Irving Kristol’s death yesterday, September 18, 2009, did not signal the death of the neoconservative movement—only the death of its godfather. The neoconservative movement died earlier this year, asphyxiated by its success and, ultimately, its defeat on election day, November 2008.
All the Kristol-lites in the media, think tanks and especially government were wiped out by the American people’s rejection of the policies of George W. Bush in November 2008. Had the neoconservative intellectuals at the Department of Defense, White House, American Enterprise Institute, Fox News, the Weekly Standard and National Review listened more closely to Irving they might have survived and been resurrected by the new conservative movement that is growing in the streets, corporate offices and farms of America. They did not, and Irving’s death provides an opportunity to tell the story of how neoconservatism came into being and then died from its own form of intellectual cancer.
Irving Kristol was present at the birth of the neoconservative movement and he deserves credit for his good humor and astute analysis mixed with gutsy New York opportunism. Irving had a sharp mind and sharp elbows. We admire his mind, critical thinking and writing ability and choose to forget those elbows and the sins of his acolytes—the Kristol-lites responsible for the destruction of the Republican Party.
Hopefully the history of neoconservatism will be written some day without emotion, but even when neoconservatism was new, its importance was traced by Esquire magazine in a late 1970s story about the “godfather,” Irving Kristol. Like Vanity Fair today, Esquire back then had an interest in politics not entirely skewed by what Irving would call the “ideology of the New Class.” This very informative and tongue in cheek Esquire story was accompanied by a chart of all the homes where Irving had placed his acolytes. I recall that at the time Irving was not amused at having his cover blown but those within his circle of influence were delighted to be identified with a clear and firm political movement with ambition, talent and money.
Money was a key ingredient to Irving Kristol’s success. He had a nose for money, its uses and its importance for promoting ideas. Encounter, which he edited for many years, was funded by the Central Intelligence Agency. In later years, Irving acolytes, Bill Bennett, Leslie Lenkowski, James Piereson and Michael Joyce held the purse strings at the National Endowment for the Humanities, Richardson, Olin and Bradley foundations. Seizing control of even one of those forts would be considered a major victory, and Irving was responsible for placing his men in every one of them.
Then there was the Public Interest and the National Interest working in tandem with Norman Podhoretz’ Commentary magazine that could be counted on to engender interest in new ideas and reinforce resistance to the Communist Party of the USSR that the New Left and Democratic Party began to resemble.
While all this was transpiring, Irving championed a number of ideas that found resonance with traditional conservatives. Among those new ideas were Supply-side Economics, Eric Voegelin’s interpretation of modernity as “gnostic” and Irving’s analysis of social currents on the Left as representative of a New Class. We conservatives liked that and were unaware—or ignored if we knew—that Irving also held the view that Americans like and want big government. Though a case can be made that holding all these ideas to be true was contradictory, Irving was a gifted intellectual juggler and none of the intellectual balls he juggled was ever dropped.
The idea that tax cuts could stimulate economic growth and engender taxable income from new sources of wealth was championed outside of Academe. Jonathan Chait’s recent attack on the Supply-siders charges that they are not “real” economists because their writings were not published in peer review journals of Economics is absurd. But, Bob Bartley, Arthur Laffer, Jack Kemp, Jude Wanniski, Richard Rahn, Craig Roberts and the early Supply-siders had productive careers in journalism, on Congressional staffs, elective politics, investment advisory service companies—and not in higher education. Irving could smell a good idea before it attracted anyone of influence and played an important role in supporting the Supply-side movement. That too appealed to us traditional conservatives and once more the bond between us and Irving’s brand of neoconservatism was cemented.
Even more charming was the fact that Irving had read Eric Voegelin’s New Science of Politics and Science, Politics and Gnosticism in which Voegelin analyzes the irrational aspects of modern intellectual and mass movements and their similarity to the ancient heresy of Gnosticism. Irving understood the gnostic aspects of the New Left, their desire to destroy society in order to build a new, second, reality. That too cemented the bond between the new and traditional conservatives. We shared the same enemies.
We traditional conservatives also shared Irving’s patriotism, his defense of the American interest against communist ideology, his enthusiasm for Supply-side economics and we admired his integrity, personal warmth and graceful writing style. But, we were not former Democrats, we had not voted for John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, or Hubert Humphrey and we didn’t like welfare state entitlements, big government, and the tentacles of the administrative state that encroached on our individual freedoms. Much is made of the fact that most of the neoconservatives were college-age Trotskyites. In that fact too we traditional conservatives could have driven a very large truck, had we been so inclined. But we were not about to rain on Irving’s parade. Irving was making our “conservatism” legitimate and given a hearing by corporate interests that traditional conservatives couldn’t reach. That was then—1972 to 1980.
Irving Kristol believed the New Deal saved capitalism and thought that Americans wanted a big government.
Traditional conservatives who supported the Supply-side movement in its infancy believe that emphasis on tax cuts is only one half of the equation. Indifference to deficits and the growth of the administrative state is a critical and strategic blunder that, to the neoconservatives, was necessary. Posted at the Weekly Standard website today is a link to Irving’s 2003 essay, “The Neoconservative Persuasion,” in which he argues, that neoconservatives “are impatient with the Hayekian notion that we are on ‘the road to serfdom.” Perhaps his death will initiate a full and frank debate about that with some traditional conservatives who know better and neoconservatives willing to risk public scrutiny of the theoretical underpinnings of their political “persuasion.”
