THE NEW CONSERVATIVES: INTELLECTUALS IN RETREAT
Epstein, Joseph
Ten years ago, who could have predicted the rise of a new conservatism in American life? Yet such a conservatism has arisen, and what among other things is new about it is that, unlike...
...But the main point is that the new conservatism is neither parochial in outlook nor powerless in the world...
...How badly do you despise Oppression, a state known equally to blacks, Chicanos, students, housewives, and account executives deprived of fulfillment...
...in fact, a democratic radical could in good faith hold to any of them...
...Briefly, things are getting very much better for young black husband-wife families, which are everywhere beginning to close, and in some statistical situations have closed, the gap in income between themselves and white fam ilies of equal education...
...No longer, apparently...
...Others frequently mentioned among the new conservatives, with varying accuracy, are James Coleman, Morris Janowitz, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Harry Johnson...
...In government, in the academy, in journalism—in short, in all those modern institutions out of which influence can be radiated with the greatest intensity—the new conservatism is extremely well-placed...
...Where genuine progress is made, it ought duly to be noted, both because, as Moynihan suggests, it may improve our morale and because it may serve as a guide to setting future social policy...
...Daniel Patrick Moynihan, currently U.S...
...As editor of THE NEW CONSERVATIVES: INTELLECTUALS IN RETREAT Commentary and an exceptionally talented journalist, Podhoretz has run much material with a strong new conservative flavor, providing many of the new conservative writers, who normally appear in the Public Interest, a home away from home...
...The Democratic party, done in by its own divisiveness, is in shambles...
...Again like liberalism, it has traditionally been part of a controversy, one side of a long argument over the true nature of the historical process —over the question, that is, in what direction and at what pace change ought to take place in society...
...YOSAL ROGAT, New York Review of Books The book in question is Irving Kristol's On the Democratic Idea in America, and reading it one discovers nothing of the kind...
...Viewed thus far in its brief history, the new conservatism strongly resembles another abrupt shift in political orientation among American intellectuals—namely, that undertaken by the group of intellectuals who came to be known as the Cold Warriors...
...to cries about the wretched of the earth, with cool displays of statistics...
...It claims to believe in the improvability of man's lot, yet ignores his more flagrant social problems, arguing that these problems do not exist (Norman Podhoretz on Pollution), that they have been grossly inflated (Daniel Patrick Moynihan on the plight of blacks in America), or that they are not really problems at all (Irving Kristol on the redistribution of income...
...Yet it is one thing to say that on certain brutally tough social problems we don't as yet have any convincing solutions...
...As so often in new conservative writing, the tragedy could be laid at the door of liberal foolishness, the irony that the lib eral-left had once again acted against its own avowed best interests...
...The New Left of the late '60s spoke out on behalf of the world as it ought to be, as radicals had traditionally done, but they went down to defeat by the new conservatives because they were woefully ignorant about the world as it is...
...The right, seeing itself as richly endowed with a firm grasp on reality, looks upon the left as naive...
...Now United States ambassador to India, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a man who appreciates a heavy irony, might wish to brood over this one of a hot and sleepless night in New Delhi...
...Norman Podhoretz, as editor of Commentary, tirelessly tracked down and clubbed away at each fresh outcropping of "swinging" radicalism...
...In looking across the invisible line that divides men politically, left and right each sees the other as not merely mistaken in its views but deficient in precisely those virtues that it especially prides itself upon...
...G...
...In November 1969, in one of his many attacks on what he called the outrageous bias of the news media, Vice-President Agnew quoted from the work of a number of intellectuals in defense of his own position...
...If City College can be said to have put the blacking on his education, then London, during his years as coeditor of Encounter, must have supplied the polish...
...I have observed over the years," Kristol writes, "that the unanticipated consequences of social action are always more important, and usually less agreeable, than the intended consequences...
...Daniel Bell, the other coeditor of the Public Interest, is less easily described...
...As a political program, an intellectual response to events, or a body of thought having something pertinent to say about contemporary society, the stock of conservatism ran low among intellectuals...
...but even assuming a rough consensus among them, as .a group they were very far from able to confer any sort of serious standing upon conservatism as an intellectual force in American life...
...He can, for example, write disparagingly of the "highly apocalyptic notions of the present" in one essay, then turn round to sound the apocalyptic note himself: "Today," he wrote in Fortune in 1968, "one does have cause to believe that we are approaching one of those historical watersheds that separate worlds in time...
...Whereas James 0. Wilson once wrote that "empathy (though not outright approval) governed the liberal response to urban riots and campus disorder," surely if once true, this is true no longer, urban riots and campus disorders having come to an end and liberal empathy for them having long since been snuffed out...
