Irving Kristol's Neo-Conservatism

...The oddity has little to do with its allegiances, more to do with its tone, its view of what is worth writing and thinking about, and its author's conception of the human condition...

...But that makes it even odder that he should take such a high line elsewhere...

...they would have shot prisoners of war if military discipline had not stopped them...

...Almost equally bad, it has been financed by people for whom he has a barely disguised contempt: commercial and financial types who would not recognize an issue of high principle if it reared up and bit them...

...Part of the problem, though the smaller part, is that Kristol is a dreadful writer...

...Kristol runs the standard Wall Street Journal line about the slight impact of the Reagan revolution: a Democratic congress imposed deeper cuts than Reagan wanted, and ran amok with its spending programs...

...In Chicago, he encountered Leo Strauss and was bowled over...

...His fellow soldiers were ready to loot and rape...

...The conservatism that reckons that "there is a great deal of ruin in a country" and refuses to panic until it is absolutely necessary to do so is not Kristol's...

...Among many other peculiarities of the book is Kristol's observation that his friends are constantly surprised that he is such a cheerful conservative...

...His first serious employment was as an editor at Commentary, and from those early fifties years he reprints several essays on religion and Jewishness...

...Reinhold Niebuhr was for much of his life a socialist...

...This view doesn't inevitably lead to conservatism...

...That aside, complaint predominates...

...The world he sees around him is structured that way...

...Some insight into that puzzle, and some explanation of the muffled note that the whole book seems to strike is offered by Kristol's other profession of allegiance...

...What remains impossible to see is why intelligent people with a deep understanding of the cultural and political dilemmas of a society like our own should have thought that Ronald Reagan was a proper object of their devotion...

...In short, neoconservatism satisfies his desire for neo-orthodoxy...

...q 114 • DISSENT...

...It is, if the phrase is forgivable, Protestant Jewish...

...One wonders why...

...Crucially, American conservatism is populist conservatism...

...It would be an insult to his intelligence to suppose that he actually believes such stuff...

...I dare say he is...

...Kristol says of himself that he abandoned his youthful hopes for a career as a novelist after he wrote a tome in "a style that was a bastard mixture of Saul Bellow and Jean Giraudoux, whose novels I was then enchanted by," and saw soon enough that its destination was the incinerator rather than the best-seller list...

...He candidly admits that even as a Luce Professor of Urban Affairs at New York University, what he valued about the job was the time it gave him to make trouble for the Democrats...

...As he himself says, he knows next to no economics, and has spent his life editing other people's work...

...A man who surrounded himself with rip-off artists and ran two administrations as plagued by scandal as any in postwar America seems an odd icon for cultural conservatives who want to bring back discipline and self-control...

...The sort of religious temper he has is also distinctive...

...112 • DISSENT Books The explicit answer is that his chief interest lies in religion rather than politics...

...But these essays are anything but cheerful...

...God the lawgiver rather than God the source of theological puzzles dominates the scene...

...It is also stunningly boring...

...For some reason, Kristol himself supposes that his religious attachments lead to what he calls a "neo" outlook—so that he was neo-Marxist, neoTrotskyite, neoliberal, and neoconservative...

...Even after the full horror of the Holocaust was known, Kristol never changed his mind: Germans were not intrinsically more prone to evil than Americans, for human nature in every setting is essentially fallen...

...Is he, then, a good essayist...

...Not a bit of it...

...This is God as the object of prayer rather than God as the object of cognition...

...More plausible is the other insight into his attachments that he offers—that he wants an orthodoxy...

...All of which means that in order to do down the multicultural, countercultural, nihilist, highspending liberals, Kristol has had to hitch his wagon to a conservative revolution driven by the kind of populist impulses that must scare him half to death...

...If one adds that distrust of the masses to Kristol's belief in original sin and human political frailty, it becomes a lot easier to see that what Kristol has godfathered is something that must give him pause...

...That suggests a greater taste for intellectual inventiveness than he possesses (or approves of...

