Originally posted by crazy comie+Dec 6 2003, 12:28 AM--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (crazy comie @ Dec 6 2003, 12:28 AM)
El
[email protected] 5 2003, 06:00 AM
(which is why it dosen't surprise me that the first neo-conservative intelectuals were once Trots).
Doudt that very much.[/b]
http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3830066a52a3.htm
The Godfather of Neoconservatism
Irving Kristol looks and sounds like your Uncle Mordy, the kind of Jew who probably owned a hardware store on New York's Lower East Side. He doesn't answer "yes," he says "yeah," and like the native New Yorker that he is, there's nothing wishy-washy about his opinions.
But you also know not to be fooled by appearances: He is one smart guy, a serious intellectual, a social philosopher and a political icon, so it is a little intimidating when you sit down with him one-on-one. But he's no egghead, and like with Uncle Mordy, you soon find yourself in an easy back and forth, debating history and politics like Jews tend to do.
For Kristol, 79, it is second nature, if not first, for he's been at it now for over 60 years. Not from the same perspective, mind you. Today he is known as the godfather of neoconservatism, a Wall Street Journal columnist, co-editor of The Public Interest magazine which he founded in 1965, publisher of The National Interest magazine, and the author of numerous books presenting the conservative ideology.
But when he started out espousing his political theories as an undergraduate at the City College of New York in the late 1930s, he did so standing on the soapbox of the Young People's Socialist League, i.e. the Trotskyists. City College was famous then as the place for New York's very smart Jewish kids - "The only people I knew who went to another college were the kids who were not so bright and went to NYU," Kristol says with a smile - and it wasn't just an academic education that those young Jews were receiving.
Back then it was de rigueur on college campuses for students to debate and advocate their political convictions, which by and large were left wing. Kristol was no exception.
The headquarters for those political discussions was the school lunchroom, where various religious, cultural, ethnic and political groups would stake a claim to one of a dozen alcoves along the wall, and call it home. Catholics, blacks, Zionists, Orthodox Jews, athletes - each group had its own spot.
The cafeteria became the birthing ground for a host of intellectuals who dominated the second half of the 20th century. Indeed, a movie was made last year about four of them - Kristol, Irving Howe, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Bell - called Arguing the World, which explored that political era and the intellectuals who were formed by it.
Kristol, Howe and other anti-Stalinists were stationed in Alcove No. 1, the first spot on the right from the entrance. A clear division, if not snobbery, existed between the different left-wing radical groups, one that is still heralded today.
"The reason we became Trotskyists rather than a Communists was because it was so absurd to be a Communist and tied to Stalin," says Kristol over coffee at the Hilton Hotel in Jerusalem last week. "It was obvious that he was a tyrant, a butcher, a liar. The Trotskyist movement intellectually was far superior to the Communist movement. I mean Trotsky was an intellectual after all - orthodox Marxist nevertheless, but an intellectual."
And so, for a year and a half, Kristol pushed the party line, attending League meetings and making like- minded friends. But there came a point when Kristol said "there's something wrong with this picture, " and realized that being a Trotskyist had its limits.
"There were a lot of books and ideas floating around that the Trotskyist movement seemed to have no knowledge of or interest in. And one of the reasons we left, I remember, was an education program for the young Trotskyists. We said, 'Look, read Marx and Lenin and Trotsky, but how about reading Max Faber, or several of the other writers?'
"They said 'absolutely not.' They wouldn't let us read anything but Marx, the prescribed literature. We wanted to bring in these other books we were reading, which were very interesting. So we left, a group of us, myself and some of my closest friends, who just felt that we had outgrown the movement - we were reading all these other interesting books, and they weren't."
Kristol is not ashamed of his radical roots, now so firmly disowned. As he would write years later: "Joining a radical movement when one is young is very much like falling in love when one is young. The girl may turn out to be rotten, but the experience of love is so valuable that it can never be entirely undone by the ultimate disenchantment."
"Yeah, I have no regrets having been a Trotskyist," he says now. "I met my wife [author Gertrude Himmelfarb] at a [League] meeting. Then we got engaged and left the movement together. I made my oldest and closest friends [there] - they were in the movement and left more or less when I did. It was a great educational experience - and I never had to read any more Marx, Lenin or Trotsky."
