Irving Kristol

4 Comments so far ↓

• joemarier // Sep 18, 2009 at 4:50 pm

  Don’t you worry, Danielle. The kids are all right.

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• raygun // Sep 18, 2009 at 6:30 pm

  Wow, what a passion for life!

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• JJWFromME // Sep 18, 2009 at 6:52 pm

  One of the most interesting people of the 20th century, I think, as intensely as I disagree with a lot of what he did and said. (Speaking as one of this site’s occasional liberal commenters, BTW.)

  I’m surprised there haven’t been more books written about him.

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• balconesfault // Sep 20, 2009 at 6:34 pm

  Although Kristol’s rejection of many of the things that progressives view as critical building blocks to a civil society was integral to taking the right wing to the land of Palin and Beck – his own intellectualism implicitly rejecting the intellectualism of the Progressives.

  From Tanenhaus:
  http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/conservatism-dead

  In 1975, the same year Phillips’s, Buchanan’s, and Rusher’s manifestos all were published, Irving Kristol, the onetime elegist of the non-ideological “reforming spirit,” identified a “new class” of liberal enemies. They were “not much interested in money but are keenly interested in power,” Kristol wrote. “Power for what? Well, the power to shape our civilization–a power, which, in a capitalist system, is supposed to reside in the free market. The ‘new class’ wants to see much of this power redistributed to government, where they will then have a major say in how it is exercised.” And who, exactly, populated this new class? “[S]cientists, teachers and educational administrators, journalists and others in the communication industries, psychologists, social workers, those lawyers and doctors who make their careers in the expanding public sector, city planners, the staffs of the larger foundations, the upper levels of the government bureaucracy.”

  That was an awful big enemies list, and that wide net by Kristol is a good place to start when you want to figure out why only about 1 in 20 scientists feel comfortable identifying themselves as Republicans.

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