The Neoconservative Instinct

The Neoconservative Persuasion: Selected Essays, 1942-2009
By Irving Kristol. Basic Books, 2011. Hardcover: $29.95, 416 pp.
Irving Kristol may have passed away in 2009, but his spirit lives on in the latest collection of his writings, The Neoconservative Persuasion: Selected Essays, 1942-2009. As a founder of such magazines as The Public Interest, The National Interest, and Encounter, as well as a frequent contributor to publications like the Partisan Review, Commentary, and The Wall Street Journal, Kristol’s legendary life of letters is amply documented in the anthology’s many biographical and autobiographical sketches. However, between the book’s opening eulogy by his son, writer William Kristol, and the concluding “Memoirs” section, lies perhaps his most indelible legacy: a long and multi-sourced anthology of neoconservatism, a political philosophy of both historical and presentday import, made famous for its adoption by George W. Bush’s administration.
These essays, carefully assembled by his widow, historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, trace Kristol’s odyssey from a radical leftist to a student of Lionel Trilling and Leo Strauss, culminating in the birth of Kristol’s neoconservative ideology. Along the way, the book covers his views on everything from W.H. Auden to Judaism, but its salient subject is clearly politics. Drawing on what he calls “the wisdom of the past,” Kristol constructs an outlook conservative in its staunch opposition to liberalism but divergent from what he calls “traditional” free-market, isolationist conservatism. The essays call for the return of virtue as the end of politics, a vision which, though seemingly having gone awry in the last decade of American foreign policy, nonetheless remains immensely compelling.
A Liberal Education
Kristol graduated from the City College of New York in 1940 during a golden era for many academically minded New York City leftists, comprising a group later dubbed the New York Intellectuals. Many of these Intellectuals, including a young Kristol, immersed themselves in the writings of Leon Trotsky and professed a steadfast opposition to both Stalinism and what they viewed as American imperialism. Interestingly, the author attempts to downplay his association with the radical left in The Neoconservative Persuasion as “brief” and nothing more than “an accident.” Regardless, as the Soviet Union steadily crumbled—and with it the ideal of communism—the New York Intellectuals began to fragment, some joining the burgeoning counterculture movement, and others gravitating towards a more tempered, conservative posture, based on support for America in the rapidly escalating Cold War.
It was during this period of intellectual transition that Kristol discovered the writings of literary critic Lionel Trilling. Whereas Marxism focused on the material benefit of society, Trilling, as Kristol quotes in his essay “The Moral Critic,” believed that “[politics] is to be judged by what it does for the moral perfection rather than the physical easement of man.” This view hit Kristol with what he later described as “the force of a revelation.” He eventually came to the conclusion that “the materialistic view of life was wrong, it was simply false,” according to Ruth Wisse, a professor of literature at Harvard and interlocutor with Kristol. Trilling reframed Kristol’s concerns to promoting the moral good and combating the specter of evil. On this subsequent view, however, Wisse contends that “Kristol and his thinking went far beyond Trilling.”
Foundations of a Theory
If it was Trilling who transformed Kristol into a moral critic, it was philosopher Leo Strauss who made him the “godfather” of neoconservatism. According to Kristol, Strauss “trained his students to look at modernity through the eyes of the ‘ancients’ and the premoderns, accepting the premise that they were and are more insightful than we are” and believed that society needs an underlying moral code, not just pure reason alone, if it seeks stability and progress. For Kristol, this idea “turned one’s intellectual universe upside down.”
What follows in Kristol’s essay “Republican Virtue versus Servile Institutions” proves a powerful case for reviving what he calls “republican virtue,” a culturally Western, distinctively American ideal. Kristol believes this virtue, with its origins in the Roman Republic, is best personified in whom the Founding Fathers labeled “the noblest Roman of them all”: George Washington. The Washingtonian model, according to Kristol, is that of a citizen exuding “probity, truthfulness, self-reliance, diligence, prudence, and a disinterested concern for the welfare of the republic.” The Neoconservative Persuasion asserts that it is also this phalanx of attributes, ultimately comprising republican virtue, which good government should foster among its citizenry.
