A giant walked humbly among us
By: Irwin M. Stelzer
Examiner Columnist
September 25, 2009
Kristol We buried Irving Kristol in Washington on Wednesday, and now must cope with the fact that we, and others who had never been fortunate enough to know him, live in a world devoid of his wisdom, kindness, humor and plain common sense.
Irving was 89 years old, the son of Jewish immigrants. He rose from a day laborer in Brooklyn to become perhaps the most consequential public intellectual of the latter half of the 20th century.
To the world, Irving is best known as the godfather of neoconservatism, although the persuasive tools at his command were not those of Tony Soprano or Marlon Brando's godfather figures, but only those contained in his numerous essays, talks, columns and what he called his "small magazines" such as the Public Interest.
That journal never had more than 12,000 subscribers, but what subscribers! The Public Interest had such a profound effect on public policy because it applied the best knowledge of all the social sciences, as understood by scholars and public intellectuals on all sides of most policy debates, and in Irving's view because footnotes were absolutely forbidden.
Any doubts about the influence of Kristol and his small magazines should have disappeared when President Reagan joked at a dinner that anyone wanting a job in his then-new administration should call the White House and say, "Irving sent me." No further vetting would be required.
Or when President George W. Bush conferred on Irving the Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian honor.
Kristol regaled us with tales of his undergraduate days as an anti-Stalin Trotskyite, a cell so small that it could have met in a phone booth, according to his co-Trotskyite wife, the distinguished historian Gertrude Himmelfarb; of his support for liberal Democrats in the days when those Democrats such as Henry "Scoop" Jackson believed in a strong military and refused to bow to the pressure of the Soviet Union; and his final conversion to what came to be called neoconservatism, a name invented by a socialist critic of Irving's views.
Kristol's explanation, that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality, might well apply to those independent voters who supported Barack Obama but now have been mugged by the reality of soaring deficits and taxes, and successive surrenders of American interests to whatever tyrant flexes his muscles.
As I tried to report in my collection of neoconservative essays, Irving never regarded neoconservatism as a movement -- there never has been a meeting of neoconservatives, he liked to say. Neoconservatism, he said, is a tendency. I would call it a style of thought, one part empiricism, one part common sense, one part old-fashioned good humor when confronting opponents.
And several parts plain kindness: I have received more than one communication from now-mature scholars who recollect how kind Irving had been to them when "I was just a junior researcher." Indeed, my wife, Cita, recalls that when she was not as grand as the other guests at a New York dinner party -- attended by the governor of the state, various media moguls, Wall Street movers and shakers, and the like -- Irving nevertheless spent most of the evening chatting with her, exploring her interests, and determining whether he could further her career in some way.
On the policy level, it was Kristol who urged Reagan to make his peace with Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. To counter the liberal offers of more and more entitlements, he suggested that conservatives offer voters more and more of their own money -- tax cuts. And he persuaded Republicans, traditionally fixated on balancing budgets, that some tax cuts could actually increase the flow of revenues to the exchequer by encouraging hard work and risk taking.
It was Kristol who realized that culture affected economic performance. The family must be preserved, as it is the source of the stability that permits people to look to the future and save and invest.
Crime must not be condoned, lest society unravel. Welfare that induces dependence is a disservice to the recipients, even if those who make it available feel good. And capitalism must produce results that are fair and seen to be fair, and be adapted to changing circumstances, which is one reason he never gave more than two cheers for capitalism.
Irving Kristol is gone. We will miss him, those whose lives were enriched by association with him, and the far greater number who benefited from his influence on economic and social policy.
Examiner Columnist Irwin M. Stelzer is a senior fellow and director of the Hudson Institute's Center for Economic Studies.
Follow The Examiner