...On the question "Is the American Worker Alienated...
...As he seems to have no intellectual doubts, neither does he deal in political equivocations...
...Having noted that some years back, at a national board meeting of Americans for Democratic Action held after the riots in Newark and Detroit, Moynihan "urged that liberals form a coalition with conservatives in the interests of social order," Rustin, tying this in with Moynihan's "benign neglect" memo to President Nixon, went on to remark: "From this point of view Moynihan's role in the Nixon administration becomes tragically clear...
...Irving Kristol, one of the two coeditors of the Public Interest, is perhaps the quintessential new conservative in that many of the ideas, feelings and tendencies most characteristic of new conservative thought find their boldest expression in his writing...
...but it increased 23.6 percent for those with fe male heads...
...in Irving Kristol the full and finished edifice is on display...
...On the problems of our public schools, it turns out that many of these prob lems don't really exist, being the product of minds in the grip of social hypochondria, feverishly thinking up new crises, and that in fact, by and large, the system is working and that "since it is our system...
...There is something in the grand English amateur tradition about Kristol's prose...
...Conservative" was still a fairly new word in Macaulay's day, having come into usage only after the French Revolution— the first modern political event sufficiently grand in sweep and unnerving in impact to turn people's minds to thoughts of "conserving" their traditions, their property, and not least their heads...
...The respective positions of the Cold Warriors and of the new conservatives locked each into an exceedingly optimistic view of their own society: the former had their "free world," the latter their America without "social meanness...
...He adds: "But facts are facts, however unpleasant, and they have to be faced unblinkingly by anyone who really wants to improve matters in the cities...
...This the new conservatism is currently doing...
...He is at once the new conservatism's leading journalist-publicist and its prime exemplar...
...As Bayard Rustin once noted, writing about Moynihan in another connection: "To point out improvements where they have been made but not to couple this with an urgent call for more action is to provide an excuse for complacency and criminal inaction...
...On the question of what ought to be the role of intellectuals in foreign policy, his answer, despite many an interesting observation along the way, is that intellectuals, having no real responsibility, ought probably to stay the hell out...
...Read separately, when they are not dom inated by fits of bad temper, Irving Kristol's essays can give off a whiff of political phi losphy and of subtlety...
...Vested interest, it appears, is not a notion restricted to property alone...
...not Benign but more nearly Total Neglect was apparently to be its answer...
...A righward path was the only turf left open to him by the New York Review of Books...
...The overall effect seemed to be the same...
...As 158 former assistant to the president for Urban Affairs and executive secretary of the Nixon administration's Urban Affairs Council, Moynihan, by his own account, was in the forefront of the fight to achieve a guaranteed income for the poor through a negative income tax...
...The only intellectuals who could be said to participate in it were those who believed in the principles of the market economy (F...
...In the final reckoning, then, on the question of how best to deal with poverty in America, the Nixon administration would be offering neither an income nor a service strategy...
...In describing his own political position— about which more directly—Irving Kristol writes that it "is not an obviously secure position, but neither is it, I would insist, a completely unrealistic one...
...Nathan Glazer notes that he came to believe that "the radical thinking of the late 1960s was almost completely misguided, based on an amazing ignorance of the lineaments of modern society and an almost equally amazing arrogance...
...the world as it is, as experience teaches us, is not easy to deal with -HENRY FAIRLIE, "Camelot Revisited" In response to theories of conspiracy in places high and low (the Ramparts-syndrome), the new conservatives answered with the soothing voice of social science...
...Many of the same events that brought out the pathetic worst in several intellectuals traditionally aligned with the liberal-left caused the conversion of others so aligned to the new conservatism...
...anyone who has reached a certain age and has not yet become conservative politically must either be at best "immature," or at worst "abnormal...
...In American intellectual life, in fact, it was not so very long ago that conservatism seemed a dead issue...
...Some of its staunchest academic adherents—Edward Banfield, for example, or James 0. Wilson —were trained as social scientists at the University of Chicago...
...Yet it is not exactly as if all they are saying isn't entirely welcome to the Nixon administration...
...rich our nation, one-fifth of it would always be poor (or poorer than the other fourfifths), that poverty was after all a comparative thing (compared with the poor, say, of Asia, the American poor lived in splendor), and (though this was never said, it was implied in the foregoing) so why bother...
...We engage in political activity so that we may, as societies of men, deal with the world as it is...
...Realism, or so its adherents would claim, is the long suit of the new conservatism...
...Many of the new conservatives disavow the label...
...Apparently one must ride out one's obsessions beyond the fringes of reality...
