Two, Three, Many Neoconservatives

...These were notable and heartfelt...

...But this, too, is not quite right...

...Both statements suggest that in the interstices of the magazine's social science articles were deeply held opinions on the nature of the world and how America both shapes and is shaped by that world...

...Irving Kristol certainly does not...

...It is doubtful most of the editors and contributors to The Public Interest share this particular judgment...

...Founded by Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell in 1965, The Public Interest is credited as the founding journal of neoconservatism—a label first applied to the politics of Kristol and others in the early seventies—and the home to Matthew Continetti is associate editor of The Weekly Standard...

...Oddly enough, however, the Academy Award-winning actress never made it to room 104 of the Computer Science building, where Madison Program director Robert George ably guided conference participants through panels on, among other things, "Social Policy and Urban Policy," "Neocon-servatism and the American Commonwealth," and "Manners, Morals, and Modern America...

...This transition in neoconserva-tism, Kersch implied, had been to the detriment of both The Public Interest and the public interest...

...a particular type of social science, one that applied rigorous empirical analysis to social programs with an eye toward improving them and ameliorating the sometimes negative consequences of government interventions...

...And Roger Scruton made sure to mention the influence and inspiration of Gertrude Himmelfarb, Irving's wife...

...Looking over his back issues in 2005, Nathan Glazer would write, "I . . . am happy to see a few articles in defense of the more developed welfare states of Europe, which to my mind have created a better society than we have in the United States...

...He continues: "Against this, there was a party on the right with a radical individualist ethos that opposed the very idea of a welfare state...

...Two issues after that, there is another article on the draft...

...And while they rejected "ideology," it is also clear the magazine's editors were interested in American constitutionalism and in the intellectual foundations of the American regime from the beginning...

...by Matthew Continetti Princeton No less an eminence than Meryl Streep was on campus here November 30 and December 1, when the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions hosted a conference on "The Public Interest and the Making of American Public Policy: 1965-2005...

...One could also argue that the many articles published on immigration policy, energy policy, trade policy, global demographics, and intelligence bureaucracies were all additional examples of "foreign policy" sticking its foot in The Public Interest's door...

...The 1972 election, in which Kris-tol voted for Richard Nixon and Bell voted for George McGovern, was a foreign policy election...

...We did not want any of the space in our modest-sized quarterly to be swallowed up by Vietnam...

...At Princeton, the intellectual disputes involved differing interpretations of what The Public Interest had been "all about," and of the curious life of the political persuasion with which it remains associated, neoconservatism...

...As early as 1966, Irving Kristol contributed an article predicting that, in the future, it would be culture and not economics that would dominate politics...

...comparing the economic systems of the United Kingdom, Japan, and Sweden...

...The editors published many articles on comparative politics...

...The Public Interest's "work in economic and social policy" would be closely tied to "our national destiny as a world power...

...And The Public Interest closed its doors a little more than three years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the inauguration of a new era in American politics...

...In the first issue (Fall 1965), for example, Martin Diamond, a student of Leo Strauss, contributes an article analyzing the then-dominant liberal and conservative approaches to the Constitution...

...One of Kersch's interlocutors pointed out that the "broadening" or "popularization" of neoconserva-tism might also be considered a deepening of its approach to politics, as it encountered political realities and interacted with new forces in American life...

...John J. DiIulio Jr...

...It was nonideo-logical, nonpartisan, skeptical, elitist, empirical, and focused exclusively on domestic affairs...

...There were, as always, exceptions...

...In Kristol's view, there was such an option...

...He finds both lacking...

...Kersch's Neoconser-vatism Two is ideological, a creature of the Republican party, populist, skeptical of empiricism, dismissive of domestic policy, and primarily associated with certain currents in foreign policy that emphasize the uses of American power in the pursuit of American ideals...

...Both statements serve as a reminder that the editors—and the contributors they published—while tending to share similar approaches to the world, held divergent views on a variety of subjects...

...The simplest solution was to ban foreign affairs and foreign policy from our pages...

...L. Gordon Crovitz would write on Congress's imperial mismanagement of foreign affairs...

...There was another way in which the link between the domestic and foreign visions of neoconservatism was manifest in The Public Interest...

...One finds Nathan Glazer making a similar point in that same issue, in his essay "Neoconservative from the Start": "We began to realize that our successes in shaping a better and more harmonious society, if there were to be any, were more dependent on a fund of traditional orientations, 'values,' or, if you will, 'virtues,' than any social science or 'social engineering' approach...

...As early as the magazine's fifth issue, the editors published two articles under the heading "Reforming the Draft...

...And—much later—Fred Bau-mann would articulate his views on America's post-Saddam foreign policy debate...

...Indeed, it is possible to identify moments when foreign affairs enters The Public Interest's pages...

...And both provoke reflection on the fact that domestic and global politics are more interdependent—as they say—than we might otherwise imagine...

...As one participant said, any magazine is simply a collection of articles and yet more than the sum of its parts...

...Only one lecturer, William B. Allen of Michigan State University, a visiting fellow in the Madison Program who delivered an eye-opening and bracing talk on affirmative action, departed from a direct engagement with the Public Interest articles on his given topic...

