By Irving Kristol. Basic Books, 2011. Hardcover: $29.95, 416 pp.

Irving Kristol may have passed away in 2009, but his spirit lives on in the latest collection of his writings, The Neoconservative Persuasion: Selected Essays, 1942-2009. As a founder of such magazines as The Public Interest, The National Interest, and Encounter, as well as a frequent contributor to publications like the Partisan Review, Commentary, and The Wall Street Journal, Kristol’s legendary life of letters is amply documented in the anthology’s many biographical and autobiographical sketches. However, between the book’s opening eulogy by his son, writer William Kristol, and the concluding “Memoirs” section, lies perhaps his most indelible legacy: a long and multi-sourced anthology of neoconservatism, a political philosophy of both historical and presentday import, made famous for its adoption by George W. Bush’s administration.

These essays, carefully assembled by his widow, historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, trace Kristol’s odyssey from a radical leftist to a student of Lionel Trilling and Leo Strauss, culminating in the birth of Kristol’s neoconservative ideology. Along the way, the book covers his views on everything from W.H. Auden to Judaism, but its salient subject is clearly politics. Drawing on what he calls “the wisdom of the past,” Kristol constructs an outlook conservative in its staunch opposition to liberalism but divergent from what he calls “traditional” free-market, isolationist conservatism. The essays call for the return of virtue as the end of politics, a vision which, though seemingly having gone awry in the last decade of American foreign policy, nonetheless remains immensely compelling.

A Liberal Education

Kristol graduated from the City College of New York in 1940 during a golden era for many academically minded New York City leftists, comprising a group later dubbed the New York Intellectuals. Many of these Intellectuals, including a young Kristol, immersed themselves in the writings of Leon Trotsky and professed a steadfast opposition to both Stalinism and what they viewed as American imperialism. Interestingly, the author attempts to downplay his association with the radical left in The Neoconservative Persuasion as “brief” and nothing more than “an accident.” Regardless, as the Soviet Union steadily crumbled—and with it the ideal of communism—the New York Intellectuals began to fragment, some joining the burgeoning counterculture movement, and others gravitating towards a more tempered, conservative posture, based on support for America in the rapidly escalating Cold War.

It was during this period of intellectual transition that Kristol discovered the writings of literary critic Lionel Trilling. Whereas Marxism focused on the material benefit of society, Trilling, as Kristol quotes in his essay “The Moral Critic,” believed that “[politics] is to be judged by what it does for the moral perfection rather than the physical easement of man.” This view hit Kristol with what he later described as “the force of a revelation.” He eventually came to the conclusion that “the materialistic view of life was wrong, it was simply false,” according to Ruth Wisse, a professor of literature at Harvard and interlocutor with Kristol. Trilling reframed Kristol’s concerns to promoting the moral good and combating the specter of evil. On this subsequent view, however, Wisse contends that “Kristol and his thinking went far beyond Trilling.”

Foundations of a Theory

If it was Trilling who transformed Kristol into a moral critic, it was philosopher Leo Strauss who made him the “godfather” of neoconservatism. According to Kristol, Strauss “trained his students to look at modernity through the eyes of the ‘ancients’ and the premoderns, accepting the premise that they were and are more insightful than we are” and believed that society needs an underlying moral code, not just pure reason alone, if it seeks stability and progress. For Kristol, this idea “turned one’s intellectual universe upside down.”

What follows in Kristol’s essay “Republican Virtue versus Servile Institutions” proves a powerful case for reviving what he calls “republican virtue,” a culturally Western, distinctively American ideal. Kristol believes this virtue, with its origins in the Roman Republic, is best personified in whom the Founding Fathers labeled “the noblest Roman of them all”: George Washington. The Washingtonian model, according to Kristol, is that of a citizen exuding “probity, truthfulness, self-reliance, diligence, prudence, and a disinterested concern for the welfare of the republic.” The Neoconservative Persuasion asserts that it is also this phalanx of attributes, ultimately comprising republican virtue, which good government should foster among its citizenry.

