The Journalism of the Right

REFLECTIONS OF A NEOCONSERVATIVE:

Looking Back, Looking Ahead byIrving Kristol. Basic Books, $19.95.

IN ONE OF THE essays collected in this book, Irving Kristol calls himself “perhaps the only neoconservative.” This is showmanship, of course. When he wrote this, in 1979, the neoconservative movement was already into its middle age. Through the 1970s, writing in The Public Interest had developed the academic and public-policy side of the theory, and writing in Commentary the cultural-criticism side. By the end of the decade, there was no shortage of people who were either proud of or resigned to being classified as neoconservatives. Indeed, the occasion for Kristol’s comment was his review of a book by Peter Steinfels about the neoconservative confederation.

Still, there is something to Kristol’s claim, for he is different from most others in the movement. The distinction does not concern ideology; it has to do, instead, with temperament.

The public face of neoconservatism is typically a scowl. Who has seen a picture of Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick smiling? Her public demeanor epitomizes the most familiar neoconservative attitude: admonitory; cheerless; locked in grim combat with those seen as the enemies of American power, a capitalist economy, and Western democracy.

Irving Kristol can sound this way, as illustrated in this book by a few essays from the seventies about the threat from the “New Class” and the “adversary culture.” But his heart does not really seem to be in it. Kristol says that, unlike his friends, he wasted no time fussing about the nuances of “neoconservative.” Even though the term was first applied by Michael Harrington, who did not mean it as a compliment, “the sensible course . . . is to take your label, claim it as your own, and run with it.” Also, “having been named Irving, I am relatively indifferent to baptismal caprice.” Kristol has something in common with another cheerful Republican, William Satire, of The New York Times. Safire’s winking hints that politics can be a game allow him to sound less embattled than, say, Patrick Buchanan, even when making exactly the same case. Similarly, Kristol most often sounds like a man who is having a good time, rather than someone speaking from the spleen.

This effect is heightened by Kristol’s seeming awareness that neoconservatism has been good to him. He has, after all, become a public figure, christened godfather of the movement, on the strength of an oeuvre consisting of two volumes of previously published pieces (On the Democratic Idea, 1972, and Two Cheers for Capitalism , 1978). The present book is also a collection of essays, mainly from Commentary and The Wall Street Journal, plus several substantial pieces recycled from book number one. Unlike Norman Podhoretz and Joseph Epstein, Kristol does not make a point of acknowledging his own ambition. But his career interest in the movement remains in the background, a part of the story that the worldly reader will recognize and understand.

Most of Kristol’s essays are positive in their approach: they argue for a certain outlook, rather than for viewing-withalarm. Three related themes run through the essays.

The first is that the capitalist system has political as much as economic consequences. Capitalism does not guarantee liberty, Kristol says, but it does make liberty possible. “Neoconservatives do not think that liberal-democratic capitalism is the best of all imaginable worlds,” he says, “only the best, under the circumstances, of all possible worlds.” Capitalism should, therefore, receive more than a grudging recognition of its superior efficiency; it deserves a heartfelt defense from “neoconservatives [who] believe that the last, best hope of humanity at this time is an intellectually and morally reinvigorated liberal capitalism.”

Kristol’s second theme is that the American Revolution was a success—in fact, the only successful revolution in modern history—and that the political arrangements that flowed from it deserve impassioned support. The difference between the American and French revolutions, Kristol says, is the bourgeois, prosaic nature of the American. The authors of The Federalist and the Constitution did not promise citizens happiness, only the pursuit of happiness. “These [traditions] aim at a gradual improvement of the human condition—a process, moreover, in which each individual bears his share of responsibility for a successful outcome. ...” Kristol says that such a revolution has less romantic appeal than one that makes utopian boasts. But only in America, he says, did the leaders of a revolution all die in bed; only here could a citizenry come to take its revolution’s success for granted.

Kristol’s third argument is that democracy is not self-maintaining. Its architects did not imagine that the play of self-interest would always and automatically lead to a harmonious result. There must also be an overlay of “republican virtues,” such as self-restraint and a respect for the public good, as distinct from the sum of private desires. This leads Kristol into speculation about the modern-day state of the civic virtues. He argues, in one of the essays resurrected from On the Democratic Idea, that absolute permissiveness toward pornography is, in the end, a threat to liberty, because it undermines the public culture that democracy requires for its survival.

With minor tuning by Sinclair Lewis, some of these themes could be turned into a speech for the Zenith Rotary Club—but Kristol’s point is precisely that such sentiments are unfairly dismissed as boosterism. We have an artistic tradition that lampoons the bourgeois virtues, he says; and an intellectual language that seems more comfortable with socialist liberation than with free enterprise. Capitalism lacks ideologues to speak on its behalf.

That is the void Kristol has set out to fill. Nearly every essay contends that modern politics is ideological politics, that the Western liberal-capitalist way might be undone by its neglect of its own poetry, romance, bravery. The left can march under the banner of “equality,” but the right has had to mutter objections about “facing uncomfortable truths.” He says that Americans are so complacent about their democracy’s success that they nit-pick about its errors. American business has chosen the losing course of justifying itself on soulless, cost-benefit premises, “conceiving of itself as representing an abstract species of ‘economic man,’ rather than as men and women engaged in a fully human activity.”