...a cheerful acceptance of anything around him is utterly absent...

...It is, as he says in an essay on the exceptionalism ofAmerican conservatism, a conservatism unlike English conservatism (the essay is not so much an essay on its avowed subject as a gloomy account of why Michael Oakeshott hasn't wowed Americans...

...Absent discipline, we all run after evil...

...One of Kristol's more sympathetic paragraphs is his brief reminiscence of service in the U.S...

...Mill didn't believe in God, but was as convinced as Kristol that mankind was deeply imperfect...

...they vary between the combative and the morose...

...But NeoConservatism displays a more interesting and deeper tension than that, because the discrepancy between the elitist and paternalist vision of the world that fuels Kristol's conservatism and the anti-elitist, populist sentiments that provide the votes and money that give it so much influence goes right to the heart of his views...

...In fact, Kristol supplies much of the answer quite explicitly and a certain amount more by inadvertence...

...Many critics of the neoconservative alliance with the Christian Coalition have pointed to the contrast between the social and cultural liberalism of many neoconservatives—few of whom would wish, for instance, to recriminalize homosexual behavior between consenting adults—and the rip-roaring illiberalism of the fundamentalists...

...Kristol is widely known as "the godfather of neoconservatism," and the vaguely mafioso overtones of the label aside, you'd expect him to be flattered, even ready for a little self-congratulation...

...Well, perhaps a very little bit of it, as when he acknowledges in his autobiographical introduction that the support of assorted foundations and think tanks, and the enthusiasm of the Wall Street Journal, together with the self-destructive habits of the Democratic party, now mean that conservatives are not so "neo" as they were, but established, entrenched, and on the march...

...since he has been supported in some comfort by the well-to-do whose virtues he praises, he has a good deal to be cheerful about...

...Such speculation as there is wobbles wildly between incompatible thoughts—when he wishes to extend an olive branch to the liberals, he suggests that the unanticipated consequences of perfectly sensible policies have caught us on the hop, and when he wishes to wage holy war against them, he waves a hand toward the wickedness of countercultural intellectuals...

...Once Kristol's religiosity is given its due, it becomes easier to see why he—and his more intellectually formidable wife for that matter— is so obsessed with "values...

...How these persons, who elsewhere are denounced for their isolation from the practicalities of American political life, have managed to remodel American society in their own image he nowhere explains...

...what he got from Strauss was Strauss's well-known doctrine that the multitude is unfit for philosophical enlightenment, and that intelligent and thoughtful philosophers will be exceedingly cautious in what they allow to get out about their true views...

...Bertrand Russell thought that all rational radicals must believe in original sin...

...We pray because we are aware of our frailty and our weakness— a good Hobbesian view of the matter— and we know that men behave abominably unless they are subjected to law...

...There is a striking absence of sociological curiosity about how it has come about that in a country that is, on Kristol's account of it, overwhelmingly conservative, traditionalist, religious, and patriotic in its inclinations things should have come to such a pass...

...it is the small change of political knockabout...

...the primitive and decayed orthodoxy of the Yeshiva he attended as a child won't do, but something more apt to our late-twentieth-century condition is needed...

...On the face of it, you'd expect this to be a cheerful book...

...Army in Germany...

...you can see that Oakeshott might have thought it something of a joke...

...Even he must know that the appeal of the Reagan revolution was to the usual mixture of patriotic sentiment and ordinary cupidity...

...He also gave up the idea of writing a book-length "examination of the evolution of American democracy, a kind of sequel to Tocqueville and Henry Adams," when he discovered he had neither the patience nor the intellectual rigor for the task...

...Most of the essays deplore the state of the world, full as it is of sexual license, multicultural education, oppositional intellectuals, revolting students, secular humanists, and welfare mothers...

...On the evidence of these pieces, no...

...They are lumbering, ungainly, complaining pieces, and it is their complaining quality that explains the atmosphere of gloom and depression that hangs about this hefty volume...

...GinSPRING • 1996 • 113 Books grich really is what American conservatism looks like...