Was Irving Kristol a CIA Plot?by Richard Spencer Recently by Richard Spencer: The Narcissism Revolution
Sure, we should all give “two (very qualified) cheers” for Irving Kristol (1920–2009), the tireless writer, political éminence grise, and longtime editor at Commentary, Encounter, The Public Interest, and The National Interest, who left this world last Friday. Kristol was,
on many levels, emblematic of a whole generation of American Jewish
intellectuals. His journey, recounted in histories “Cold War Liberalism” pretty much sums up Kristol's political philosophy throughout his entire adult life; the “neoconservative” moniker never indicated an actual conversion or apostasy so much as it served as a reminder that Kristol, and many others from Alcove 1, had begun voting Republican by the early ’80s. The dissident Left had become the pragmatic center and eventually lionized and demonized as the ultra right-wing – a development that reveals far more about the political trajectory of the American nation than it does about Irving Kristol's personal travails. In his history This aside, Kristol was one of the only neocons around who always called himself a neocon. And for this, he should be praised (the younger generation usually dismisses the term as either an insult or as anti-Semitic code). Kristol also did dissident conservatives a great service by explicitly defining neoconservatism as a leftish dogma foisted upon the Right when it was least expecting it; in turn, the neocon ascendancy in the GOP and conservative movement was, in Kristol's treatment, something on the lines of a high-jacking: [T]he historical task and political purpose of neoconservatism would seem to be this: to convert the Republican party, and American conservatism in general, against their respective wills, into a new kind of conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy. Is neoconservativism conservative or right-wing? Probably not. Is it American, Yes (and here I think Kristol speaks the truth).
Kristol's discussion of neocon governance is also quite revealing, especially when it comes to what we've seen of the GOP and movement in and out of power:
Instead of defining specific functions for government, Kristol instead theorizes much like Goldilocks – the state should be “strong” but not “intrusive,” juuust riiight. It's no coincidence that contemporary neocons, and their conservative underlings, have been rendered intellectually incapacitated when it comes to opposing the growth of the state. This is a long-running trend, exemplified by Bill Kristol's call in late September of '08 for economic genius John McCain to return to Washington and “save the economy” with more bailouts, and, as Grant Havers points out, Irving Kristol's critique of the “New Class” of sociologists and managers within the Great Society that left the New Deal expansion of government untouched. (Kristol fils, it's worth noting, backed FDR and LBJ all the way, as he divulged to E.J. Dionne in Commonweal a decade ago.) And Irving Kristol wasn't just the godfather of George W. Bush's “compassion” but of a long-term neocon power strategy. While many conservatives and movement types might have, at one point, genuinely wanted to cut government programs and departments, the neocons only wanted to place other neocons in positions of power. This elect, which understood the “unintended consequences” and valued patriotic (“hard”) military spending over liberal (“soft”) welfare, was well suited to high posts in the Pentagon and the Reagan and Bush administrations. September 26, 2009 Richard Spencer is editor of Taki's Magazine. Copyright © 2009 Taki's Magazine
|
and his own “
”
writings, began in the legendary “Alcove 1” at the City College
of New York, whose Trotskyist inhabitants engaged in rancorous dialectics
with the Stalinists of Alcove 2. This City College dynamic informed
Kristol's first decisive public stand after the war, as Kristol,
and the rest of Alcove 1, denounced the “socialist perversion” of
Stalin's USSR and firmly backed NATO as well as a vigorous, interventionist
variation on “containment.” And when it came to the prevailing Zeitgeist,
post-Trotskyism, or whatever it was exactly that Kristol advocated,
was somehow it: Alcove 1's stalwarts, Daniel Bell, Nathan
Glazer, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Kristol among them, went on to
fame and fortune; Alcove 2, which included 
of “the rise of the neocons,” Jacob Heilbrunn recounts a moment
(a happy one, from my perspective) in 1990 when the ultra-neocon
“Committee for the Free World,” whose leadership included Kristol
and his wife, Gertrude Himmelfarb, met and seriously considered
that their movement might have just been rendered defunct by the
collapse of the Evil Empire. The conference's mood was reflected
by its title, “Does the ‘West' Still Exist?” (the “West,” of course,
being defined by the Pentagon's latest strategy memo and the tastes
and mores of Manhattan's Upper East Side). The ultimate outcome
was much more ironic: the conservative movement and neoconservatism
absorbed one another to the point that the two are today practically
indistinguishable. The neocons' “death” marked their greatest triumph,
as Norman Podhoretz would observe at the close of the decade.