Kristol’s Great Society

While the nomenclature may seem vague at first, Kristol’s project quickly becomes coherent against the backdrop of policy and ideological debates addressed in these essays. To start, Kristol’s label of neoconservatism proves a curious appellation. A critic might be tempted to point out that there is little new about Plato or Caesar. But compared to the free-market fundamentalism of right-wing publications like the contemporary National Review, Kristol’s moral critique of unfettered capitalism in essays like “No Cheers for the Profit Motive” seems especially novel. Indeed, in “The Two Welfare States,” Kristol even defends Roosevelt’s New Deal as conforming to the virtue of “manly” social policy. Although the argument is part of a larger attack on what he views as the “womanly” programs of continental Europe, an unacceptably “feminine-materialistic conception of the welfare state,” the essays show Kristol at his most intellectually versatile.

Culturally, Kristol mounts a blistering assault on the rising “counterculture” of the 1960s, and defends the cultivation of a “high-brow” education consisting of Strauss’ ancients and premoderns. He laments that “the gradual dissolution and abandonment of the study of the classics as the core of the school curriculum” will undermine our unifying values.

To be sure, this account is not without its shortcomings. Kristol’s critique of Johnson’s “maternal” Great Society program rests upon a comparison to the successfully “paternal” New Deal. But the former program sought to quell the birth pangs of a newly desegregated nation, while FDR sought to stimulate full employment; analogizing between the two misleads more than it illustrates. As for the Classics, while Aristotle and Aeschylus remain enlightening reads, one ought to be skeptical that American schools can regain their global competitiveness by returning to the masterworks of ancient Greece and not through the promotion of math and science skills. And though George Washington may be the archetype of American virtue, we cannot wistfully ignore the fact that he was a slave-owner. In some ways, Kristol’s views seem as politically dated as the ancients themselves.

Retrospect

The title of this anthology comes from Kristol’s review of historian and friend Marvin Meyers’ book The Jacksonian Persuasion. Meyers defines a political “persuasion” as “a half-formulated moral perspective involving emotional commitment,” one whose meaning, according to Kristol, “we clearly glimpse only in retrospect.”

Yet this last decade, with the attendant rise of the “neocons” in the Bush Administration, paints a troubling picture of neoconservatism. While Bush’s domestic policy initiatives seems generally in line with Kristol’s vision (a “manly” social safety net is, for the most part, here to stay), neoconservative foreign policy appears to have all but disowned its godfather. In fact, one could describe much of the right-wing American interventionism in the post-Cold War world as “at odds” with Kristol’s philosophy, as Peter Beinart does in his book The Icarus Syndrome. While Kristol believed in democracy, he proved ultimately skeptical of taking virtuous democracy global.

Justin Vaisse, author of Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement, reduces Kristol’s take on foreign policy to “plain realpolitik,” looking out for America’s interests globally, rather than being a military evangelist for its virtues. Moreover, Kristol believed that any assertion of “an ‘American Mission’ actively to promote democracy all over the world” proved utterly “full of presumption” and ignorant of foreign cultures entirely alien to any tradition of republican virtue. Not surprisingly, Kristol vocally opposed ousting Saddam Hussein in the wake of the dictator’s disastrous defeat in the Gulf War, which may explain Kristol’s conspicuous silence on the eve of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, or the book’s absence of any essays pertaining to the topic. “This doesn’t mean Kristol…wasn’t a neoconservative,” Vaisse points out. “Rather,” she argues, “it shows how much Kristol’s neoconservatism…differed from its descendants today.”

Ruth Wisse nonetheless feels just the opposite: George W. Bush was a bona fide neoconservative mostly because of his foreign policy. “Bush really took evil seriously,” she says, “that you can use the word, that you must use the word, that in fact morality has as much to do with the recognition of evil as the performance of good. And I think that’s one of the crucial things that separate liberals in generals from neoconservatives. It has to do with your attitude towards evil.”

Wisse’s argument may shed some light on the “emotional commitment” Kristol has to neoconservatism; it is an instinct, not strictly a rational belief, that there is evil in the world, and that in promoting the good we must battle darkness. Many commentators hailed the 2008 presidential election as a realignment of American politics away from the Bush era and, consequently, a distancing from the neoconservative worldview. Yet others, Kristol included, would argue that evil still exists just as much in today’s world as it did on 9/11 or during the Cold War. The Neoconservative Persuasion’s arguments may yet win out. Though the Bush Administration, its guiding philosophy, and its intellectual godfather have weathered serious criticisms in the wake of the War on Terror, it would be difficult to assert that evil does not exist in the world today. Kristol may be gone, but neoconservatism and his seminal works still remain persuasive.

