Irving Kristol is Dead. Good Riddance.

[elfs]

Irving Kristol, one of the major founders of the modern conservative movement, is dead. Like Bill Buckley, he wanted to found a movement with some intellectual credibility. As we now know, he has failed. The twin pillars of a religious moralism and unrestricted capitalism were inevitably doomed: the marketplace will move to satisfy our most trivial desires, a universal acid dissolving the existing morality in our baser nature.

Kristol's solution was to deny both democracy and universal truth. In order to preserve his idea of a great nation, the intellectual elites, the very people loathed and feared by the Teabaggers, must engage in a Noble Lie:

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.

Conservatives gleefully point out that whenever some liberal talks about overturning the existing political order (which is insanely conservative by all historical standards, thanks to people like Kristol and Buckley), those liberals never seem to understand that they're likely to end up among the ruled and not the rulers.

Kristol believed he was already among the "happy elites" capable of steering a docile public for their common good, "chosen by History." The neoconservative movement remains animated by this belief: that they are better than everyone else, and it is not education people need, but leadership and obedience. The Bush years were populated with calls to "deference the president," something that neither Clinton nor Obama ever got. That kind of poison, the notion that one side somehow deserves different treatment, will rot in the national veins for years to come, and yet the right has seized it through glib deceit and an illicitly seized penumbra of religious conviction.

So good riddance to Irving Kristol. I'd rather deal with Pat Buchanan's honest conservatism, however befouled it maybe with trite racism and anti-Semitism, than the dishonest flavor put forth by people committed to a tribal "winning at all costs," even of their own respectability.

Comments

[tagryn]

Elf's passion on issues is one reason why I keep reading, but sometimes it descends into ugliness, and this is one of those times. The tone throughout of glee and satisfaction at another's death pretty much invalidates it all for me: Elf's obviously too far gone on this to present Kristol's ideas in any unbiased way, since he hated the guy's guts enough to be glad he's dead. And I say that as a guy who doesn't care about Kristol one way or another; I felt the same way about the few cons who were happy that Kennedy passed away.

[shunra.livejournal.com]

I take very seriously the crimes of that vicious man. He inspired generations of people to lie as a lifestyle, as their way to interpret reality to the people who trusted them.

I grew up in a world that was heavily influenced by the lies of Kristol and his despicable ilk. Trying to figure out what is *not* a lie, where reality actually starts, has been the task of my life.

It feels like a sort of intentionally induced disconnect from reality, an emergence from mental fog into clarity. That they did this to people on purpose - that is unforgivable.

I consider Kristol to have cheated justice by dying before his crimes against humanity were generally accepted as crimes.

Troublingly, Kristol's modus operandi is the only effective argument I've ever heard against free speech: a sufficient number of people who lie loud and long with the intent of perverting a democracy will succeed. I want to figure out a defense against that which will not involve Congress making laws.

You'd think that broadly available public education would be that defense... ...but, no.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

One of my "favorite" Irving Kristol anecdotes is the one where, at a dinner table, he was asked about his intellectually inglamorous son Bill's rise to fame as founder of The Weekly Standard and, later, Dan Quayle's press secretary. Kristol proceeded to name-drop a long list of highly placed and privileged men on whom he had called to help Bill into Harvard, toward an internship at the White house, bankroll his magazine project, and sell him to the vice president.

After hearing this, someone said, "To change the subject, Mr. Kristol, how do you feel about affirmative action?"

"I oppose it," Kristol said. "It subverts meritocracy."

That sort of unreflective acceptance of power and privilege deserves no place in our intellectual universe.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

Indeed. It has (probably) destroyed the American Experiment.

The way that the so-called "Conservatives" imitate the old Soviet Union, and the frequency with which they do so saddens me.

(I was alarmed, but when people didn't call The Big Lie a lie, I became too angry to be alarmed. As things slid further downhill, I eventually became too sickened to be angry, then too sad to be sickened. Now, I've given up all hope that the US will not become totalitarian/authoritarian within my lifetime.)