Scott McLemee: The King of Pompeii (on the history of Neoconservatism)
[Scott McLemee is an essayist and critic. In 2005, he helped start the online news journal Inside Higher Ed, where he serves as Essayist at Large, writing a weekly column called Intellectual Affairs.]
The term “neoconservative” is now routinely applied to any right-wing policy wonk inside the Beltway or the mass media. This usage reflects no understanding of the movement's history – or, just as often enough, a largely delusional notion of it, based on third-hand guesses about the influence of Leo Strauss and Leon Trotsky. Such rumors tend to be circulated by people who would be hard pressed to name a single book by either of them, let alone to grasp that their ideas were utterly incompatible.
Properly used, the label applies to a rather small cohort of social scientists and journalists who, during the 1950s and ‘60s, became anxious about Communist influence abroad – but equally uneasy at movements for black power, women’s liberation, and (a bit later) gay rights within the United States. “We regarded ourselves originally as dissident liberals,” wrote Irving Kristol, who died last week at the age of 89.
Kristol is often, and rightly, called the godfather of neoconservatism (in something akin to the Marlon Brando sense). An editor at the CIA funded journal Encounter during the 1950s, he was later one of the founders of the journal The Public Interest, and a columnist for The Wall Street Journal.
“We were skeptical of many of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society initiatives," he wrote in Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (Free Press, 1995), "and increasingly disbelieving of the liberal metaphysics, the view of human nature and of social and economic realities, on which those programs were based. Then, after 1965, our dissidence accelerated into a barely disguised hostility. As the ‘counterculture’ engulfed our universities and began to refashion our popular culture, we discovered that traditional ‘bourgeois’ values were what we believed all along, had indeed simply taken for granted.”
Translating this self-perception of themselves as the very guardians of civilization into a politically efficacious movement was not a swift or simple matter. Nor was the Republican Party its obvious or immediate destination. With Kristol as its helmsman, the movement built up a network of magazines, think tanks, and mass-media perches for punditry. These amounted to a counter-counterculture. Thirty years ago, Peter Steinfels’s intelligent and well-researched book The Neoconservatives: The Men Who Are Changing America’s Politics provided a group portrait of the movement on the eve of Ronald Reagan’s election – an ideological cohort with one foot planted in each party.
This wide stance cannot have been comfortable. And in any case, the political realignment of 1980 settled the matter. Reagan was, Kristol wrote in 1995, “the first Republican president since Theodore Roosevelt whose politics were optimistically future-oriented rather than bitterly nostalgic or passively adaptive. The Congressional elections of 1994 ratified this change, just as the person of Newt Gingrich exemplified it. As a consequence, neoconservatism today is an integral part of the new language of conservative politics.”
Indeed it is, for better or worse. But not from the sheer intellectual firepower alone. As that flourish of tribute to “the person of Newt Gingrich” may suggest, the progress of neoconservatism has also involved cultivating the courtier’s grace. There is a knack for knowing just when to apply one’s lips to the fundament of power.
Read entire article at Inside Higher Ed
The term “neoconservative” is now routinely applied to any right-wing policy wonk inside the Beltway or the mass media. This usage reflects no understanding of the movement's history – or, just as often enough, a largely delusional notion of it, based on third-hand guesses about the influence of Leo Strauss and Leon Trotsky. Such rumors tend to be circulated by people who would be hard pressed to name a single book by either of them, let alone to grasp that their ideas were utterly incompatible.
Properly used, the label applies to a rather small cohort of social scientists and journalists who, during the 1950s and ‘60s, became anxious about Communist influence abroad – but equally uneasy at movements for black power, women’s liberation, and (a bit later) gay rights within the United States. “We regarded ourselves originally as dissident liberals,” wrote Irving Kristol, who died last week at the age of 89.
Kristol is often, and rightly, called the godfather of neoconservatism (in something akin to the Marlon Brando sense). An editor at the CIA funded journal Encounter during the 1950s, he was later one of the founders of the journal The Public Interest, and a columnist for The Wall Street Journal.
“We were skeptical of many of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society initiatives," he wrote in Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (Free Press, 1995), "and increasingly disbelieving of the liberal metaphysics, the view of human nature and of social and economic realities, on which those programs were based. Then, after 1965, our dissidence accelerated into a barely disguised hostility. As the ‘counterculture’ engulfed our universities and began to refashion our popular culture, we discovered that traditional ‘bourgeois’ values were what we believed all along, had indeed simply taken for granted.”
Translating this self-perception of themselves as the very guardians of civilization into a politically efficacious movement was not a swift or simple matter. Nor was the Republican Party its obvious or immediate destination. With Kristol as its helmsman, the movement built up a network of magazines, think tanks, and mass-media perches for punditry. These amounted to a counter-counterculture. Thirty years ago, Peter Steinfels’s intelligent and well-researched book The Neoconservatives: The Men Who Are Changing America’s Politics provided a group portrait of the movement on the eve of Ronald Reagan’s election – an ideological cohort with one foot planted in each party.
This wide stance cannot have been comfortable. And in any case, the political realignment of 1980 settled the matter. Reagan was, Kristol wrote in 1995, “the first Republican president since Theodore Roosevelt whose politics were optimistically future-oriented rather than bitterly nostalgic or passively adaptive. The Congressional elections of 1994 ratified this change, just as the person of Newt Gingrich exemplified it. As a consequence, neoconservatism today is an integral part of the new language of conservative politics.”
Indeed it is, for better or worse. But not from the sheer intellectual firepower alone. As that flourish of tribute to “the person of Newt Gingrich” may suggest, the progress of neoconservatism has also involved cultivating the courtier’s grace. There is a knack for knowing just when to apply one’s lips to the fundament of power.