AURELIE GODET (PARIS 7)

CONSERVATISM IN AMERICAN POLITICAL CULTURE :

THE EXAMPLE OF IRVING KRISTOL

Elements of bibliography

I – The United States : a liberal or a conservative country ?

Over the last 50 years, an essential paradigm shift has occurred in the historiography of America. Simply said, historians have moved away from a paradigm in which the United States was seen as a liberal country, inhospitable to conservatism, to another, in which conservatism has become the norm of American political life.

For consensus historians writing in the 1950s, conservatism was totally alien to American political culture and was therefore dismissed as a “paranoid style”, a “political pathology” or a “status anxiety”. In The Liberal Imagination (1950), Lionel Trilling observed that “liberalism is not only the dominant, but even the sole, intellectual tradition” in the United States. The country possessed a conservative impulse, he admitted, but this expressed itself in “irritable mental gestures” rather than full-fledged ideas. In The Liberal Tradition in America (1955), Louis Hartz went even further. He argued that the lack of both a feudal aristocracy and a class-conscious working class meant that America was the world’s purest example of a liberal society. As for Daniel Bell, he wrote in The End of Ideology (1960) that the fiery clash of Left and Right had been replaced by a cool debate about management techniques.

Trilling, Hartz, and Bell had two things in common :

- First, they all considered the aspirations of the “New Conservatives” (that is, people like Russell Kirk, Francis Wilson, and Peter Viereck) as nothing more than a strange, futile quest.

- Second, they all defined conservatism as an aristocratic ideology, that is the ideology of a single specific and unique historical movement : the reaction of the feudal-aristocratic-agrarian classes to the French Revolution at the end of the 18^th century.

This vision of conservatism as an aristocratic ideology was seriously damaged by the so-called “conservative revolution” of the 1970s and 1980s. Between 1964 and 1980 the Right progressively gained ground. The footsoldiers in the South and West gradually became a more unified army, conservative intellectuals began to shape policy, while demography continued to drag America in the Southwestern direction. All three forces came together in 1980 in the shape of Ronald Reagan – a man whose philosophy was exactly the opposite of Lyndon B. Johnson’s liberalism : government was the problem, not the solution.

The “Reagan phenomenon” and its aftermath led some historians to re-read American history. Maybe the U.S had always been a conservative nation after all. Maybe American conservatism had deep roots in American institutions and founding principles. Maybe conservatism was in many respects a norm of American thought, instead of an aberration.

This sudden realization produced a number of valuable studies of the development of conservative thought over time. In The Populist Persuasion (1995), Michael Kazin showed how right-wing ideas had in fact dominated populist political discourse throughout the twentieth century. In Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America, 1950-1985 (1993), Patrick Allitt drew crucial connections between Catholicism and conservatism. As for Charles Dunn and J. David Woodard, they produced in 2003 an amibitious study of American conservatism ominously entitled American Conservatism from Burke to Bush (2003). In that book, they tried to reconstruct an ideology that was largely hidden from view as it developed.

The work of these scholars has had a great impact. Today, the majority of historians sees conservatism as a normal “action” rather than as a pathological “reaction”. Some even go as far as to view conservatism as an autonomous ideology, that is an ideology whose appearance is not dependent upon any specific historical configuration or social forces .

I personally disagree with this vision of conservatism. Indeed, I think that most conservatives adopt conservative ideas in order to defend one particular established order, that their conservatism is instrumental, positional, rather than primary, inborn. In other words, conservatism for me is a situational ideology, which develops to meet specific historical needs. The question, therefore, is not : “Why are some people born to conservatism and why others aren’t ?”, but : “In what political, social, cultural context is a conservative ideology generated ?”

II - When, where, and how is a conservative culture generated ?

Nobody can answer this question in a straightforward way. What historians can do, however, is try to explain the reasons for conservatism’s current success. There are three ways to do this.

- One way is to look at the higher echelons of conservative power, that is, political parties, corporate elites, foundations and think tanks. This is what historians like Mary Brennan, Kimberly Phillips-Fein, and Alice O’Connor have done over the past few years.

