The Times In Denial
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The New York Times ran a shockingly opaque obituary for Irving Kristol today – shocking, that is, because it does not make a single mention of foreign policy whatsoever.
This is hardly a new conceit – as I’ve commented elsewhere, so much of the neocons’ self-congratulatory historiography makes it seem as though their story is about nothing more than discovering that America is alright and that social welfare policy has limitations. No mention whatsoever by the Times of Kristol’s far greater legacy in American foreign policy.
Indeed, late in life, Irving Kristol admitted the truth about neoconservatism – that it was in fact totally driven by foreign policy considerations and derived entirely from Trotskyite-Shachtmanite principles: the realization that social democracy could not serve as a vanguard for a global democratic revolution because the European welfare states were dismantling their empires and conciliatory toward the Soviets, and therefore it must be driven by a military-industrial complex heavy “democratic capitalism”.
And of course, we must not forget the neocon devotion to the State of Israel. As Phil points out today, Kristol did indeed join his confederates such as Norman Podhoretz and John Roche in being especially hysterical that the peace platform of George McGovern threatened military subsidies to Israel.
So while I, unlike some others, remain confident that the neocons are now definitely on the ropes, the perfidy of the Times in indulging the worst self-congratulatory narrative about them more than six years after we invaded Iraq is a stark reminder of why historians of neoconservatism must remain vigilant.
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The “Weekly Standard” article is a find, but most of what what “The Public Interest” published in its early years involved domestic policy and cultural/social questions. In that 2006 article, Kristol was looking back in light of what “neoconservatism” became and giving his thinking a Bush-era coloring, but in the 1960s, his concern was more that New York just wasn’t working, and the rest of the country looked likely to follow the city’s trajectory.
When we talk about those first-generation neocons, it would be wise to remember the mess and malaise of the 1970s. Looking at that first generation in its own context, they aren’t as horrible as people who associate neoconservatism with Cheney and Bush believe. Originally the focus wasn’t on empire or foreign policy, but on what the early neocons saw as the failure of the Great Society. Whether they were right or wrong about LBJ’s policies, their ideas were bound to find an audience in the troubled Ford-Carter era.
Obviously, Kristol felt he could admit it all in light of what Bush wrought, but I do believe this was the truth – neoconservatism is nothing if not intellectual dishonesty.
I have great sympathy for the folks like Moynihan and Nathan Glazer, both of whom fundamentally objected to neocon foreign policy, but the foreign policy was there from the beginning, ironically enough brought to the fore by the folks around Scoop Jackson who continued to call themselves Social Democrats USA.
Mr Ross is right, the SDUSA has always been militarist, just shifting around its enemies. It (and let us remember this is the main body of the old Socialist Party of America, which came around to a Scoop Jackson position, not the people always around Scoop Jackson) also became moderate on economics and insane on foreign policy a few years after Schactmanite-Trotskyists took it over.
[...] reconcile said social democracy with Reaganism. And this was his vision from the beginning, as I’ve explained elsewhere: Having said all that, there is still a great deal of truth in the FP article. Irving [...]