Unfortunately, in ignoring the other side to the Supply-side equation—limited government—we conservatives never engaged the American people in a discussion about the merits of the philosophy of limited government of the Founding Fathers, too much emphasis was placed on tax cuts alone, we lost the initiative to reduce the size of the American government. Irving supported cuts in taxes, but not cuts in spending and we traditional conservatives, caught up in the enthusiasm for a new idea that was gaining traction with republicans and winning elections forgot that neoconservatives are, at heart, lovers of big government.
Then something bad happened. Irving had an eye for the main chance. Bill Baroody, then head of the American Enterprise Institute, was a gifted policy wonk with a keen eye for sizing up the interests of America’s largest corporations and delivering them policy papers that were clever, intellectually challenging and politically astute. A Coptic Christian of Lebanese descent, Baroody ran AEI with a firm hand from 1954 to 1978 when he installed his son, Bill, Jr. as his successor. The two Baroodys were known as “Sr.” and “Jr.” Sr. was a big tent Republican and invited prominent neoconservatives to AEI: Irving Kristol, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Michael Novak, and Ben Wattenberg. What Sr. didn’t know was that Irving had other ideas about the succession at AEI and he expressed them by openly challenging the appointment of Jr. Irving won and Jr. was replaced by a Kristol acolyte.
The emergence of the “corporate right” and Irving’s appeal to them was evident in the coup d’etat at AEI. Randy Richardson, Harry Bradley, John M. Olin and an assortment of Wall Street types came out in droves to listen to Irving, read his OpEd pieces in the Wall Street Journal, attend AEI séances and give jobs to acolytes that Irving recommended. Irving definitely had a gift with wealthy men, but you can’t control men with money or the half-educated politicians who like pilot fish attach themselves to men of wealth and influence.
In 1980 the neoconservative movement was populated by people who were traditional Democrats. Irving supported Hubert Humphrey over Richard Nixon in 1968 and only became a Republican when the McGovern wing of the Democrats seized the Democratic Party in 1972. The anti-war movement was the breaking point for Irving and his neoconservative friends and they shifted en masse to the Republican Party. By 1980 Irving was influential but with few roots to the men around Ronald Reagan. Reagan ran for President three times and Irving and his neoconservatives supported him only once. As a result, when political appointments were being made by Reagan’s White House personnel shop, Irving was on the sidelines. He didn’t like being on the sidelines and Irving put a great deal of effort in the next four years to advance “his” men.
The larger conservative movement began in the writings of the anti-New deal journalists, the philosophy of limited government of Sen. Bob Taft (R-OH), the writings of the intellectual historian Russell Kirk, the libertarianism of Barry Goldwater and Ayn Rand and limited government politicians like Ronald Reagan. Ultimately this traditional conservative movement parted ways with neoconservatism. With the influence of traditional conservatives in decline with the growing power and influence of former Nixon and Ford Administration appointees, neoconservative influence grew exponentially. Then corporate money entered to play a role. National Review was purchased by a New York banker. Rupert Murdoch founded Fox News and bankrolled the Weekly Standard. George W. Bush chose Dick Cheney, President Ford’s chief of staff, as his Vice President and former Ford Administration officials in exile at AEI moved into top jobs in the Bush Administration.
During that “second growth” of neoconservatism in the 1990s , curiously, Irving Kristol played a lesser role. Though we don’t know much about the inner discussions amongst neoconservatives, it’s clear that some—but not Irving—were attracted to Wilsonian idealism. During the Cold War, an arsenal of intellectual arguments was constructed to support opposition to the dangers presented by an ideologically driven Marxist state with nuclear weapons and by the failed policies of Containment and Détente. One of those arguments morphed into an ideology of democracy that came back to bite neoconservatives in the ass. The idea, simple enough, and quite appealing to some, was that democratic regimes are peaceful. Ergo by converting a regime into a democracy peaceful relations will occur. Democracy has many faces. American democracy of limited government, checks on government power, the rule of law and an independent judiciary bears no likeness to democracy of the French Revolution, absolutist assertions of human rights and an aggressive foreign policy that changed the face of 18th century Europe.
Somehow the French idea of democratic revolution took root in the mind of the 43rd president of the United States, George W. Bush, and an ideology of democracy was fashioned to justify the invasion of Iraq. The Iraq war split the conservative movement with traditional conservatives calling to our attention President George Washington’s farewell address and his admonition to avoid foreign entanglements. On the other side neoconservatives took the idea of a war to make the Middle East a democratic oasis and ran with it. Fox News Allstars Charles Krauthammer and Fred Barnes joined by Bill Kristol and Norman Podhoretz and an assortment of talking heads nurtured by neoconservatives became shills and megaphones for a war that was not in the American interest.
Irving Kristol’s legacy is an intellectual movement that became a gnostic ideology and nurtured a revival of Wilsonian idealism. When the history of neoconservatism is written this aspect of Irving Kristol’s life work must be examined closely.