Kristol’s Great Society
While the nomenclature may seem vague at first, Kristol’s project quickly becomes coherent against the backdrop of policy and ideological debates addressed in these essays. To start, Kristol’s label of neoconservatism proves a curious appellation. A critic might be tempted to point out that there is little new about Plato or Caesar. But compared to the free-market fundamentalism of right-wing publications like the contemporary National Review, Kristol’s moral critique of unfettered capitalism in essays like “No Cheers for the Profit Motive” seems especially novel. Indeed, in “The Two Welfare States,” Kristol even defends Roosevelt’s New Deal as conforming to the virtue of “manly” social policy. Although the argument is part of a larger attack on what he views as the “womanly” programs of continental Europe, an unacceptably “feminine-materialistic conception of the welfare state,” the essays show Kristol at his most intellectually versatile.
Culturally, Kristol mounts a blistering assault on the rising “counterculture” of the 1960s, and defends the cultivation of a “high-brow” education consisting of Strauss’ ancients and premoderns. He laments that “the gradual dissolution and abandonment of the study of the classics as the core of the school curriculum” will undermine our unifying values.
To be sure, this account is not without its shortcomings. Kristol’s critique of Johnson’s “maternal” Great Society program rests upon a comparison to the successfully “paternal” New Deal. But the former program sought to quell the birth pangs of a newly desegregated nation, while FDR sought to stimulate full employment; analogizing between the two misleads more than it illustrates. As for the Classics, while Aristotle and Aeschylus remain enlightening reads, one ought to be skeptical that American schools can regain their global competitiveness by returning to the masterworks of ancient Greece and not through the promotion of math and science skills. And though George Washington may be the archetype of American virtue, we cannot wistfully ignore the fact that he was a slave-owner. In some ways, Kristol’s views seem as politically dated as the ancients themselves.
Retrospect
The title of this anthology comes from Kristol’s review of historian and friend Marvin Meyers’ book The Jacksonian Persuasion. Meyers defines a political “persuasion” as “a half-formulated moral perspective involving emotional commitment,” one whose meaning, according to Kristol, “we clearly glimpse only in retrospect.”
Yet this last decade, with the attendant rise of the “neocons” in the Bush Administration, paints a troubling picture of neoconservatism. While Bush’s domestic policy initiatives seems generally in line with Kristol’s vision (a “manly” social safety net is, for the most part, here to stay), neoconservative foreign policy appears to have all but disowned its godfather. In fact, one could describe much of the right-wing American interventionism in the post-Cold War world as “at odds” with Kristol’s philosophy, as Peter Beinart does in his book The Icarus Syndrome. While Kristol believed in democracy, he proved ultimately skeptical of taking virtuous democracy global.
Justin Vaisse, author of Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement, reduces Kristol’s take on foreign policy to “plain realpolitik,” looking out for America’s interests globally, rather than being a military evangelist for its virtues. Moreover, Kristol believed that any assertion of “an ‘American Mission’ actively to promote democracy all over the world” proved utterly “full of presumption” and ignorant of foreign cultures entirely alien to any tradition of republican virtue. Not surprisingly, Kristol vocally opposed ousting Saddam Hussein in the wake of the dictator’s disastrous defeat in the Gulf War, which may explain Kristol’s conspicuous silence on the eve of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, or the book’s absence of any essays pertaining to the topic. “This doesn’t mean Kristol…wasn’t a neoconservative,” Vaisse points out. “Rather,” she argues, “it shows how much Kristol’s neoconservatism…differed from its descendants today.”
Ruth Wisse nonetheless feels just the opposite: George W. Bush was a bona fide neoconservative mostly because of his foreign policy. “Bush really took evil seriously,” she says, “that you can use the word, that you must use the word, that in fact morality has as much to do with the recognition of evil as the performance of good. And I think that’s one of the crucial things that separate liberals in generals from neoconservatives. It has to do with your attitude towards evil.”
Wisse’s argument may shed some light on the “emotional commitment” Kristol has to neoconservatism; it is an instinct, not strictly a rational belief, that there is evil in the world, and that in promoting the good we must battle darkness. Many commentators hailed the 2008 presidential election as a realignment of American politics away from the Bush era and, consequently, a distancing from the neoconservative worldview. Yet others, Kristol included, would argue that evil still exists just as much in today’s world as it did on 9/11 or during the Cold War. The Neoconservative Persuasion’s arguments may yet win out. Though the Bush Administration, its guiding philosophy, and its intellectual godfather have weathered serious criticisms in the wake of the War on Terror, it would be difficult to assert that evil does not exist in the world today. Kristol may be gone, but neoconservatism and his seminal works still remain persuasive.
Eli Kozminsky ‘14 is a Contributing Writer