Eli Kozminsky ‘14 is a Contributing Writer

The question of Jewish liberalism

Why Are Jews Liberals?, by Norman Podhoretz, Doubleday, 2009. $27, 295 pp.

The story of Norman Podhoretz is as complicated as the political history he examines in Why are Jews Liberals? Once a leftist, he moved rightwards in the 1960s to become one of the great voices of neoconservatism. In Why Are Jews Liberals?, Podhoretz asks why the rest of the Jewish community hasn’t followed suit. Along the search for a satisfactory explanation, the reader is continually reminded of the author’s agenda:  to show that the centuries-old connection between Judaism and liberalism is no longer a sensible alliance, and never was. This agenda constantly undermines Podhoretz’s attempt to establish a convincing history of the relation of Judaism and Western politics.

Old Habits Die Hard

Podhoretz’s case against the alliance of Judaism and leftism begins in the time of Jesus Christ, passes through Europe and the enlightenment, and ends with the 2008 presidential election in the United States.  As a history of the Jewish people, his scholarship is solid.  Soon, however, the narrative develops several antagonists – Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire, socialist leaders like Karl Marx, and American 20^th-century progressives.  In the case of the first, philosophes encouraged conversion to the “Religion of Reason” to escape anti-Semitism. The socialists in turn won over Jews with the “Marxist promise of a world in which there would be ‘neither a Jew nor Greek.”In both cases, however, Podhoretz argues Jewish joiners were ill-served by their new alliance. Finally, from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Carter, Democratic presidents have managed to make Jews part of their coalitions while being less-than-faithful friends of the Jews or Israel abroad.  Not least of these fair-weather friends was Roosevelt himself, who “made little effort…to help Hitler’s Jewish victims.”

Starting from the last, Podhoretz bluntly claims that Jews of each place and era should have seen these groups as enemies, asserting that it is self-defeating to support a cause, group, or party that does not support you in return, framing this assumption in oppositional, simplistic terms such as, “…all animals, including humans, are equipped by nature with an instinct for telling the difference between friends and enemies…”Absent from Podhoretz’s analysis is a prescription for getting along with groups with differing interests. Instead, he focuses on an abhorrent rapport, “partaking of the pathological,” between Jews and their supposed enemies.

Various leftist movements may have been ideological “enemies” of the Jews, but Podhoretz fails to examine the anti-Semitism of traditional societies or right-wing movements across European and American history. Restricting social and political interaction only to those groups that bore no animosity or ill will toward the Jewish community does not seem a convincing strategy, and what “animal”, put in Podhoretz’s terms, surrounded by predators and faced with the possibility of destruction, would not make sacrifices in exchange for continued existence?

An analogous struggle applies to the debate over Israel. Just as a Jew might share political beliefs with an anti-Semite, so too could a Jew agree with someone opposed to Israel. The author disagrees with both assertions, and views anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism as points along the same spectrum: “hostility [toward Israel] has by now metastasized to the point where the difference between ‘anti-Zionism’ and anti-Semitism has become almost invisible to the naked eye.” Podhoretz unfairly conflates the political issues surrounding Israel and the existential issue of Jewish continuity. Yet policy on Israel does not imply disagreement on all political issues, or contradiction of Jewish interests elsewhere.

A Convincing Alternative?

Podhoretz does address more popular explanations for Jewish liberalism. In the case of the most common – the shared values between Judaism and liberalism – he fails to convincingly rebut the argument. He claims that if Jewish teachings, namely “the Bible and…the Talmud” were the source of liberalism, Orthodox Jews, those most adherent to religious tradition, would be the most liberal. Indeed, he is correct to say that they are the “least liberal of all their fellow Jews,” and that “Orthodox enclaves are the only Jewish neighborhoods where conservative candidates get any votes to speak of.” Podhoretz is correct that Orthodox Jews might align with American conservative causes like the protection of Israel or the preservation of religious displays, but fails to establish that religious texts are the only source of Jewish values; holidays, stories, and the community-constructed fabric of Jewish life are an equally powerful source of the Jewish perspective.

