FOR a man who purveyed little more than warmed over supply side economics and a stress on the need for religiously-rooted morality, Irving Kristol – who has died aged 89 – was idolised on the transatlantic political right to an extent entirely out of proportion with any distinctive intellectual contribution to their cause.
Given that he remains little known to the public in this country, the extent of the coverage given to the passing of the godfather of neoconservatism over here comes as something of a surprise.
Thus the likes of Daniel Finkelstein can rhapsodise about ‘what made Irving Kristol great’, without providing any evidence of greatness, other than general misantrophic grumpiness harnessed behind the cause of reaction and somehow served up as profundity.
If anything, Kristol was more of an organiser than an ideas man, acting as publisher for the journals that first got the neocon message across. That’s no bad thing from the right’s point of view; all political currents need people together enough make things happen.
But what I suspect the right really likes about him is his backstory; while Kristol coined the soundbite that a neoconservative is ‘a liberal who has been mugged by reality’, he was in fact a Trot mugged by conservatism, and then brutally beaten out of all recognition.
What will be of most interest to Dave’s Part readers is Kristol’s journey from far left to far right. This man made opposition to Soviet totalitarianism the fulcrum of his political thought, thus evolving seamlessly from young anti-Stalinist revolutionary socialist to hardline anti-communist old man, while still retaining some level of consistency.
Back in the 1930s, of course, Kristol was a teenage member of the Socialist Workers’ Party, at a time when that organisation was in close contact with Trotsky himself in Mexico City.
In 1940, Kristol lined up with the breakaway minority opposition around Max Shactman, along with noted philosopher James Burnham and subsequently famous novelist Saul Bellow, both later to move to the right.
Shachtman himself supported the Bay of Pigs incursion in Cuba and the Vietnam war, and by 1972, implicitly endorsed Republican anti-communist Richard Nixon. A number of other big name neocons were associated with Shachtman in their youth, including Jeane Kirkpatrick, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz.
When I first got involved in the labour movement, elderly East End tankies routinely offered admonition that such line of motion was nascent within the Trotskyist DNA. Any word of criticism of actually existing socialism was tantamount to the first step down the road to reactionary Toryism. I suspect some on the left believe something pretty like that, even today.
Yet it is always impossible to know exactly what drives any individual down the path from right to left. As the Brooklyn-born son of Jewish immigrant garment workers, Kristol’s life story was clearly not another instance the standard posh boy university flirtation with paper-selling.
Ultimately I think the answer lies in both generational and national factors. Radical politics in the US in the cold war years, especially the McCarthyite 1950s, was subject to specific pressures which the British left was not forced to endure. In the UK, careerists always had the option of social democracy. Under our system, pensioned off former Cliffites can easily end up in the House of Lords.
But in the final analysis, the right loves Kristol because he started out as one of ours, and ended up as one of them, taking numerous other clever individuals along with him for the trip.