1) In 1995, Mary Brennan pulished a book focusing on the conservative strategy to take over the Republican party and thereby win the South. It was entitled Turning Right in the Sixties : The Conservative Capture of the GOP.¹

2) In 2006, Kimberly Phillips-Fein wrote an article showing how a small but increasingly influential group of conservative businessmen (among whom Lemuel Ricketts Boulware, the Vice-President for Employee and Community Relations at General Electric) mobilized during the Eisenhower years against what most thought to be well-accepted tenets of New Deal liberalism².

3) As for Alice O’Connor, she recently studied how, even as the mainstream philanthropic establishment was reorganizing in response to reform legislation passed in 1969, the conservative right was laying the groundwork for an alternative philanthropic network that would aim to provide the cultural, intellectual, and ideological capital for the triumphant return of laissez-faire capitalism – heralded, as it were, by the escalating erosion of the New Deal welfare state and progressive taxation, as well as the deregulation of labor markets and of corporate and individual wealth.³

- Other historians such as Kevin Kruse or Lisa McGirr prefer to focus on conservatism at the grassroots, that is on the work accomplished by local conservative militants and organizations.⁴ In 2003, Jeff Roche, in a local study of the Texas Panhandle in the 1960s, examined the emergence of a “cowboy conservatism” based on the defense of “Christianity, family, whiteness, capitalism, and tradition”. This ideal, he argued, emerged not from watching sixties upheavals on television but rather through “local battles to define and defend local values”. Thus, Roche's essay delivered rich insights into the effects local SDS activism, Black Power advocacy, busing, and prairie counterculturalists had on local politics.⁵

- One final way to explain the success of conservatism today is to look at the ideas of the movement. After all, intellectuals are the ones who have articulated the formal strategy and concerns of the conservative movement and thus laid the groundwork for electoral success.

Few syntheses of conservative ideas exist, apart from George Nash’s famous Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, first published in 1976.⁶ Most of the time, historians prefer to focus on the ideas of one particular conservative thinker, whom they deem representative or, on the contrary, unique : James Burnham (Daniel Kelly)⁷, Ayn Rand (Jennifer Burns)⁸, William F. Buckley (John B. Judis)⁹, Leo Strauss (Shadia Drury)¹⁰, Daniel Patrick Moynihan (Robert Katlmann)¹¹, or Frank S. Meyer (Kevin Smant)¹².

The biographical approach, though less ambitious in scope, seems to me an excellent way of looking at the conservative movement in America. Indeed, it allows the historian to :

- vivify a subject which might otherwise be dry.

- trace the origins of the conservative ideas in the conservatives’ personal lives, encounters, and reactions to particular events. As I said earlier, there is no genetic predisposition to conservatism. Many Federalists began as successful revolutionaries, and America’s premier conservative, John C. Calhoun, started his career as a Jeffersonian nationalist. The impulse to conservatism comes from the social challenge before the theorist, not the intellectual tradition behind him. Men are driven to conservatism by the shock of events, by the horrible feeling that a society or institution that they have approved or taken for granted and with which they have been intimately connected may suddenly cease to exist. Each individual statement of the conservative position comes, therefore, from personal experience.

- finally, the biographical approach to conservatism permits to destroy any illusion of homogeneity that the conservative movement or its enemies might cherish and/ or foster. The history of the US conservative movement is a series of tensions, conflicts, clashes between strong personalities, and the biographical genre undeniably is the most convenient to tell such a story.

The arguments which I have just expounded certainly had an influence in my own decision to write a biography of Irving Kristol.

III – Who is Irving Kristol ?

Kristol was born in 1920 in New York City, the son of a Jewish clothing subcontractor. In 1936 he graduated from Boys High School in Brooklyn and entered City College of New York. A Trotskyist sympathizer for years, he deferred from joining the movement until the spring of 1940, when he graduated from college and the Workers Party was founded. A few months later, while working as a machinist’s apprentice at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Kristol joined the “Shermanites” in their departure from the Workers Party to enter the Socialist Party.

In 1942 he accompanied his wife, Gertrude Himmelfarb to Chicago where she began graduate study. Waiting to be drafted, he served as the editor of Enquiry, the press organ of the Shermanites.

