Irving Kristol: Setting the stage for Radical Centrism? Being impressed by Yoram Hazony led me to take a fresh look at Irving Kristol because Hazony was deeply influenced by Kristol. By the way, reference to "Irving" in a recent essay of mine had nothing at all to do with Irving Kristol. In that essay the point that was made that "Irving" could not see the virtue in helping others succeed. In contrast, imperfectly or not, Irving Kristol understood that he could not be successful unless he helped others to achieve some measure of fame and fortune. Kristol, of course, was Jewish, but there is a Christian adage that we might say he made his own regardlessly even though Christ was not his lodestar. The adage goes like this: "Put Jesus first, others second, and yourself third." This is the foundation of Christian faith itself. Indeed, if you do not so this, then all of the other things that you think make you a Christian are so much dust in your mouth. For Kristol, as for Hazony, the adage might be read as: Put your religious faith first, put the good of others including your family second, and only then put yourself on the list. This is very different than the libertarian creed, which is: Put yourself first, others a distant second, and nobody needs religious faith except maybe as window dressing or a sop to your conscience. To the extent that there are libertarians whom I admire it is because of the fact that some libertarians do, in fact, -even if they don't put others ahead of self interest- nonetheless regard helping others as vitally important; they have some kind of innate sense that you cannot be yourself as a person unless you are connected to a community that you help along to a better life. A prefect example of this was HL Mencken who, throughout the years of his mature life, helped a wide variety of talented people get the kinds of breaks they needed in order to achieve success. Mencken was an Atheist but you can nonetheless say that he was a pretty good Christian. This is all about Irving Kristol; it would be unfair to compare the son to the father, because the two were / are very different people. "Kristol" in the following comments refers to Irving. -------------------------------------- Was Irving Kristol a precursor to Radical Centrism? If we limit the time frame to the early years of Neo-Conservatism the answer is at least a qualified "yes," but remember that the neo-cons of the Bush years were different in many ways from the original "neo-cons" of the 1970s and into the 1980s. This is essentially about Neo-Conservatism of the 1970s and some years beyond. Most of the original neo-cons were former Democrats who had become disillusioned with the new direction of the party in the aftermath of the McGovern campaign and the subsequent re-making of that party to reflect a set of values that were influenced by Herbert Marcuse as much as anyone else, with other imported values derived from the identity politics of black militants. A good example was Daniel Bell who, at one point, said that he considered himself a Socialist in economics, a liberal in American politics, and a conservative in terms of religion and values. This is NOT a definition of Radical Centrism but it certainly is a step in that direction. Here are some quotes from Kristol that make RC points: * It is ironic to watch the churches, including large sections of my own religion, surrendering to the spirit of modernity at the very moment when modernity itself is undergoing a kind of spiritual collapse... * People need religion. It's a vehicle for a moral tradition. A crucial role. Nothing can take its place. * If you believe that no-one was ever corrupted by a book, you have also to believe that no one was ever improved by a book. * If you have standards, moral standards, you have to want to make them prevail, and at the very least you have to argue in their favor. Now, show me where libertarians have argued in some comprehensive way for a set of moral standards. … I don't think morality can be decided on the private level. I think you need public guidance and public support for a moral consensus. The average person has to know instinctively, without thinking too much about it, how he should raise his children * The United States is unique among nations in being founded not on race, not on kinship, not on language, not on a religion, but on political values. To be an American is to subscribe to these values. What Kristol also said something that, while it rings true can be questioned: "There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn't work." He also argued against the politics of victimhood, dismissing the Marxist view about oppressed demographic groups, at least as this applies to the United States: "The danger facing American Jews today is not that Christians want to persecute them but that Christians want to marry them. " About one position that Kristol took I am really uncertain, namely: “The three pillars of modern conservatism are religion, nationalism, and economic growth.” Is a similar Radical Centrist formulation possible? Yoram Hazony brought this up during his C-Span talk to make the point that contemporary 21st century American conservatism has all but abandoned the "religion" part of the tripod. But how might a Radical Centrist try to express the essence of RC in three basic principles? Some possibilities: Religion, education, and a moral market Original thought, community consciousness, and religion Enlightened nationalism, a moral market, and an optimal mix of religion and philosophy You can think of still other formulations but none are congruent with Kristol's statement. So, maybe he wasn't all that much of a proto-Radical Cenrist. Yet the Wikipedia article about Kristol also said this about his views: :Neo-conservatism, Kristol maintains, is not an ideology but a "persuasion", a way of thinking about politics rather than a compendium of principles and axioms. It is classical rather than romantic in temperament and practical and anti-utopian in policy." This comes more-or-less close. But RC, at least as I understand it, sees utopianism not as some form of Gnosticism but as an orientation to the future rather than to unchanging tradition, it is a way to turn dreams into projects to work toward. In America, utopias are always on trial and if something does not work, it is abandoned. But soon enough there is a new utopia and sometimes a new version of an old utopia can work. We all need some kind of vision of the future, some ideal of what the future can look like, to get things started, In any case, there certainly are areas where Kristol was not aligned with Radical Centrism. But the point is not that he was a Radical Centrist but that in a number of ways his ideas can be regarded as a resource for Radical Centrists to learn from. As Wikipedia added, Kristol said that "any economic philosophy has to be enlarged by "political philosophy, moral philosophy, and even religious thought" This is intrinsic to RC. Where there is close to1: 1 parallelism concerns a famous one-liner of his: "A conservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality" The RC equivalent goes like this: A Radical Centrist is someone who has been kicked where it hurts the most, each in their own way, by both the Democrats and the Republicans, and is searching for the best way possible to return the favor. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_Kristol#cite_note-18> -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
