Barry Gewen
New York Times
September 18, 2009
Irving Kristol, the political commentator who, as much as anyone, defined modern conservatism and helped revitalize the Republican Party in the late 1960s and early ’70s, setting the stage for the Reagan presidency and years of conservative dominance, died Friday in Arlington, Va. He was 89 and lived in Washington.
He was commonly known as the godfather of neoconservatism, even by those who were not entirely sure what the term meant. In probably his most widely quoted comment — his equivalent of Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame — Mr. Kristol defined a neoconservative as a liberal who had been “mugged by reality.”
It was a description that summarized his experience in the 1960s, along with that of friends and associates like Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. New Deal Democrats all, they were social scientists who found themselves questioning many of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society ideas. Mr. Kristol translated his concerns into a magazine. In 1965, with a $10,000 contribution from a wealthy acquaintance, he and Daniel Bell started The Public Interest. Its founding is generally considered the beginning of neoconservatism. “Something like a ‘movement’ took shape,” Mr. Kristol wrote, “with The Public Interest at (or near) the center.”
The Public Interest writers did not take issue with the ends of the Great Society so much as with the means, the “unintended consequences” of the Democrats’ good intentions. Welfare programs, they argued, were breeding a culture of dependency; affirmative action created social divisions and did damage to its supposed beneficiaries. They placed practicality ahead of ideals. “The legitimate question to ask about any program,” Mr. Kristol said, “is, ‘Will it work?’,” and the reforms of the 1960s and ’70s, he believed, were not working. Read More...
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