Next door to his group in the City College cafeteria, in Alcove No. 2, sat the pro-Stalinists, members of the Young Communist League. One of the men who hung out there was an recent electrical-engineering graduate, two years older than Kristol, named Julius Rosenberg.
Kristol says that although he vaguely remembers him from those college days, he was not surprised 10 years later when Rosenberg was arrested for conspiracy to commit espionage.
"My thoughts were, yeah, of course he was a spy. I never had any doubt about that, never for a moment. Those people in Alcove 2 - it was so easy for them to be spies, they would have felt that they were being loyal to the country that incarnated socialist ideals. So I never had any doubt that he was a spy."
But Kristol was opposed to Rosenberg's death sentence because " I didn't see the point of it. The war was all over, why execute him, why not a long prison sentence? I was against the execution. It was that stupid judge."
It was also those times, the early 1950s, when America's fear of Russia led to a veritable witch-hunt against suspected Communist sympathizers. The House Un- American Activities Committee (HUAC), and later Sen. Joseph McCarthy, held hearings and called witnesses to testify against friends, colleagues and anyone they knew of who had once been affiliated with any left-wing organization.
Kristol was never called to testify and name names, and is not sure now what he would have done.
"I've often thought about it, and my answer is that I don't know. I think that I probably would have, since nothing would have happened to them, they were all known. I have nothing against snitching in [cases of] criminal activities, I guess I have nothing against snitching in these activities [either]. Fortunately I was never called, I never faced that issue. But the FBI had so thoroughly infiltrated the Trotskyist movement, they knew the name and address of every single member."
The trouble with McCarthy, as a fellow anti- Communist, is that "he gave the anti-Communist movement a bad name. He was an embarrassment. As far as we were concerned, he was a distraction, and we wished he would shut up and go away."
"But certainly there was no fear [of] McCarthy. It's hard to say this without being misinterpreted: for most of us, including people in the intellectual world, certainly for most Americans, the McCarthy thing was not nearly as important as subsequent writings make it appear. It didn't affect anyone I knew."
After college Kristol got married, not yet 22. Then came World War II.
Kristol served in the infantry of the 12th Armored Division, ending up in Marseilles and staying there for a year after the war. There he saw Jewish refugees from Europe in displaced persons' camps waiting for an opportunity to go to Palestine.
"By the time they got to the camps they were no longer scarecrows, they were reasonably fed. I had never been a Zionist particularly, but obviously I wanted to help them get to Israel. I used to go there regularly, talk to them, help them to the degree that I could. I would bring them food from the PX, cigarettes - mainly I could bring them things, the equivalent of money.
"I was only a sergeant in those days, there was no way I could help them much officially. But I got to know a lot of them. I spoke French, English and a little Yiddish - truth is my German is better than my Yiddish - but we managed."
Though he may not have been an active Zionist, Kristol still remembers the JNF blue box in his home when he was growing up, and the pennies he would collect to fill it. His parents were immigrants from Ukraine who married after they came to the United States in the 1890s. He remembers his grandfather was Orthodox, who "did nothing except study," and that the home where he grew up in the Williamsburg and Ridgewood sections of Brooklyn was "mildly observant," and kosher.
"Being Jewish was not something you thought about, since every one else was Jewish too. I didn't feel anything about Judaism - didn't know anything about it really, except what I learned in heder. I went to heder after school, from nine to 13 years old. It was a very Orthodox heder, a very bad heder. I translated Humash [Pentateuch] from Hebrew into Yiddish, two languages I did not know, since my parents spoke only English to us, though they spoke Yiddish to each other. But we overheard it, so we picked up some Yiddish."
He remembers his bar mitzva taking place in an Orthodox synagogue, "the kind where you walk into the shul and there are 200 men, all davening at their own rate, paying no attention to one another, very noisy."
Kristol would go to synagogue when his father did, but attendance dropped off when his grandfather died, "and once my mother died - she died when I was 16 - my father never set foot in a shul again. I never asked him why. He was not the rebellious type, but I think he said to hell with it. I said kaddish for my mother and he didn't, though he didn't mind my doing so. I think he was rather pleased that I did."