...And the intellectual's ideological heritage as it has accumulated JOSEPH EPSTEIN over the years has tended to be anticonservative at its base...
...In a world of infinte complexity," Nathan Glazer writes, "some things had emerged and survived...
...Among the new conservatives, the world is not only too much with us, but, given its complexity, damn near indecipherable...
...But the word has remained in use ever since, picking up and dropping off nuances over the years, its meaning changing all the while, sometimes subtly and sometimes not so subtly...
...The heat is off, and a large number of those on the liberal-left as well as new conservatives seem frankly relieved...
...Again as with the Cold Warriors, so now with the new conservatives—once astride the stallion of intellectual monomania, it is not so easy to dismount...
...Over the past century in America, conservatism has had an ample popular and a scant intellectual following...
...In the course of that fight, he came out strongly against those "service" programs— community action, manpower retraining, etc.—which, as he has said, he "had not the least confidence in...
...But Moynihan's real point in this essay has less to do with these particular trends than it does with his belief that "con siderable energy is devoted to denying either trend...
...But what experience and history teach is that peoples and governments have never yet learned from history, let alone acted ac cording to its lessons...
...Consider Moynihan's own position...
...In gross terms, the number of blacks below the pov erty line declined 49.4 percent between 1959 and 1968 for families with male heads...
...Yet such a conservatism has arisen, and what among other things is new about it is that, unlike previous incarnations of conservatism in America, it speaks neither in the gruff voice of established privilege nor in the hollow one of aristocratic pretension...
...Although the strands of origin and influence are not so easily separated, it is clear that the new conservatism is very much a national matter...
...This situation has had consequences that reverberate well beyond the confines of debate among intellectuals...
...As described by Edward Shils, a sagacious student of intellectuals and no friend to the ideological caste of mind, the best of this heritage includes: "the demand for moral equality, the distrust of authority and of the institutions which it conducts for its own continuance, the insistence on justice, and the call to a heroic existence, even the belief in the earthly paradise and the realm of freedom...
...As liberal cover for a conservative administration, he is not advancing liberalism so much as helping to entrench conservatism...
...read together, they come to acquire an odor curiously akin to Coueism...
...Both the Cold Warriors and the new conserva tives took up positions that in some respects were not only correct but required courage to hold, in that they went against the grain of the majority of their intellectual peers...
...As such, conservatism has appeared in different guises over the decades: as the extoller of tradition and older values, as the philosophy of economic freedom, as the defender of order and the status quo, and as the label affixed to a political mood or temperament...
...Until now, at least the facade had to be preserved...
...Evidence of this is not difficult to find...
...The New Left is not merely any longer not New, it is by now moribund if not deceased...
...NADEZHDA MANDELSTAM, Hope Against Hope Before attending to what the new conservatives are saying, to the quality of their thought, and to their likely impact on American politics in the years immediately ahead, let us first look to what they have thus far accomplished...
...The American Jewish Committee, publisher of Commentary, had laid down the law to him...
...Opposing itself to the strongly antidemocratic New Left, it appears to be setting itself up as the false antithesis to a false thesis...
...The enemy," Orwell est motives were attributed to Podhoretz for steering Commentary along the editorial course he chose...
...Norman Podhoretz qualifies as a new conservative largely by default...
...It took the political madnesses committed in the name of the left to make conservatism not merely intellectually respectable but to many intellectuals deeply appealing—no small task in the United States, where the overwhelming political intellectual tradition has been clearly liberal-left...
...Irving Kristol notes that he considers himself part of the tradition of conservative reform...
...Political scientists know them to be complex...
...It continues to flog away at its old enemy, the liberal-left, even as that enemy falls into greater political disarray...
...The left, which sees itself as on the side of decency, looks upon the right as heartless...
...Unlike others of the new conservatives, many of whom came to their views as a result of the devastations of the '60s, Kristol's conservatism is not altogether new...
...In his very tough-minded book on cities, The 156 Unheavenly City, Edward Banfield notes that he will doubtless be taken to be an "illtempered and mean-spirited fellow...
...The new conservatism has evidently acquired such an interest in its own ideas and, though it began as an anti-ideological force, has itself become ideologized...
...Irving Kristol's mind, in short, is neatly calculated to encourage precisely the exaggerated response it can usually be relied upon to receive...
...When one looked closely, it became apparent that what passed for the American left had grown mentally stale, dumb in fact...
...Yet Kristol, in the Preface to On the Democratic Idea in America, a collection of his recent essays, remarks: "It is fairly clear, I would hope, that I am not comfortable with what passes for either liberalism or conservatism in the United States today...
...and consequently cheering on the students in their mischief...