Finally drafted in 1944, Kristol saw combat in France and Germany as an infantryman and was discharged in 1946 as a staff sargeant. While living in postwar England, where Himmelfarb was attending Cambridge University, Kristol began contributing to Commentary, the Jewish monthly. In 1947 he returned to New York to become the magazine’s managing editor as it was becoming a major forum for anticommunist thought among intellectuals. This phase of Kristol’s career began with a turn to religion and climaxed with his famous statement in 1952 that “there is one thing the American people know about Senator McCarthy; he, like him, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing”.

He then returned to England to found and coedit the journal Encounter, sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom and later revealed to have received funding from the CIA. After returning to the US for a brief stint on the editorial staff of the Reporter, Kristol became the executive vice-president of Basic Books, a position he held for the next eight years. During this period, with Daniel Bell, he founded the Public Interest and in 1969 became Henry R. Luce Professor of Urban Values at New York University.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Kristol began to lay the foundations for what later came to be called “neoconservatism”. According to him, neoconservatism was nothing more than “liberalism mugged by reality”. In other words, Kristol viewed neoconservatism as an attempt to defend Cold War liberalism, albeit by different tactical means. Claiming that the United States and the Western world suffered from a “crisis of authority” that was essentially cultural and that the American government was crippled by “overload” because it attempted to do too much domestically, Kristol called for reducing the government and restabilizing the international order.

In the late 1970s and 1980s, Kristol became closely associated with the Republican congressman from upstate New York, Jack Kemp, and the Arthur Laffer “supply side” school of economics.

Since then, his function has been to arm right-wing politicians and corporate executives with an ideological self-assurance that traditional conservatism could not provide. Through his connections with the American Enterprise Institute and the Wall Street Journal, and in lectures to business groups, Kristol has made his ideological services avalaible for impressive fees. He has also established himself “at the center where the neo-boys’ network interconnects” (Walter Goodman), arranging positions for those who think as he does on editorial boards and in universities.

Today, Kristol is 86 years old and lives in Washington with his wife, historian Gertrude Himmelfarb. Though he has not written anything since 2005, he is still active in the conservative movement.

IV – Why write a biography of him ?

Now that you know more about who Kristol is, I would like to explain in greater detail why I chose to focus on his life and writings.

My project originates in a paradox. Though Irving Kristol is widely considered as one of the most influential New York Intellectuals and is often acknowledged as “the godfather of neoconservatism” or “the Lenin of the new conservatism”¹³, no book has been written about him. Though some historians and political scientists like Peter Steinfels, Alan Wald, J. David Hoeveler or Gary Dorrien have devoted chapters to him in their respective studies of neoconservatism, those pages remain very allusive, and only select such episodes in Kristol’s life as can illustrate their own vision of neoconservatism¹⁴. Therefore, Irving Kristol’s life and thought have never been studied for themselves, outside the restrictive framework of “the neoconservative intellectual movement” or “the New York Intellectuals”. There’s a gap here that needs to be filled, as journalist John J. Miller noted in his recent book about the John M. Olin Foundation : « Of all the figures involved in the conservative movement, the one who most desperately needs a biography written about him is Irving Kristol »¹⁵. Of course, the mere absence of a biography does not in itself justify the writing of one. So let me explain now why I think Kristol’s life deserves to be told.

Well, first, Irving Kristol is an interesting subject because his life is a kind of compendium of American twentieth-century history. His career, and especially his transition from liberalism to conservatism, reflects the general political evolution of the United States between 1945 and 2000.

But Kristol’s life cannot be reduced to being a “window on twentieth-century America”. Kristol is also one of the most famous and the most quoted political commentators in America. He has taken part in all the great intellectual debates since the Second World War. Nothing has escaped his attention, be it in the economic, political, or social sphere, though religion, criticism of the welfare state and the necessity to invent a new conservatism undoubtedly are the most important themes of the 600 articles or so he has published between 1942 and 2005.