Second, the fact that Orthodox are, on average, more conservative than less religious Jews elides the point that they are still more liberal than the average American. Furthermore, Podhoretz describes the conservative religious rules to which Orthodox Jews tend to adhere, and describes a set of purely social principles – on subjects like gay marriage and abortion – that make Orthodox Jews more conservative. However, there are just as many progressive principles on socioeconomic matters, like the advancement of social justice and compassion for the disadvantaged, which inform the political views of both religious and secular Jews.  The fact that Orthodox Jews tend to be more conservative reflects their stronger adherence to religious principles on social issues, but the economic ideas that Judaism imparts might well be liberal ones.

Synagogue and State

In his historical narrative, Podhoretz endeavors to demonstrate that contemporary Jewish liberalism traces back to years of poor decision-making that have become engrained in the contemporary Jewish psyche, implying that Jews have lost their agency over their own political choices. The authentic political choice for Jews seems to be conservatism, yet Podhoretz’s story is a story of a people balancing their political interests with their religious interests, revealing the fact that most Jews, like most people of any faith, do not lead their lives strictly according to religious commands, and cannot be reduced to their faith when at the ballot box.

Podhoretz is frustrated with fellow members of his own faith, and the story becomes very personal at times. Any bitterness that shows through the pages, as it clearly does in the chapters covering contemporary American politics, ultimately does a disservice to the pursuit of an honest answer to the question of Jewish leftism.  By claiming that Jews should not be liberals before investigating why they are, Podhoretz closes himself off to a number of explanations that seem both logical and compelling. The explanation at which he finally arrives – that Jewish liberalism has replaced actual Judaism as its adherents’ religion – forces a division between liberal values and Jewish values that is hard to believe. Millennia of Jewish history have encompassed much; why not liberalism?

The Death of Conservatism, by Sam Tanenhaus, Random House, 2009.  $17, 144 pp.

In 1962, legendary ABC News anchor Howard Smith ran an hour-long segment titled “The Political Obituary of Richard Nixon.” Smith proclaimed Nixon, who had just lost the race for Governor of California only two years after narrowly losing the 1960 Presidential election to John F. Kennedy, to be politically finished. Six years later Nixon would capture the White House.

American politics is lit with these stories of self-reinvention and political turnarounds, yet Sam Tanenhaus, in The Death of Conservatism, decrees a political obituary for the entire conservative movement. Tanenhaus, who has once called himself “a chastened liberal,” traces the conservative movement from its roots in Edmund Burke to its modern leaders like William Buckley Jr. and Ronald Reagan, and finally its death: the 2008 presidential election. Ultimately, Tanenhaus’s obituary comes much too soon, and proclaims an end to a movement that is very much alive.

Whither Conservatism?

The book follows from an essay Tanenhaus wrote in The New Republic in the aftermath of Barack Obama’s election, and it is the ascendancy of Barack Obama which overshadows the author’s argument. Obama’s victory, Tanenhaus argues, was not so much a positive referendum on liberal ideology as it was a negative referendum on eight years of the Bush administration. “During two terms of George W. Bush,” he writes, “conservative ideas were not merely tested but also pursued with dogmatic fixity.” Tanenhaus holds up the resounding failure of the Bush administration and its policies, as evidence of conservatism’s demise and rejects the role of a new liberal energy in that election.

Tanenhaus’s definition of conservatism is central to his concise book. Tanenhaus divides conservatism into two groups: ‘revanchist’ conservatives and realist conservatives. Revanchist conservatism is rooted in the politics of revenge and extremism, and the author argues that this wing of conservatism has overtaken the realist wing and suffocated true conservative principles.  The issue arising from this division of conservatism is that Tanenhaus lumps the Bush years among the revanchist aspect of the party. Yet Bush was seen in the conservative wing of the party as an ideological betrayer, especially on the growth of government and deficits and immigration.

Looking Ahead

“In each instance [of conservative losses], crushing defeat gave the movement new strength and pushed it further along the route to ultimate victory,” Tanenhaus writes. “Today it is impossible to make this case.” The future Tanenhaus sees for the conservative movement is a bleak one, in which the intellectual base of the party, found in “journals like Commentary, National Review, and The Weekly Standard,” slowly deteriorates until it becomes a “mouthpiece of the Republican Party at its most revanchist.” For Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times Book Review and the New York Times Week in Review, this claim is all too predictable, and his critiques of his conservative counterparts sound far more partisan than analytic, often relying on finger-pointing at conservative celebrities such as Rush Limbaugh.