...While he may well think his own current political position to be "centrist," no other intellectual, save perhaps Irving Kristol, has done more to bring the new conservatism into prominence...
...The election of Richard Nixon meant a real lowering of the thermostat in this connection, and perhaps the chief function of the new conservatism, though one suspects they are not about to own up to it, is to keep it down...
...All this being so, he sees his own position being on the side of the "enterprise of conservative reform...
...It was organized around a number of soft, exceedingly vague issues, calling less for thoughtful than for emotional responses...
...This is not a slight endeavor...
...The schism has to do with the fact that, as Moynihan reads and understands the census data, things for blacks are going in two directions simultaneously...
...Marcuse, the New York Review of Books, the Panthers, the Population Controllers, the Radical Educational Theorists, one by one Commentary went after each, and many others beside, in a thankless,* though often successful, demo * Thankless because largely unappreciated, where not actually depreciated, by intellectuals...
...Where intellectuals in America have in any significant fashion served power, as during the presidential terms of Franklin Roosevelt, it has been under liberal auspices...
...In the early 1950s, Peter Viereck, echoing Edmund Wilson's plea to intellectuals of two decades earlier to "take communism away from the communists," implored them now to "take conservatism away from the conservatives...
...Conservatism by and large remained with the conservatives, which meant with those who had a vested interest in existing economic and political privilege and those who were temperamentally opposed to change...
...Nathan Glazer, who readily enough admits to some conservative inclinations, argued in the pages of Commentary for George McGovern for President—surely an unusual gesture even for a "mild" conservative...
...When it successfully occurs, we ought to know about it, and permit it to cheer us up...
...The liberal-left, nearly as much as poverty itself, soon becomes the villain of the piece...
...q 162 JOSEPH EPSTEIN...
...First, although they were not alone in this, the new conservatives helped push back "the mob...
...It took the New Left, both in its political and cultural aspects, to do that...
...Both the Cold Warriors and the new conservatives initially pitted themselves against very real enemies—for the former, Stalinism at home and abroad...
...If the new conservatism stood up to the New Left onslaught upon rationality, it had also, in the course of doing so, shown how thin American thought on the left had become...
...H We see that, if M. Dumont had died in 1799, he would have died, to use the new cant word, a decided "Conservative...
...III How does a radical—a mild radical, it is true, but still someone who felt closer to radical than to liberal writers and politicians in the late 1950's—end up by early 1970 a conservative, a mild conservative, but still closer to those who now call themselves con servative than to those who call themselves liberals...
...On the issue of inequality, after taking his readers down a fascinating detour having to do with power struggles between intellectuals and the business community, he concludes that the issue is in reality a cover for a deep and unappeasable anguish at the loss of religion...
...The bitter sadness is that, with its strong intellectual sophistication, it may well end up a more genuine obstacle to the alleviation of social pain than the obtuse and retrograde conservatism of the privileged that preceded it...
...This improvement did not `just' happen to blacks," Moynihan writes...
...or, as during the presidential terms of Kennedy and Johnson, under the facade of liberal auspices...
...Thus, Irving Kristol doubts that the average American feels more powerless today than in the past...
...As recently as the middle 1960s, it could still be said with some confidence that conservatism counted for little in intellectual circles...
...No, the novelty of this new conservatism resides in the fact that it appears to be a conservatism arrived at upon disinterested grounds—a conservatism more purely intellectual, and hence more formidable, than any in recent decades...
...Which brings up the interesting point about the political context of the rise to prominence of the new conservatives...
...But as for celebrating it in any large-scale way, this scarcely seems what is called for...
...Until the past five years or so, conservative sentiments among American intellectuals whowished to be taken seriously were best kept hidden...
...Finally, Kristol holds that many of our institutions "have become so debased as to need substantial reformation, not only to survive but to merit survival...
...But a contradiction here or there, a mistaken prophesy, a patch of factual thinness—these, while they exist in Kristol's essays, are less important than the assumptions under which he writes in the first place...
...Commentary, for example, where one of the pieces from which the VicePresident quoted had originally appeared, saw fit to print a letter by its editor disassociating the magazine from Mr...
...Agnew and his line on the media...
...Involved were great hordes of the disaffected middle class, comprised in unequal parts of students, middle-aged men and women terrified of being left behind by youth, and psychosexual adventurers like Dotson Rader who in the passage below about Andy Warhol JOSEPH EPSTEIN conveys how the "swinging" radicalism of the '60s allowed those who engaged in it to play out their separate little fantasies: Certainly in the Velvet Underground and the Exploding plastic Inevitable, in the disaster paintings, in his films beatifying manhood through violence through the cult of leather, with his bike boys and hustlers and impotent studs worn through and phasing out on scag and the pretenses of the butch, in that vision he [Warhol] joined with much of what rumbled in the consciousness of the New Left, much of what was true for the Weatherman and the Panther and, for a time, true for me...