There was no Jewish learning in the Kristol house, though his parents kept a set of Sholom Aleichem in Yiddish. Kristol would hang out at the public libraries on Tompkins and Bushwick avenues, reading everything - boys' books, adventure stories, anything.
"I was smart - not the smartest, not a genius, just a bright Jewish kid" who went to P.S. 57 Boys High, and Ebbets Field on Sundays to catch Dodger doubleheaders.
"I look back on it and say, well, it was a perfectly normal childhood, perfectly happy childhood. I thought mine was the kind of childhood everyone had, since I didn't know anyone else who had a different kind of childhood."
Last week Kristol gave the inaugural Zalman C. Bernstein Memorial Lecture - sponsored by the Jerusalem- based Shalem Center - to an audience of roughly 1,000. The Shalem Center, a research institute focusing on Jewish social thought and Israeli public policy, will soon publish a book of Kristol's best essays, translated into Hebrew for the first time.
Kristol's books of essays in English include: On the Democratic Idea in America (1972), Two Cheers for Capitalism (1978), Reflections of a Neoconservative (1983), and Neoconservatism (1995).
[b]The question often asked of Kristol is how exactly he defines " neoconservatism," as opposed to classic conservatism. He says the neocon philosophy is a reaction to the older conservatism, in the area of economics as well as social issues.
"It's hard for an outsider to see it because we never had a program, we never had a meeting. The whole thing was done informally, deliberately - I didn't want to start a political movement. If they would have called a meeting I wouldn't have gone."
The neocons were in favor of an economic program of growth in what came to be known as supply-side economics, a philosophy championed by president Ronald Reagan.
"Whereas the older conservatism said 'We have to cut the budget, we're spending too much money,' we said 'No, you've got to cut taxes, you have to encourage growth, never mind the budget.' It was a sharp difference within conservatism, and originally we encountered great opposition."
The neocons were always more interested in the social issues than the traditional conservatives were, Kristol says, "I think because of our intellectual background. Traditional conservatives were economists, all of them, and they were only interested in anti- Marx economics."
Kristol cites his position on the welfare state, which he is in favor of reforming and not impoverishing, as strict conservatives are, and on abortion, which he says neocons "never had a problem with," leaving it up to the individual.
Kristol says parts of his neocon philosophy can be imported to Israel, but that it would take a change of attitude to make it a reality.
"You have to care less about equality, because growth creates inequalities. Always. You can't have it both ways. Growth is better because everyone improves their position under growth, even if they improve it unequally. What you want is a revision of the whole taxation system, and the whole structure of the Israeli economy, which has already been happening.
"But it's very hard in Israel because the commitment to equality goes way back. You have to care less about it, that's all. It doesn' t mean you don't take care of the unfortunates. You don't take care of the sick, the lame, the halt because you want to make them more equal. You want to make them better off, that's all."
What's problematic in the transfer of the philosophy, Kristol says, is the whole social-religious situation, the bitter divide between the secular and religious.
"I just wish this split between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, secular- religious, can somehow be tempered. That bothers me a lot. It's so unnecessary. We permitted the black hats to have more influence than they're entitled to by their numbers, because of this stupid electoral system.
"One of the things that should be changed is the electoral system. The best electoral system is the American/British constituency. No party lists. I keep explaining this, arguing it now over the years, but I get nowhere. In Israel, if someone on a list gets elected, who is he responsible to? To the party. In the United States or even in England, you get elected from your district [and you represent] all the people, including the ones who voted against you.
"That really changes the whole political complexion, because you can't be that partisan, unless the people in your district happened to be that partisan, which is rare. So the fact that you represent all the people in that district has a powerful moderating influence. And therefore that's the best system, I think."
Neoconservatism came into being as a reaction to the liberal 1960s. As Commentary editor-at-large Norman Podhoretz wrote, "Neoconservatism came into the world to combat the dangerous lies that were being spread by the radicalism of the Sixties and that were being accepted as truth by the established liberal institutions of the day."
Still in "doudt"? :rolleyes: