Godfather of the American Right

THIS IS A COLLECTION OF ESSAYS BY IRVING KRISTOL, FORMER TROTSKYIST and son of a garment worker, who has been for several decades a leading ideological campaigner of the American right. In the 1950s he edited Encounter, a CIA-funded cultural journal with a virulent anti-Communist line. In the 1960s he and Daniel Bell founded The Public Interest, which began the intellectual assault on the American welfare state. In the 1970s, as the corporate right-turn reached flood stage, he came into his own as the leader and organizer of the attack on government spending, social regulation, environmental protection and progressive taxation. He wrote. He hyped right-wing authors. H channeled funds to allies. These battles were conducted from positions at The Wall Street Journal, the American Enterprise Institute and New York University. His eminence as the organizer and director of right-wing ideological combat during this period earned him the title of Godfather of the American right. As he put it: "I am a liaison to some degree between intellectuals and the business community."

This collection is incomplete and, as with most such collections, uneven. Essays cover the future of the Jews, the Republican Party, the Christian Right, the strengths and weaknesses of American capitalism and the sins of the educated middle classes, his "new class," and their supposed enthusiasm for an adversary culture critical of bourgeois society. Some of his zanier works have been excluded, including the famous pro- McCarthy attack on liberals entitled "'Civil Liberties': 1952, a Study in Confusion," a piece he has been trying to live down for decades. The exclusion of this article is unfortunate because it sheds light on his claim to have been converted to "neoconservatism" in the wake of the supposed excesses of the 1960s but he was already red-baiting liberals and working for a CIA- financed journal years before anyone had heard of Abbie Hoffman.

Kristol is most energetic and stimulating when he is on the attack, insulting his enemies and calculating short-term political advantage. But even here he has little of the polemical precision, wit and research zeal we are lucky to get in essayists or critics on the American left like Chomsky, Hitchens, Cockburn and Herman. In short, don't expect Kristol to quote his enemies, offer much in the way of fact or cite sources. When Kristol self-consciously turns to Important Sociological Themes his writing bloats up. For example, in "Urban Civilization and its Discontents" he informs us: "For the overwhelming fact of American life today.. .is that it is life in an urban civilization." (334) In "American Historians and the Democratic Idea" he helpfully remarks that: "The political ideas that men have always help to shape the political reality they live in..." (325)

As a sociologist of capitalism, Kristol takes a culturalist line. His guiding idea is that the capitalist economy is stable; its culture turbulent. The economy produces growth and the betterment of everyone's condition. Affluence brings the pathologies which stem from hedonism and the desire for immediate gratification. The educated middle classes -- the pampered and babied "new class" -- is thoroughly disgusted by modern capitalism, which it finds unheroic and boring impelling it to challenge business leadership of society. The problems of capital are the problems of success: the stable material improvements it offers are a stimulus to moral and cultural rot. The antidote to all this is the reinvigoration of religious orthodoxy and traditional values.

THIS IS A HEAVILY RETRO VIEW, ROOTED IN THE GOLDEN AGE of post-war prosperity. Kristol does not discuss the main features of the current landscape of American capitalism: falling real wages, deindustrialization, the spread of low-wage, contingent work, the facts of income and wealth polarization and so forth. He actually says that the distribution of wealth is "a trivial moral issue.(437) The link between economic growth and the betterment of the lives of the population is in fact, more than ever, dubious. Economic growth in the 1980s failed to reduce poverty as it had in earlier recoveries. As for the 1990s, in the years of recovery after 1991 the Economic Policy Institute notes that "inflation adjusted hourly wages have been stagnant or declining for the vast majority of the workforce," including the bottom 80% of men and the bottom 70% of women. Kristol ignores all this and more -- twenty years of economic history -- and is still taken seriously as an analyst of U.S. capitalism, a feat no leftist could accomplish.

Kristol's picture of the spoiled middle classes is also a tad dated. During the l980s twenty million workers were displaced from their jobs. By the end of the decade 45% of these were white collar workers. Of the managers and executives among the displaced, fewer than one-half were able to find jobs as good as their old ones. Also, wages for male white collar workers -- surely the core of his "new class" -- began to fall in the late 1980s in line with, though at a lesser dip than, the pattern earlier established for blue collar workers. Many of these people vote and have contributed to the electoral volatility of recent years. Kristol's picture of a bratty middle class bored by capitalist prosperity is way off base: American capitalism is unheroic but too menacing to be boring.

Finally, religiosity does not seem to offer much in the way of an exit from these problems. In terms of church-attending, Bible-studying and God-believing, we've gone about as far in the piety department as we can go. Telling Americans to solve their problems through religion is like urging population growth on the Chinese as a panacea.

