The conservatism that [Irving] Kristol was referring to is neoconservatism. Neocons came in for a lot of criticism during the Iraq war, but neoconservatism was primarily a domestic policy movement. Conservatism was at its peak when the neocons were dominant and nearly every problem with the Republican Party today could be cured by a neocon revival.
Kristol and others argued that the G.O.P. floundered because it never accepted the welfare state. “The idea of a welfare state is in itself perfectly consistent with conservative political philosophy,” he argued. In a capitalist society, people need government aid. “They need such assistance; they demand it; they will get it. The only interesting political question is: How will they get it.”
I am reading The Servile Mind, by Kenneth Minogue, which takes the opposite point of view. Minogue argues that the welfare state substitutes political agency for moral agency. As citizens, we lose our moral compass and instead pick up a political one.
I find the book rather heavy going, but I probably will review it somewhere down the road. If you are looking for someone who concedes nothing to the oppressor-oppressed axis and instead views it as undermining Western values completely, then Minogue is your champion.
Back to the squishier conservatives, Reihan Salam lauds Brooks and Irving Kristol.
the right response to programs that really do undermine self-reliance and individual liberty may well be to eliminate or consolidate or devolve them. But it is important to acknowledge that not all programs undermine self-reliance and individual liberty, e.g., wage subsidies are designed to entice low-wage workers into the labor market, a crucial first step if these workers are eventually to climb the economic ladder to self-sufficiency. Wage subsidies are a paradigmatic example of a conservative welfare state initiative, and when well-designed they can do a great deal to strengthen the social foundation of a free enterprise economy by making it more inclusive.
Read the whole thing.
That’s a topic (neoconservatism vs. libertarianism) that needs to be fleshed out in an essay or book; it’s a bit meaty for a column of a few hundred words. ‘The people demand a welfare state’ is not an argument that will convince any skeptics.
“neoconservatism was primarily a domestic policy movement”
Says who? I’ve heard the neocons described as progressives who thought the left went too far with taxation and felt the Democratic party was insufficiently hawkish, so they opportunistically switched sides. But their “policy” doesn’t seem to fit conservatism and certainly not libertarianism otherwise: they are better described as political opportunists than anything else.
Here’s a laughable quote from Brooks:
“The kind of conservatism that Irving Kristol embodied was cheerful and at peace with modern America. The political heroes for this kind of conservatism, Kristol wrote, ‘tend to be T.R., F.D.R. and Ronald Reagan.'”
Really? You’re going to lump in Theodore Roosevelt, who split the party and who many Republicans hated, and Franklin Roosevelt, who almost all conservatives hate to this day (except for his time leading the war effort), with Reagan? That just goes to show what a joke the neocons are.
The neocons are completely discredited, in almost everything they push. I hope they’re purged from the discourse, that the Tea Party and libertarians can rhetorically bludgeon them till they’re out. Their current positions and sock puppets, Liz and Dick Cheney, John Bolton, Brooks, Peter King, are beyond laughable. This is the end for them, but I suspect they won’t go down easy.
When you review “The Servile Mind” I hope you will give analysis to the issue raised by Minogue about the process of Democracy (he does point out it is a process, not a condition) being captured by teleology – and how that affects the effect of the process on the social order and its moral structure.
Kristol himself wrote of a neoconservative movement arising largely out of a ‘sobering up’ / ‘mugged by reality’ backlash against ideological excesses of the 60’s radical New Left as the urban ramifications of race riots and exploding crime and flight to the suburbs began to take their toll on city centers (and especially in New York, where most of the movement’s writers lived).
In other words – they always liked FDR. A welfare state – but not so much as to corrode morals and work-ethic and inspire multi-generational dependency and social pathology. Also limited in motivation to reduction of hardship and suffering deriving from poverty, and increasing opportunity – instead of being obsesses with oppression-driven narratives of Social Justice. They were disillusioned of their Communist sympathies by admitting the wickedness and broken economic models and stopped apologizing for Stalin and the Soviets, and so they wanted a US that was assertive in foreign policy. Finally, they wanted the government to be able to enforce law and order on the streets and without Warren-Court innovations or any special preoccupation with matters of gender or race or sexuality.
In other words – these were people who wanted the evolution of American Left politics to stop in the 1940’s. When it did continue to evolve, and start to change the culture quickly and dramatically in the 60’s, they were indeed ‘conservatives’ in the sense of wanting to go back a generation, even ‘standing athwart History yelling ‘Stop!’. Non-neo paleo-conservatives wanted to go back to 1932. Today, wanting to go back to the Eisenhower administration is considered ‘paleo’.
Neocon governance is probably best exemplified by the Giuliani-Bloomberg pair of NYC Regimes. A Pushed-Back Left that doesn’t let the ideological currents get in the way of governing.