“Today’s conservatives resemble the exhumed figures of Pompeii,” Tanenhaus writes, “trapped in postures of frozen flight, clenched in the rigor mortis of a defunct ideology.” This grandiose statement is typical of Tanenhaus’s literary flair -but today’s conservative landscape is no Pompeii. Although conservatism has paled next to the energized progressivism of Obama, it is far from the ghastly death Tanenhaus diagnoses.  A quick examination of conservative leaders today finds plenty of vital signs. Tim Pawlenty remains a popular conservative, while Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney are considered among the leaders of the Republican Party despite their heterodoxies on key ideological points like abortion. The conservative movement today is more steeped in realism and compromise than Tanenhaus acknowledges.

Tanenhaus is not entirely off-base. The uncompromising extremism of the Bush administration, rooted in men like Dick Cheney, John Bolton and John Ashcroft, and a hard-line neoconservative foreign policy, has certainly passed, and perhaps this is the obituary Tanenhaus meant to write. But the movement itself is still alive, and will continue to be for quite some time. Movements and leaders are never finished in America-they are just waiting to make a comeback.

While still in high school, I read a book by Pete Carril, who for 29 years coached a series of exceptionally disciplined basketball teams at Princeton University, in which he recounted a lesson from his childhood. “In this life,” Carril’s father would tell him and his sister every morning, “the big, strong guys are taking from the smaller, weaker guys but … the smart take from the strong.” I hoped to succeed in politics, and when I arrived at Harvard I planned to do so by heeding Carril’s lesson and educating myself. I enrolled in courses in history and political science, attended talks on public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and wrote book reviews for the HPR.

But I soon learned that I had misdirected my focus. The core skill of government work, I discovered, is not the ability to craft a winning argument, whether in the classroom or on the op-ed page, but the ability to master the process that decides who wins. This is why skilled lobbyists command such high salaries. It is also how individuals with limited knowledge of public policy, from movie stars to sports greats, can succeed in elected office by commanding public support. It explains why Oliver Wendell Holmes’ description of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a “second-class intellect but a first-class temperament” is a toast to Roosevelt’s penchant for using the political system to his advantage, rather than a cheap shot.

Having revised my sense of how to succeed in politics, however, I found myself uncomfortable with the thought of becoming a politician. In college, we are encouraged to search for truth. Finding the best policy seemed fun, as did building reasoned arguments for why it was the best; pushing the levers and making the compromises necessary for enacting the policy seemed less so. I found that others had similar thoughts, including the subject of my senior history thesis, Elliot Richardson. When Richardson first considered the possibility of government service, he asked former Sen. Leverett Saltonstall (R-Mass.) if he could work on policy rather than politics. “It’s all politics,” Saltonstall responded.

But in Richardson’s life, I learned, the same insight on the nature of politics proved liberating, for it opened up new challenges, those of “managing, reconciling, mollifying, neutralizing, fending off, and avoiding a host of competing and conflicting interests.… No other occupation subjects its practitioners to such a constant flow of difficult, demanding, and sometimes painful choices.” This is what Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) means when he refers to the Senate as a “chemical place.” Mastering that chemistry, the intricate balance among process, principle, and personality, without sacrificing one’s sense of self is a task that, Richardson wrote near the end of his life, “more than fully engage[s] the highest level of ability.”

That ability, which Isaiah Berlin called the ability to “understand a particular situation in its full uniqueness,” may make a difference not only in the back-and-forth of crafting legislation but also in a crisis. Certainly the qualities that we associate with scholarly intelligence — asking questions, probing presumptions, grasping nuance — can make a key difference, as they did in John F. Kennedy’s performance during the Cuban Missile Crisis. But so did Kennedy’s skill in prodding members of his team to contemplate alternatives and his willingness to empathize with Khrushchev’s position as he pondered his next move. In a pivotal moment, temperament mattered as much as intellect.

My adjustment to the fact that politics tends not to be an arena for the concentrated thought that I have learned to prize took some time. But while I still wonder whether a career in politics is right for me, I no longer doubt that it can provide a fascination of its own, as invigorating as it is important. And there is something inspiring about the fact that Barack Obama won office not only because his ideas were persuasive but because millions of Americans, inspired by his example of grassroots change, hit the road and knocked on doors. “There’s nothing wrong with ‘politics,’” former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill would say, “and [people] should be proud to say it.”