...Philip Rahv, playing at being Plekhanov...
...Coming out for Richard Nixon, a figure who more than any other in American public life had been the target of unreserved contempt on the part of the intellectual community, was a starkly symbolic act demonstrating how totally disenchanted these men had become with the politics of the liberal-left...
...One could indeed, and many liberal-left intellectuals opposed the Movement from its earliest days for its totalitarian cast—for its disregard of basic democratic forms, its casual accommodation of violence within its own ranks, its feverish hatred of America, and its heavy antinomian strain—without themselves abandoning their own traditional yet still valid left politics...
...and, unlike others of the new con servatives, he brings long and varied ex perience of government to his writing—some 13 years of it, by his own count, over the past two decades...
...Already, anyone who cares to look closely can perceive a sad dialectic at work among the new conservatives...
...He can be a poor prophet, as when, THE NEW CONSERVATIVES: INTELLECTUALS IN RETREAT 159 in an essay entitled "American Intellectuals and Foreign Policy," he predicts the transformation of the American two-party system to make room "for a mass party of the ideological left, as in most European countries— except that its grass roots will be on the campus rather than in the factory...
...Yet, one wonders, who is the enemy that continues to draw the new conservatives' fire...
...In the essay on his "Deradicalization," Nathan Glazer remarks on the influence a year spent working at the Housing and Home Finance Administration had on the maturation of his political views: "It was a big country," he learned, "and it contained more kinds of people than were dreamed of on the shores of the Hudson...
...American intellectuals as a class, at any rate since the Civil War, have tended to be quite distant from centers of power...
...On the one hand, the new conservative intellectuals have been among the ablest chroniclers of the excesses of the New Left, especially (and deservedly) in its counter-cultural and antidemocratic aspects, while they have also been the first group of intellectuals to question liberal assumptions in America from a point of view that is at once sophisticated and not to the left of liberalism...
...We approach a fantasized condidition...
...Three years later, some of these same intellectuals, and a good many others besides, purchased an ad in the New York Times to announce their intention to vote for Nixon and Agnew and to encourage fellow citizens to do the same...
...No single one of these positions would necessarily qualify Norman Podhoretz as a conservative, new or old...
...A. von Hayek and Milton Friedman), or who believed Senator Joseph McCarthy on balance a good thing for the country (William F. Buckley, Jr., and the editors of National Review), or who began with a libertarian hatred of Communism that in time turned into a strong distaste for the liberal-left generally (Sidney Hook and others whose primary political preoccupation was with the Cold War...
...Other intellectuals show one or another aspect of the new conservatism in high relief...
...It was made to happen by black per sons working hard for things they want...
...Yet by adopting these positions in combination with the single-minded concentration of his editorial firepower on the (very real) excesses of New Left rhetoric and countercultural idiocy, to the near-total exclusion of the (equally very real) excesses of the Nixon-Agnew administration, not to speak of abrasions and abuses still dealt out to great numbers of people in America, Podhoretz has in effect allowed his liberal-left credentials to lapse...
...Moynihan adds: "Nothing I have written in this article provides any grounds for complacency," and he elaborates in terms no one on the liberal-left need disagree with (except for their incompleteness) : Lower-class behavior in our cities is shaking them apart...
...perhaps we ought to be less ill-tempered about it than we usually are...
...This quality is especially underscored in the work of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who is in some respects the most attractive of the new conJOSEPH EPSTEIN servative writers...
...But a more compact example of Moynihan's method--and, by extension, of the new conservatism's—is to be found in an essay entitled "The Schism in Black America...
...In a recent issue of the Public Interest Daniel Patrick Moynihan writes: Political society wants things simple...
...Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer—is the new conservatism in the main restricted to New York intellectuals, yet another phenomenon bred in the cafeterias at City College and nurtured on Morningside Heights...
...Not at all...
...It was almost as if the magazine had taken its cue from the final sentence in Nathan Glazer's essay "On Being Deradicalized," which read: I, for one, indeed, have by now come to feel that this radicalism [that of the late '60s] is so beset with error and confusion that our main task, if we are ever to mount a successful assault on our problems, must be to argue with it and to strip it ultimately of the pretension that it understands the causes of our ills and how to set them right...
...As a prose writer, Moyni han has a decided craving for elegance, and along with it a strong taste for generaliza tion, and the two combined render him es pecially delighted at the discovery of irony in contemporary events...
