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View Full Version : Irv Kristol: How the neocon godfather rewrote the American Right




bobbyw24
10-29-2009, 06:19 AM
When Irving Kristol died on Sept. 18, neoconservatism lost more than just its “godfather.” It lost its most unabashed exponent, “a true, self-confessed—perhaps the only—‘neoconservative,’” as he described himself in the title of a 1979 essay. Others of his persuasion have disclaimed the label, coined as a reproach by the socialist Michael Harrington. But Kristol embraced it. Indeed, he expanded on it, explaining in Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea that he had always been a “neo” of one kind or another: “a neo-Marxist, a neo-Trotskyist, a neo-socialist, a neoliberal, and finally a neoconservative.”

After the Bush years, during which defenders of the administration insisted that anyone who spoke of “neoconservatives” really meant “Jews,” it is refreshing to return to Kristol’s frank self-description. He was not coy about his influences, either: he wrote that after Marxist philosopher Sidney Hook, “the two thinkers who had the greatest subsequent impact on my thinking were Lionel Trilling and Leo Strauss.”

He was comfortable with his radical past. “I don’t really mind when some journalist, even … a half-century later, casually refers to me as an ‘ex-Trotskyist.’ I regard myself as lucky to have been a young Trotskyist and have not a single bitter memory.” He had personal as well as ideological reasons for feeling that way, for it was through the Young People’s Socialist League that the 20-year-old Kristol met his wife-to-be, Gertrude Himmelfarb. “She had a trim figure and a strong, handsome face that radiated intelligence and sensibility,” he recalled. Theirs was an old-fashioned courtship: “Many of the young Trotskyists were bohemian in their ‘lifestyles,’ but that was not for me. Trotskyist or no, radical socialist or no, I was bourgeois to the core,” he recalled. Therein lay the seeds of his future neoconservatism.

Kristol’s work as polemicist and public intellectual is best understood in light of his lifelong desire to be on the

http://amconmag.com/article/2009/dec/01/00014/

paulitics
10-29-2009, 06:30 AM
This guy was no winner as far as the free market of ideas. No, he had to be funded by the CIA. http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/38415.html

Gee, I wonder if his son's neocon publication that loses millions every year is funded?