Much of the God-talk in this collection seems a little forced, a manipulative effort to seem compliant to the Christian Right. As Kristol puts it: "...if the Republican Party is to survive it must work at accommodating these people." (368) Here is a sample of the improbable mixture of calculation and groveling which pervades parts of the book: "Conservative politicians woo the religious conservatives but only neoconservatives can really speak to them... Many of the neoconservatives are not themselves religiously observant in their private lives -- though more and more of them are coming to be." (380-381) Kristol never quite gets around to saying he is a believer though, as this passage indicates, some of his best friends are.

Kristol's hasty and ill-considered efforts in this area are also on display in his attempt to devise an ecumenical definition of religious orthodoxy which conservatives of all faiths -- Jews, Muslims and Christians -- could accept. Without getting into the details, the definition turns on "virtuous practice in daily life." (431) Most Born Againers would find this sort of definition a boastful, legalistic attachment to good works, alien to the need for a spirit-filled personal relationship with Jesus Christ. This is an elementary point, not requiring intensive study of Ephesians; several viewings of The 700 Club might do it. The point is that Kristol doesn't know much of anything about the Christian Right, except that he wants it permanently hooked up to the Republican Party.

Kristol is consistent in little but his politics. His main loyalty is to the latest tactical twists and turns of the Republican Party and the right. Hence the extreme versatility of his conclusions. Populism is bad (321) but right-wing populism is good. (362-363) The welfare state is good for capitalism (308) but the welfare state causes a "long train of calamities." (365) It is impossible to plan or design a good society (272) except when it comes to religion. (379-380)

What is true of this collection is also true of his career as a whole. Take the issue of secular humanism. Encounter was a hard- core cold war journal backed by the CIA, and secular humanist beyond a doubt. In his 1950s' contributions, for example, Kristol often favorably contrasts the secularism of the West with the religious impulse at work in fascist or Communist regimes and movements. In one wild article called "The Shadow of the Marquis" Kristol denounces French left-wing intellectuals and the Marquis de Sade as "religious maniacs." He remarks: "In Paris one speaks of la Revolution, quite simply, with that frisson which only the Holy can evoke..." In another piece entitled "Politics Sacred and Profane," he runs on at length about the religious roots of totalitarianism and the danger that such movements may impose the "yoke of salvation." These are aggressively secular arguments. Encounter was so relaxed about religion that Kristol felt free in one review to make some wisecracks about the Holy Trinity. Good clean fun of course, though one doubts that Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed would be amused.

After a couple of decades and the rise of the Christian Right, Kristol comes to believe that the humanist secularism which was a core feature of the civilization of the West in struggle against the Communists has itself become the slippery slope to liberalism and socialism: "It is secular humanism that is the orthodox metaphysical-theological basis of the two modern political philosophies, socialism and liberalism. The two are continuous across the secular-humanist spectrum, with socialism being an atheistic, messianic extreme while liberalism is an agnostic, melioristic version." (447) Kristol has dramatically changed his tune here: he originally used secularism as a weapon against the left; now he's convinced it's a weapon of the left. Of course, people change their minds. But Kristol claims, in a 1995 piece, he's never changed his mind about things religious: "There was something in me that made it impossible to become antireligious, or even non-religious. ...I was born 'theotropic.'" (4) This is an almost comical rewriting of his own past in order to pander to the Christian Right.

THE COHERENCE IN KRISTOL'S WORK IS POLITICAL. The guiding purpose of his work has been to win over or neutralize political forces which might oppose or simply prove troublesome for the right. In the early Cold War he used Encounter to campaign for pro-U.S., anti-Communist politics among Social Democratic intellectuals and political elites in Europe. In the 1960s and 1970s he used The Public Interest to shake the faith of the middle classes in the welfare state, racial equality and social reform generally, as a sort of retort to people like Rachel Carson, Ralph Nader and their supporters and to the civil rights movement. In the 1990s he is trying to domesticate the Christian Right for the purposes of the mainstream of the Republican Party, to avoid splits, divisions and acrimony.

In each case the strategy is to pander to the target group by posing as the embodiment and most energetic defender of the values it holds dear: high culture and secular humanism in Encounter; academic inquiry and technocratic policy making in The Public Interest; and anti-humanism and "traditional values" in his current incarnation. Kristol is not really a social analyst. He does not use theories, concepts or evidence to understand social life but as bait to attract whatever constituency the right has designs on at the moment.

Kristol's continued prominence on the right seems a bit iffy. The politicians well understand the need to cater to the Christian Right. It is doubtful that the Republicans need the neoconservatives as a sort of Welcome Wagon for the pious. Further, when the right fully accepts the realities of growing inequality and hardening class relations, it will have to try to explain and justify them. The latest works of Murray/Herrnstein and Dinesh D'Souza suggest the increasingly harsh ideological climate that's on the way. Kristol's rosy view of capitalism covers up all the questions the right will have to deal with.

Contents of No. 23