...Not, it should be added, directly or by formal contract or secret pact, THE NEW CONSERVATIVES: INTELLECTUALS IN RETREAT 161 but because the interior logic of their situations had driven them into near (if not complete) accord with the government's own purposes—in the case of the Cold Warriors, the shared unanimity was on the implacable opposition of East and West...
...Where the '60s radicalism was anti-American, committed to a dreary view of the country in all its aspects and prone to see the nation as generally headed toward hell in a bandwagon, the new conservatism is pro-American, committed to a cheery view of the nation's current estate and prone to see the good society as having very nearly arrived...
...The other great note sounded by the new conservatives is "complexity...
...The names associated with it are reputable, belonging mostly to men of solid achievement in the social sciences or intellectual journalism, many of them having themselves once been figures of impeccable liberal or radical standing...
...So the rumors ran, with few people apparently willing to believe that Podhoretz was simply acting out of conviction...
...Facts are facts, it's a big country, let's be realistic —such is the dominant tone of the new con servatism...
...Yet could one be against the congeries of personalities, organizations, and trends that went by the name of "the Movement" without having to think oneself, or for that matter actually being, conservative...
...THE NEW CONSERVATIVES: INTELLECTUALS IN RETREAT once wrote, "is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment...
...Conservative reform" sounds eminently respectworthy, except that when Kristol comes to address himself to particular areas he is generally all conservative criticism with the reform side absent...
...Observe some parallels...
...This is hitting the note of complexity more sonorously than usual, yet the note itself recurs throughout new conservative thought...
...Kristol's conservatism derives from a deep distrust of "the ideology of liberal democracy, in its twentieth-century version," which he was born and grew up in "as into a civil religion...
...The point is less relevant to electoral politics than to what it has to say about a major shift in the political mood of some influential intellectuals...
...The tragic flaw for both the Cold Warriors and for the new conservatives, then, has been monomania...
...quite another to say, as those who talk about the limits of social policy imply, that none exist or are likely to be found...
...Like liberalism, conservatism has never been either a very compact or an altogether coherent body of doctrine...
...Ten years ago, who could have predicted the rise of a new conservatism in American life...
...With both the Cold Warriors and the new conservatives one saw men with good minds and initially fine intentions fall victim to an emotional investment in a single idea—anti-Stalinism for the Cold Warriors, antiradicalism for the new conservatives— an investment that grew so deep as to blur out all else in the world, not least the most obvious injustices all round them...
...The lowlition job...
...The language of poltitics grows more corrupt...
...On matters of social policy, it cautions that the nation go slow—"today's solution," Irving Kristol warns, "is tomorrow's dilemma" —even as the Nixon administration makes certain it goes nowhere...
...What we have here, raised to an intellectual power, is the spirit of Rotarianism...
...Instead, one discovers a keen polemical mind of the sort that belongs to an intellecJOSEPH EPSTEIN tual maverick as well as to a man who lives to argue and does it well...
...and to hysterical shouts of "Fascist Amerika," with historical perspective...
...ambassador to India, and doubtless the best-known of the new conservatives, came by his views at least in 154 part in the rough-and-tumble of urban Irish politics...
...Moynihan is, first, really a writer, as opposed to someone who merely writes...
...Curiously enough, the week after the final installment of Moynihan's account of that defeat in the New Yorker, when the Nixon budget was announced, the amplest cuts were precisely in those service programs for the poor and elderly that Moynihan had so disdained in favor of the guaranteed income...
...Why, Moynihan asks, does progress toward equality, such as the above-mentioned success of black husband-wife families, go ignored...
...Yet it is open to question whether we all don't have a stake, not in denying progress where it has legitimately been made, but in not featuring it...
...and Daniel Patrick Moynihan remarks that one of the great secrets of American politics is that while ideologically Americans are conservative, in practice they are liberal...
...for the latter, the antidemocratic New Left...
...In his personal monthly column, Podhoretz has spoken without equivocation against quotas, the mentality behind the zero population growth movement, the New Left, the New Politics, and that group of moneyed, morally smug, and well-schooled Americans David Bazelon once described as the New Class...
...Could this be the serious conservatism America has so long lacked...
...Kristol avows his own political instincts to be conservative, and, characteristically, remarks that he has come "to believe that an adult's `normal' political instincts should be" conservative...
...Establishment, Youth, Oppression, Revolution—these were the buzz words of the late '60s, sounded over and over again without much in the way of thought behind them...
...There is much talk in the Public Interest, and from new conservatives generally, about "the limits of social policy...
...In the other direction, the number of those who were down slipped further...