More important than his analyses of current events, however, is the fact that he has managed to turn into a full-fledged actor on the American political stage. Since the 1970s, he has become the spokesman for neoconservatism as well as the main purveyor of funds, positions and donations in the neoconservative milieu, connecting the often-disconnected worlds of academia, business, and philanthropy. He has become a fixer, a builder, on top of being a theoretician, thus illustrating Bernard Lahire’s concept of “the plural man”¹⁶. The result is that today, it is almost impossible to study the “conservative revolution” of the 1980s without coming across Kristol’s name.

If Kristol deserves the “plural man” label, it is of course because he likes to cloud issues and to transcend barriers, but also because he has never managed to resolve certain internal contradictions. He defends capitalism but has not been able to reconcile it with the moral values he cherishes so much. Though a critic of the welfare-state, he refuses its disappearance. Though a great reader of elitist philosopher Leo Strauss, he also celebrates the common sense of the average American. Though hostile to Darwin’s theory of evolution, he opposes the teaching of creationism in schools. Though a partisan of a realist foreign policy, he has defended nation-building in Irak. Faced with such paradoxes, it is tempting to dismiss Kristol’s thought as simply inconsistent and to forgo any study of it. This is not the course that I have chosen. Indeed, I think that most of Kristol’s reversals are rooted in precise, biographical events and that they demonstrate Kristol’s capacity to question his own beliefs. In that sense, I think that Kristol’s contradictions are perhaps the true sign of the intellectual nature of his thinking.

So, here are the five main reasons that have led me to take Irving Kristol’s life as a subject for my PhD dissertation :

- No biography of Irving Kristol exists yet (that’s what I call my “marketing argument” in private).

- A biography of Kristol permits to reread the whole history of twentieth-century America. It is a biography of twentieth-century America, in a way.

- Writing a biography of Kristol permits to bury oneself in the great intellectual debates of these last 50 years, and more particularly to reconstruct the genealogy of neoconservative thought of whom Kristol is said to be the “godfather”.

- It also allows to recount the career of an essential actor of American politics, of a man who, by migrating from the intellectual to the political sphere, forces us to reassess the categories of “intellectual and “political”.

- Finally, writing a biography of Irving Kristol leads us to follow the rambling development of ideas which are anything but insipid, which are often provocative and dogmatic, but also contradictory and in perpetual gestation.

It is still difficult for me to say what the content of my biography will look like. But after a year and a half of work, I think I’ve got a fairly definite idea of the way I am going to tell the story of Kristol’s life.

V – How to write a biography of Irving Kristol

One thing is certain, for instance : the story I’m going to tell will have nothing with hagiography. First, because Kristol, although he‘s been called the “patron saint” of neoconservatism¹⁷, still has not been canonized. But above all because hagiography postulates that everything is given from the start, that life follows a pattern set at birth. “The end repeats the beginning”, in a way.¹⁸. A biography, on the contrary, must give priority to narration, it must describe the evolution of someone’s thought over time. It mustn’t try to homogenize this evolution. In this respect, the autobiographical essay that Kristol published in 1995 really constitutes a counter-model for me. Indeed, Kristol keeps repeating in it that his existence only confirms predispositions present at birth : « I think it fair to say that what might be called a ‘neoconservative imagination’ is something that I have always possessed », « I was born ‘theotropic’ », « With such a bourgeois character, one which I seem to have been born with, it is not surprising that […] I had left the Trostkyists » and « I knew in my bones that I was not born to be a novelist »¹⁹. This idea of calling is a literary device that I won’t resort to.

I also refuse to yield to a heroic approach to history, which would consider Kristol a “great man” demonstrating extraordinary psychological qualities. The way he, the son of Ukrainian immigrants, has managed to get out of Depression-ridden Brooklyn is certainly worthy of praise, but it does not mean that Kristol has transcended the codes of his era. What he has done is merely appropriate them, like hundreds of other Jews of his time. A biography should not depict an individual life at the expense of the big picture.