The neoconservative insistence on ideology has already made a difference in the American political culture. It has embarrassed mainstream liberals, although not many like to admit it, into recognizing that violent crime is a problem in itself as well as a symptom of other problems, and that stable families and a robust business class are important underpinnings of a healthy democracy. Unfortunately, its ideological crusades also account for the most maddening side of neoconservatism, which is clearly displayed in this book.

THE ESSENCE OF ideological politics is that ideas about a thing—the “larger context”—matter more than the thing itself. An ability to rise above specifics is obviously essential, but thought becomes all too easy when the details are merely stage business for another presentation of the main ideological theme. Leftist ideologues in Latin America can turn even a crop failure into one more demonstration of gringo imperialism. So conservative ideologues can turn complaints about acid rain into one more demonstration that liberals hate American business. Tom Wolfe argued in The Painted Word that paintings were the least important part of modern art. Each new work was merely an occasion for hammering home some new critical theory. And what Jackson Pollock’s paintings were to Clement Greenberg, the facts of politics are to Irving Kristol.

In an essay aptly titled “Ideology and Supply-Side Economics,” for example, Kristol contends that the many liberals who opposed President Reagan’s tax-cut scheme could not muster proof that it wouldn’t work. Their real motive, he says, was their fear that it would work. If cutting everyone’s taxes led, as promised, to a newly vigorous American economy, then the bankruptcy of liberal thought would be exposed. It would be all the more galling, Kristol says, because it would prove that the liberal emphasis on economic redistribution was, and probably always had been, misplaced. “The real opposition to the Laffer curve has less to do with economics than with liberal egalitarianism,” he concludes.

This point would be more telling if its converse were not also true: the real support for the Laffer curve had less to do with economics than with hostility to liberal egalitarianism. The case for cutting income-tax rates rested on conjecture, analogy, hope—in short, the very kind of evidence neoconservatives would sneer out of court if it were advanced on behalf of a public-school busing plan. Some people, perhaps including President Reagan, were sincerely convinced by the supply-side reasoning, and backed the plan because of its imagined economic effects. But, to judge by Kristol’s essay, neoconservatives found the supply-side scheme attractive chiefly because of the enemies it made. And once the symbolic battle was over, and a law enacted, Kristol was less interested in how the theory actually worked.

Whenever Kristol touches on specific, contemporary events, instead of larger theories of democracy and capitalism, he seems to have looked only far enough to find what he already knew was there. To prove that liberals are unrealistically obsessed with equality, he says, “I do not recall ... a strike over [any] chief executive officer’s very high salary.” But sympathetic inside observers of the military and the corporation have testified time and again that top-to-bottom disparities in perks and comfort make a big difference in how their organizations work. Soldiers follow* officers who share their risks; the United Auto Workers were more willing to take a pay cut in order to save Chrysler when they saw that Lee Iacocca was doing the same. Similarly, to prove that liberals are unreasonably obsessed with breaking up big business, Kristol says that antitrust actions against AT&T or IBM are symbolic exercises. If they succeeded, “all that would be accomplished is a slight increase in the number of large corporations, with very little consequence for the shape of the economy or the society as a whole.” To be fair, Kristol wrote those lines in 1976, before the rippling effect of the AT&T divestiture was obvious. Still, one suspects that he wasn’t looking very hard for contrary evidence even when he wrote.

Yet again on the “equality” mania: Kristol says that “if a $100,000-a-year household thinks itself to be middle class, then it is middle class.” In some sociological way, he is right. In economic terms (which are his context), he could not be more wrong. The worst problem in American public finance is the growth of “middle-class” benefits and entitlements, from Social Security to the mortgage-interest deduction. No less neoconservative a figure than David Stockman, in his days as a writer, pointed out that the programs were impossible to control because people near the top of the income pyramid thought of themselves as “middle-class,” and therefore entitled to as much help as the next guy. Kristol himself acknowledges that modern social democracy “generates a momentum for equality—in the bizarre sense of special privileges for all—which, unless firmly controlled, creates an overbearing, bureaucratic state confronting a restless and ‘ungrateful’ citizenry.” But that is in a different essay, in which he defines middle-class entitlements as a socialist pathology, and therefore has ideological reasons to consider them a threat.

There are, of course, neoconservative scholars who examine the particularities that Kristol skates past. Kristol is, however, a fair representative of the movement’s journalists. From the outside, the neoconservative editorial process often seems to consist of ripping out articles from The Nation or going to a movie or observing a Catholic bishops’ conference, and then decrying the predictable wrongheadedness. The result is literary criticism masquerading as political journalism. It can be masterful in its rhetoric, but it is only loosely connected to real events. If there were more reporting, more observation of life as it is lived rather than as it is hypothesized, more trips outside Manhattan, there might also be more conclusions that diverge from, and thereby refine, the previously established line. Neoconservatives might even escape the brittle orthodoxy that first made liberalism vulnerable.