...His prose, certainly, has a very high shine—so high, in fact, that it is likely to blind a hurried reader to the fact that Irving Kristol often wouldn't have a subject to write about if it weren't for what he construes to be the cowardice, stupidity, and general intellectual confusion so rampant on the liberal-left...
...Do you feel opposed to the Establishment...
...Where, finally, do you stand in regard to the Revolution...
...Are you on the side of Youth...
...Between a guaranteed income and more service programs— or, in the parlance of government social science, between an "income strategy" and a "service strategy"—Moynihan clearly much preferred and argued forcibly on behalf of the former...
...Yet, as everyone now knows, the battle for the guaranteed income was defeated in the Senate...
...Although a slim volume, the eight essays in Kristol's book comprise a thoroughgoing attack on the liberal-left ethos...
...Social change," he notes, "is not easily achieved...
...and Paul Goodman, toward the end of his days regretting many of the forces loose among the American young that he had himself helped unleash...
...The only home for such thoughts was the National Review, the Siberia of intellectual journalism...
...Thus, in The Poli tics of a Guaranteed Income, his recently published account of the development and ultimate defeat of the Family Assistance Plan, Moynihan early on writes: "There was irony as well as tragedy in the history that followed...
...Other intellectuals drew a different moral from the experience of the 1960s, seeing the decade not as a serious and sad deviation from liberal-left politics but as their logical outcome...
...The heat in question is, of course, that for social change...
...and both contributed significantly to the defeat of their avowed enemies by disqualifying them intellectually...
...Upper-class lying—that the men in jail are political prisoners, that the fatherless child is happier, that the welfare system is a conspiracy to keep the proletariat passive— is destroying standards of discourse...
...Alongside this distrust has grown a deep suspicion of liberal-left activism...
...Robert Nisbet, who is scarcely a newcomer to conservatism but has long brought a deep intelligence and high principles to his political writing, acquired his political orientation at the great university that was Berkeley in the 1930s...
...To cite an example that has by now become a cliche in the history of political philosophy, 19-century liberalism is in its broadest lineaments very nearly congruent with 20-century laissez-faire conservatism...
...Again as with liberalism, there is nothing immutable about conservatism, and truths that in one generation were thought to be liberal or radical can turn up a generation or two later under the banner of conservatism...
...Norman Podhoretz insists that his own deradicalization has nothing to do with any "sudden lapse into indifference over the remediable ills which afflict the world...
...the answer Kristol supplies is, Not Really, only the sociologists who study 160 him are...
...The new conservatives were soon to put a new record on, a much more interesting and skillful one, and it wouldn't be long before people began to dance to it...
...With milTHE NEW CONSERVATIVES: INTELLECTUALS IN RETREAT lions of people in America still living quite wretchedly, and the conditions of others worsening, it still seems best that, in the main, we accord what progress is made "benign neglect," to coin a phrase...
...The fact is, Commentary's was very clearly a minority position within the intellectual community during the '60s, and that its editor took it up and pursued it without relief or ambiguity demonstrated courage and intellectual stamina...
...VII One often advises rulers, statesmen, and peoples to learn from the experiences of his tory...
...One could argue that, in part, the leftist impulse is so conspicuous among the educated and well-to-do precisely because they are exposed to more information, and are accordingly forced to choose between living with the strains of complexity or lapsing into simplism...
...NATHAN GLAZER, "On Being Deradicalized" Once one gets down to naming the names of those who might fairly be described as "new conservatives," one quickly discovers how various a lot these men are, as well as how very different they are from those whom till now one had been accustomed to think of as American conservatives...
...Some things are geting better, others worse...
...The world as it is versus the world as it ought to be—this, when the issue hasn't simply been one of naked power between two men or factions, is what the conflict between right and left in politics has always been about...
...Edmund Burke once described the mob as the linkage of "obnoxious wealth to restless and desperate poverty," but in the America of the last half of the '60s much more than these elements was linked...
...That Kristol could write so in a preponderantly liberal climate was a tribute to the sharpness of his prose...
...A Kristol essay, commanding in tone, supremely confident about subjects that are elsewhere held to be still in the flux of controversy, assuming always that anyone who thinks differently is perverse or inept, is scarcely designed to incite reasoned discussion...
...As an editor of Commentary (under Elliott Cohen), a founding editor of Encounter, and an editor of the Reporter, Kristol has over the years tended to be viewed as a liberal when in fact he has long been something of a closet Tory.* Roughly a decade ago, for example, Kristol was jabbing holes in the reports of widespread poverty in America by insisting that no matter how * The tactical duplicity implied by such a phrase is intended...