Nor should it do the contrary, for that matter. Otherwise, it risks becoming what historians call a “modal biography” (François Dosse)²⁰. In that type of biography, the individual has value only in the sense that he illustrates a context, a moment, or a social category. The main problem of the “modal biography” is that it relies on circular thinking. For example, writing a “modal biography” of Irving Kristol would suppose that I already deem him representative of the whole group of neoconservative intellectuals, that I consider him an emblem, and therefore that I have a preestablished view of what neoconservatism is. I thus run the risk, not only of concealing anything that might differentiate Kristol from a predetermined model, but also of never really questioning the “neoconservative” label itself. Is it legitimate ? Does it make sense ?

What we see here is that taking the individual as a protoype leads to an epistemological dead end. Far more relevant to me is the approach which considers the biographical material in its singularity, as a privileged entrance point to a specific period of time. This is what Frédéric de Coninck and Francis Godard call the « individual progression model »²¹.

This type of biography, rather than looking for a point of origin from where everything flows or seeing the individual’s development as pre-structured by exterior scansions, reintroduces chance in a narration that does not, however, neglect environmental constraints and the necessary character of certain events. Thus doing, it accomplishes the real fusion between the singular and the universal, between the individual and the social, a fusion which should be the ultimate goal of all biographies.

VI – What structure should the biography be based on ?

Adopting the “individual development model” instead of the hagiographic, heroic or modal ones will, of course, affect the structure of my narration. My biography will not be a rereading of Kristol’s life in light of its outcome, nor will it follow a sandwich pattern : a little bit of context, a little bit of Kristol’s life, a little bit of context etc. The “individual development model” imposes, I think, a linear, chronological narration linking context and biography very closely.

This linear narration will not exclude specific focuses on certain essential episodes of Kristol’s life like the publication in 1952 of his article « ‘Civil Liberties’ : 1952 – A Study in Confusion », which revealed him as a fierce polemicist.²², or his encounter 20 years later with Jude Wanniski, who converted him to Supply-side Economics. These episodes represent moments of transition, and ensure as such a better understanding of the ulterior orientation of Kristol’s thought or actions.

The factual narration that I’ve just talked about will bring us from 1920 to today, and will thus cover 9 decades. Such a scope justifies, I think, an ulterior attempt at synthesis. This will be the object of the second part of my dissertation. When I say synthesis, I mean less a summary than a detailed examination of such controversial questions as :

• Was Kristol really a Trotskyist between 1936 and 1940, while he was at City College ?

• When did he really become a neoconservative ? Was it in the 1960s or much before that ?

• What was the exact influence of Sidney Hook’s, Leo Strauss’s, and Reinhold Niebuhr’s ideas on his thinking ?

• Is his defense of religion purely utilitarian ?

• Is he really an intellectual ? Or should he be defined as a “counter-intellectual » ?

• Does he deserve the “godfather” label ? How can we measure his influence on American political life ?

• Does he have any disciples ? Are there any second-generation neoconservatives ?

Exploring these questions will usefully complement the previous chronological narration. It will also allow to multiply the levels of analysis and therefore prevent any risk of ossification. After all, the wish of any biographer is to recreate the movement of life through a narration that is itself as lively as possible.

Sources used

As far as primary sources are concerned, I must say that I have plenty to work with :

• 600 articles and about twenty books.

• The transcripts of interviews that I’ve made last summer (William Kristol, Leon Kass, Ben Wattenberg, Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter).

• Personal papers of Daniel Boorstin, Dwight Macdonald, Hannah Arendt, Robert Bork, and Rheinhold Niebuhr, and maybe the papers of Daniel Patrick Moynihan one day…

• The CCF and ACCF archives in New York and Chicago.

As far as secondary sources are concerned, I have nothing to complain about either. Although very few articles have been written about Kristol himself, a lot of books on conservatism and neoconservatism have been published in recent years. Some of them have brought to light neglected aspects of Kristol’s life. For instance, John J. Miller, in his book about the John M. Olin Foundation (The Gift of Freedom), has highlighted the essential role played by Kristol in the reorientation of the foundation toward the funding of pro-capitalist and conservative organizations at the end of the 1970s. So, I think there’s a lot of scholarship like this that can indirectly help me for my biography of Irving Kristol.

Elements of bibliography