol's friends hint at, but no one actually comes out and says: Irving Kristol is essentially a religious thinker who happens to write about public affairs...
...Co-edited by William Kristol, his son, and Christopher DeMuth, president of the conservative American Enterprise Institute think tank, it consists mainly of lighthearted portraits of Kristol drawn by old friends in honor of his 75th birthday...
...Christians attribute this evil to Original Sin...
...With the popular culture actively supporting Yetzer Ho'Rah, Kristol believes that the government needs to step in and support parental efforts to encourage Yetzer Ha'Tov...
...Appalled by the growing availability of pornography, Kristol has little patience with those he calls "First Amendment fanatics" who would permit smut-peddlers to go about their business undisturbed...
...And with some justification...
...And THE NEOCONSERVATIVE IMAGINATION: ESSAYS IN HONOR OF IRVING KRISTOL Edited by Christopher DeMuth and William Kristol The AEI Press/250 pages / $24.95 THE DE-MORALIZATION OF SOCIETY: FROM VICTORIAN VIRTUES TO MODERN VALUES Gertrude Himmelfarb Alfred A. Knopf/314 pages /$24 reviewed by JOSEPH SHATTAN The American Spectator June 1995 61 Culture War requires a radically different strategy than the Cold War...
...Kristol's preoccupation with evil—and especially the evil of Communism—is long-standing...
...Still, the resemblance between the leading couples of Fabian socialism and neoconservatism is striking...
...He doesn't make a big deal of his faith, and explicit references to God come relatively late in his writings...
...As she put it in a recent essay in the Wall Street Journal, "The civil society itself has been infected by some of the same viruses" that have produced our social problems...
...Neoconservatives hate these latter-day Torquemadas, and Himmelfarb devotes the postscript of her new book to an attack on the New Victorians, whose real kinship "is not to the Victorians but to George Orwell's `Big Brothers' (or `Big Sisters,' it may be...
...For much of his intellectual life, Kristol has pondered a simple question: How can society lend Yetzer Ha'Tov a helping hand...
...But someone who writes, "All people, everywhere, at all times, are `theotropic' beings, who cannot long abide the absence of a transcendental dimension to their lives," is surely no pagan...
...Jews envisage man's moral existence as a constant struggle between two demiurges, Yetzer Ha'Tov (the Good Impulse) and Yetzer Ho'Rah (the Evil Impulse...
...Neo-conservatives cannot simply call upon the government to impose a reign of virtue—that is how commissars and ayatollahs and the enforcers of political correctness (sometimes called the "New Victorians") do it...
Vol. 28 • June 1995 • No. 6