...Where once he was substantial, surely now he is no more than a wraith...
...Norman Podhoretz, quoting a Gallup Poll on his behalf, sees no "social meanness" in America...
...VI By reading this book one discovers what Spiro Agnew would sound like if he had gone to CCNY in the Thirties...
...Every day, and in every way, American society is becoming better and better...
...At the same time, the efforts of both the Cold Warriors and of the new conservatives were warmly encouraged by the administrations in power—as the CIA sponsored a number of the intellectual activities of the Cold Warriors, so are the new conservatives said to be widely read and appreciated within the Nixon administration...
...In this particular instance, whether the liberal-left's defeat of Richard Nixon's plan for a guaranteed income was a case of looking a gift horse in the mouth or instead a more prudent examination of the teeth of merchandise offered by an old horse trader of dubious reputation depends upon the credence one invests in Moynihan's portrait of Nixon as a tory radical...
...Everyone had heard ideas of this kind before, but it was rather a novelty to see them cast in such fine prose...
...He was the sheerest opportunist, it was said...
...Although the journal he has helped edit has in effect become the house organ for new conservative thought, Bell did not sign the New York Times ad endorsing Richard Nixon for president, nor has he written much in a directly polemical way that would prove him to have altogether dropped his liberal-left stance...
...in that of the new conservatism, the shared unanimity is on the dangers of undertaking precipitate social action (the "limits of social policy...
...The world is also heavy with irony...
...Sometimes Kristol is directly on target in his attack, when, as in his essay "Urban Civilization and Its Discontents," he writes: The moral code for all civilizations must, at one time or another, be prepared to face the ultimate subversive question: "Why not...
...But if any American intellectuals of earnest conservative propensities were out there, they either were not listening or felt it a mistake to heed Viereck's call...
...Iv My brother Evgeni Yakovlevich used to say that the decisive part in the subjugation of the intelligentsia was played not by terror and bribery (though, God knows, there was enough of both), but by the word "Revolu tion," which none of them could bear to give up...
...LORD MACAULAY Macaulay called conservative "the new cant word" in an eassy on Mirabeau in 1832, and no doubt many people who have had the 152 word applied to them since have felt much the same about it...
...In some intellectual quarters there was a certain embarrassment about this...
...It took a Tom Hayden, an Eldridge Cleaver, an Abby Hoffman, it took Weathermen and Panthers and an evening at the apartment of the Leonard Bernsteins to reveal the unmistakable premonition that, should these various people have their way, society as we know it, in all its imperfections but also in all its glories, would be replaced by a desert inhabited by the nihilistic and the bored rich...
...What is characteristic is the disparagement...
...In each case the explanation was scarcely subtle: intellectuals were doing the bidding of their government...
...Taken together, these men could doubtless find as much to disagree as to agree about...
...Then there were those older radical intellectuals who should have known better but, when it came to the crunch, didn't: Dwight Macdonald, like some sad Sabbatian, thinking that the revolutionary messiah had come to Columbia University (of all places...
...W. F. HEGEL, Reason in History To what extent is the Coueism found in Kristol, which takes the form of denying any strenuous flaws in American life, built into the new conservatism...
...Tory men and liberal policies," Moynihan quotes Nixon remarking, "are what have changed the world...
...Whereas the radical politics of the '30s could in some rough sense be said to have ended in the New Deal—a qualified but still real victory for the American liberalleft—those of the '60s ended in two presidential terms for Richard Nixon...
...Because one of conservatism's best-known guises has been as a rationalization for whatever happens to be the existing distribution of power, it has never been in very good odor with American intellectuals...
...Many of these men, turning away from the liberal-left, were to be in the forefront of a new conservatism that was to loom large in the politics of the 1970s...
...The New Left had no program to speak of, nor did it appear much interested in putting together a coherent critique of American life...
...Both groups were essentially victorious...
...Our civilization is now facing that very question in the form of the drug problem, and, apparently, it can only respond with tedious, and in the end ineffectual, medical reports.' But just as often he misses the target...
...Rustin would go—indeed has gone— further...
...Yet reading Irving Kristol, or Commentary, or Irving Kristol in Commentary, the reigning impression one gets is that what is mainly wrong with America today is a number of bad ideas, a handful of intellectuals acting in bad faith, and some confusions about the glories of our national life—all coming from or inspired by the liberalleft intelligentsia—and that once these are eliminated the country can get on with JOSEPH EPSTEIN the business of gradual reform (and, as it often seems, the more gradual the better...
...This context has of course been the first and second administration of Richard Nixon, which in many respects makes the position of the new conservatives anomalous...
Vol. 20 • April 1973 • No. 2
