Thinking of the recent death of Irving Kristol, the so-called godfather of neo-conservatism, on 18th September, whatever one’s political stripes one has to admit he was a formidable theorist. Starting out as a Trotskyite socialist, he ran the full gamut of the political spectrum, moving to a bellicose Democrat stance in the late 1940s and 50s (what might now be termed neo-liberal interventionism) - who would like nothing better than to see the entire Eastern bloc flattened by atomic obliteration – to finally hardline conservative on every issue imaginable. This view of his was coined by a socialist intellectual adversary as neo-conservative. Kristol himself would not be out of place were he to have taken the title role of Dr Strangelove.
The neo-cons found their voice in a Reagan administration that viewed ordinary conservatives as being limp-wristed in adopting Keynesian economic formulations. Irving Kristol was as much a standard-bearer for the policies of the former California governor as Milton Friedman and the latter’s monetarism. To pay for the slashing of taxes, welfare programmes were eviscerated, greatly accelerating the ghettoisation of inner cities (for which ‘ghetto music’ and ghetto blasters were scant cultural consolation). Lower taxes unleashed a flood of spending power that went overwhelmingly into imports, since domestic production was still in the doldrums after the 1970s, thus creating the greatest trade deficit in history. Public borrowing to ramp up pressure on the Soviet Union, most notably through the Self-Defense Initiative (SDI) AKA Star Wars, did contribute to the end of the Cold War, but led to monstrous government debts that would have induced ancien régime France to shed a tear in solidarity.
All this, while Kristol edited the magazine The Nation, whose circulation barely skimmed more than ten thousand copies sold. I once saw a copy of the journal on a newsstand in London Victoria train station earlier this year. It was focused on current affairs (as usual) but was radioactively right-wing. Centrism and moderation were for wimps and only the weak were interested in compromise. The main piece was by famed neo-con artist John ‘the dolt’ Bolton; Mr Pastryface took to berating Barack Obama for not being a bombastic sabre rattler (yeah, like that really stopped North Korea and Iran from developing their nuclear programmes or made Georgia’s borders inviolate from Russian depredations). And there are some for whom Time magazine leans too far from impartiality to the right.
Kristol once described those in his movement as ‘liberal mugged by reality’, deploying the same arrogant rhetoric as the foreign policy nodes who call themselves ‘realists’ when actually they’re just cynical hawks who are too narrow-minded to concede that others may have a valid viewpoint. Given the severe deprivation of some cities caused by Reagan, there was a rise in muggings of ordinary people in general, but that was out of the sight of Kristol in his papier-mâché Nation tower and so would not have troubled him greatly as the market would have the responsibility of correcting it.
Given Kristol’s youthful dalliance with the communism of ‘perpetual revolution’, the concept of the political spectrum as a circle, with supposedly polar opposites being indeed close enough to have a common extremist modus operandi and way of thinking, is lent credence. The neo-con artist acolytes in the previous US presidential administration believed in the perpetual democratic revolution (what is democracy?) of the Middle East. The invasion of Iraq was the key for them, as Afghanistan was too much of a backwater, to start the dominoes falling, which would have returned to have ever greater effect in Iraq. And what an impact! A high likelihood of between half a million and a million Iraqis dead as a consequence and at least four times that number displaced, internally and externally, while when Hamas was elected in Palestine democracy was suddenly off the menu when those in power were opposed to US interest. A classic case of ideology trumping expertise to produce chaos and misery.
But let’s analyse Kristol’s soundbite of himself being mugged by reality. ‘Mugged’? That’s a severe trauma, anguish that can lead to irrationality, through depression and paranoia, with likely outcomes of hatred, prickliness and aggression. Hardly something to exult in, that is, if you are of moderate persuasion. And if the robber ‘took’ Kristol’s liberalism, it was obviously regarded as something good both to the thief and to Kristol, for him to carry it on his person and to be dusted up for his pains. The mental distress lasts longer than the physical. A no less-esteemed right-wing organ than The Daily Telegraph covered a scientific study that was more likely to crop up in The New Statesman (though it was tucked away on page two). The conclusion of the authors of the clinical report, after not insignificant testing, was that right-wingers were inherently more fearful (of everything) than left-wingers tended to be. Criminality prevalent in the world was Kristol’s reality, ready to denigrate you at every turn.
Thomas Hobbes conceived of the natural world as being ‘nasty, brutish and short’; Kristol would certainly have gone along with those sentiments, whilst vehemently disagreeing with Hobbes’ solution of an overarching Leviathan, since that would be ‘big government’. Life as nasty and brutish in Kristol’s looking glass yes, but short (for a man who lived to 89)? Well, in his comparatively mature thirties he had been an advocate of World War Three in the Fifties. “Mr President, I have a plan.”
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