This is a two-part post. For part one, click here.
Irving Kristol is probably the most well known of the founders of the neo-conservative movement. What is less well known, however, is what that movement really stands for. While the name includes the word conservative, the movement transforms conservatism into a form of prudish socialism that would please no one but its leaders, which is why, in my opinion, they don’t advertize their true goals.
In this two-part blogpost, I cite and comment on a small selection of quotes from Kristol’s definitive book, Neo-Conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea. In part one, I quote Kristol’s strategic call for a “conservative welfare state;” here in part two, I offer some of his more specific ideas.
SOCIAL REFORM: GAINS AND LOSSES (1973)
Although this shocking essay, Social Reform: Gains and Losses, was written decades ago, Kristol chose to include it in this definitive anthology without revision or apology.
One wonders what would happen if all the money spent on Great Society programs had been used to institute, in however modest a way, just two universal reforms: (1) children’s allowance, as already described, and (2) some form of national health insurance? My own surmise is that the country would be in much better shape today. We would all –including the poor among us—feel that we were making progress, and making progress together, rather than at the expense of one another.
Yes such reforms are expensive and technically “wasteful,” in that they distribute benefits to all, needy or not. But to stress this aspect of the matter is to miss the point: Social reform is an inherently political activity, and is to be judged by political, not economic or sociological, criteria. When I say social reform is “political,“ I mean that its purpose is to sustain the polity, to encourage a sense of political community, even of fraternity. To the degree that it succeeds in achieving these ends, a successful social reform—however liberal or radical its original impulse –is conservative in its ultimate effects. Indeed, to take the liberal or radical impulse, which is always with us, and slowly to translate that impulse into enduring institutions which engender larger loyalties is precisely what the art of government, properly understood, is all about.
Is that what you understand government to be about? Is government an institution whose primary purpose is to be an institution? Are radical socialist policies inherently conservative because they engender loyalty to the government? Kristol is not just redefining conservatism here, he is abolishing it! Maybe if we did understand Kristol’s version of “properly understood” government, we would abolish it!