...One could easily imagine presentations on the Public Interest writings of Peter Drucker, Daniel Patrick Moyni-han, Robert M. Solow, Christopher Jencks, Leon Kass, James Q. Wilson, Charles Murray, Jude Wanniski, and others—not to mention Kristol, Bell, and Nathan Glazer, a founding contributor who replaced Bell as coeditor in 1973...

...And this includes foreign policy...

...as a political figure Ronald Reagan was known only for the speech he had delivered during the 1964 presidential campaign...

...In fact, in remarks sent to the conference (reprinted below), Kristol links—in a narrative he says is "perhaps teleological"—The Public Interest's vision of the welfare state to a vision of America as a global power...

...To caricature Kersch's caricature, one might say his analysis is that, as time went on, the neoconservatives and The Public Interest became less concerned with "facts" and more concerned with "values...

...William Bennett told stories of the ways in which Irving Kristol influenced his career...

...The conference organizers adopted a thematic approach...

...Could there not be another option—a welfare state that could be reconciled with a world role for the United States...

...Morris Janowitz would publish "Toward an All-Volunteer Military...

...discussed crime policy, Lawrence Mead analyzed welfare reform, Harvey Mansfield lectured on the academy, and Irwin Stelzer delivered a presentation on the American corporation...

...The truth is that there probably has been more consistency in neoconservatism—skeptical, empirical, meliorist, and moralist (understood as an abiding interest in, and concern for, the moral underpinnings of society)—than not...

...When he and Daniel Bell founded the magazine, Kristol writes, "there was clearly a growing American opinion that believed a European type welfare state was the correct and inevitable model for the United States...

...If there was a drawback to this thematic approach, it was that it deemphasized the individuality and importance of some of the magazine's more influential and prolific contributors...

...Later, Zbigniew Brzezin-ski would publish an article on "Purpose and Planning in Foreign Policy...

...And when an author reflected on the nature of American democracy, or compared America's welfare systems with those of other rich democracies, value judgments were never far off...

...Nathan Tarcov would examine the foreign policy of America's founding...

...Technically, in the interests of editorial peace, The Public Interest focused exclusively on questions of domestic policy...

...Nor did Streep (busy lecturing on her career) choose to attend either of the conference's two dinners, where some of the nation's most distinguished intellectuals—(neo)conservative and (neo)liberal, Republican and Democrat—engaged in informal conversation and exchanged reminiscences of what had been, until it closed its doors in the spring of 2005, the premier political quarterly in America...

...If Streep had stopped by, she would have experienced a conference that was less an assessment of The Public Interest's legacy than an analysis of its contents and an investigation of its origins...

...American society would become an arena in which a clash between "old certainties" and the "new sophistication" took place...

...At another level of abstraction, The Public Interest was home to a vibrant debate on American exceptionalism...

...Later, in "Forty Good Years," his essay in the magazine's final issue, Kristol wrote that soon after founding their journal the editors of The Public Interest "discovered that behind the hard realities of economics and social science were the equally hard realities of morality, family, culture, and religion—the 'habits of the mind' and 'habits of the heart,' as Tocqueville said, that determine the quality and character of a people...

...Eliot A. Cohen, Samuel Huntington, and others would contribute pieces to a special issue (one of two) on "America's Defense Dilemmas...

...reporting on the global nature of the student revolt in the 1960s...

...The journal began during the Vietnam war...

...Vietnam was arousing a storm of controversy at the time" the magazine began, Kristol wrote in 2005, "and we knew that our group had a wide spectrum of opinion on the issue...

...And yet, rereading The Public Interest, one is struck that foreign affairs are never far off its radar screen...

...Daniel Bell published his "End of American Excep-tionalism" in 1975, in a special issue devoted to the "American Commonwealth," and followed it up with further thoughts on the topic in the spring of 1989...

...One of the more provocative analyses came from Ken Kersch, a professor at Princeton and occasional contributor to The Public Interest in its later years, who distinguished between what he called "Neoconservatism One" and "Neoconservatism Two...

...There were articles examining differing approaches to social welfare programs among the Western democracies...

...Certainly the magazine existed in a world where questions of foreign policy were dominant...

...When such names entered the conversation, they did so usually at odd angles...

...In Kersch's view, Neoconservatism One was the animating spirit behind The Public Interest...

...To analyze and account for the contents of a 40-year-old enterprise—a timespan that, as political scientist James Ceaser pointed out, is roughly one-fifth the duration of the American republic—is no easy task...

...When The Public Interest was founded, the religious right did not exist...

...John DiIulio paid tribute to his mentor James Q. Wilson...

...and the biotechnology revolution, which would become a major preoccupation of the journal, had not yet occurred...

...It was a view echoed nonpolemically the next day by Nathan Glazer...

...Two issues later, in an essay entitled "Crisis of Confidence," Daniel Patrick Moyni-han drew a direct relationship between failures in the war in Vietnam and failures in the War on Poverty...

...Yet Glazer's comment ought to be considered in light of Kristol's remarks on his Public Interest...