Irving Kristol?

Irving Kristol?

1920­–2009

Irving Kristol famously called himself a liberal who had been “mugged by reality.” Beginning in the 1960s, he helped transform that disaffection into the powerful political movement known as neoconservatism. Kristol’s advocacy of anti-communism, small government, and traditional values helped fuel the Reagan revolution of 1980 and was later credited with supplying the intellectual underpinnings of the George W. Bush administration.

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As a teenager in New York City during the Great Depression, said the Associated Press, Kristol “was at first similar to so many other children of Jewish immigrants.” He was “passionate about books, allied with the working class,” and outraged by capitalism’s collapse. At City College, he was briefly a Trotskyist. Then, serving in the infantry during World War II, he found himself “surprised by his sympathy for the military establishment.” Kristol soon became a fervent anti-communist and, in a celebrated 1952 Commentary essay, compared liberals who defended communists’ civil liberties to a businessman paying “a handsome salary to someone pledged to his liquidation.” With such sharp, polemical observations, Kristol established himself as a cultural critic. In 1965, he co-founded the quarterly journal The Public Interest, which became the launching pad of neoconservatism.

The term itself, coined by socialist Michael Harrington, was originally derogatory, said The Washington Post. But Kristol seized on it to describe a broad-based movement dedicated to countering “the foment of the Vietnam War and the rise of the counterculture.” Kristol spoused middle-class values and traditional morality, and was suspicious of paternalistic government intervention, which he said often backfired. Thus, he rejected many of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs as expensive, ineffective, and divisive. He touted supply-side economics, which held that “tax cuts would lead to widespread financial prosperity.” He also advocated a strong military.

Kristol’s philosophy found favor in an America shaken by Vietnam and the malaise of the 1970s, said the London Guardian, and he “exerted an extraordinary influence” through a growing “network of magazines, think tanks, and grant-giving bodies.” Many of his disciples—Elliott Abrams, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and William Bennett among them—were central figures in the Reagan administration. Later, a “second generation” of Kristol adherents, led by Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, dedicated itself to “the maintenance of American international hegemony,” helping to lay the groundwork for the invasion of Iraq.

“Sharp, aphoristic, and assertive,” Kristol was hardly doctrinaire, said The New York Times. Though staunchly pro-business, “he criticized America’s commercial class for upholding greed and selfishness as positive values.” He once berated Republicans as “the stupid party” for having “not much more on their minds than balanced budgets and opposition to the welfare state.” He felt that “religion provided a necessary constraint to anti-social, anarchical impulses.” Yet when asked if he believed in God, Kristol responded, “That gets too complicated. The word ‘God’ confuses everything.” Reviewing his shifting allegiances to various political doctrines, from neo-Marxist to neoliberal to neoconservative, he concluded, “I’m going to end up a neo. Just neo, that’s all. Neo-dash-nothing.”

Kristol’s survivors include his wife, cultural historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, and son William, editor of the neoconservative magazine The Weekly Standard.