The Kristol Method

“By the end of the Clinton administration, I was content to celebrate the triumph of conservatism as I understood it, and had no desire for other than incremental changes in the economic and social structure of the United States. I saw no need for the estate tax to be abolished, marginal personal-income tax rates further reduced, the government shrunk, pragmatism in constitutional law jettisoned in favor of “originalism,” the rights of gun owners enlarged, our military posture strengthened, the rise of homosexual rights resisted, or the role of religion in the public sphere expanded. All these became causes embraced by the new conservatism that crested with the reelection of Bush in 2004,” – Richard Posner

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/09/quote-for-the-day-ii-2.html#more

“Given how often Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and other right-wing populist rabble-rousers make coarser versions of the same argument today, it’s important to note that Kristol and his colleagues initially refused to propose a political response to the rise of new class. Adopting Trilling’s ambivalent stance toward the adversary culture of the intellectuals, Kristol explicitly rejected a “populist perspective” that portrayed new class elites as “usurp[ing] control of our media” and using “their strategic positions to launch an assault on our traditions and institutions.” Such a simple-minded view was, for Kristol, “misleading and ultimately self-defeating.” The rise of the new class and the adversary culture could not simply be willed or wished away, since they had emerged out of and had their roots in the extraordinarily complicated dynamics of modern, urban civilization itself. The appropriate response to recent troubling trends was thus careful study and reflection on the complexities of contemporary American life–not futile and destructive calls to stamp them out through political action.

“But Kristol’s moderation and detachment would soon come to an end…. Two years later, Kristol would assert that defending the American way of life against foreign and domestic enemies required that citizens develop a “religious attachment” to their country. In future years he would go even further, to claim that modern conservatism should be based on a synthesis of religion, nationalism, and economic growth–and that Republicans should give up their resistance to the transformation of their party into an explicitly religious organization–all for the sake of banishing liberalism, now flatly described as the “enemy,” from American political life.”

http://www.tnr.com/blog/damon-linker/irving-kristols-other-journey?page=0,1

“Among the core social scientists around The Public Interest there were no economists…. This explains my own rather cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit and other monetary or fiscal problems. The task, as I saw it, was to create a new majority, which evidently would mean a conservative majority, which came to mean, in turn, a Republican majority – so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government…”

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/09/movement-conservatism-and-debt.html

“David has the righteous answer,” Mattera said, “because he is taking pride in his Christian beliefs.” No matter that Mattera didn’t accurately grasp David’s biography or the biblical timeline. In conserva-land, David, a character from the Old Testament, was a Christian even before Christ was born. “Anyone who came against his God,” Mattera said, “David would take it personally.”

During the panel, Mattera took the David and Goliath metaphor another perverse step: If conservatives (David) smite liberals (Goliath), they will be rewarded with the hot conservative women, just like King Saul promised his daughter to the warrior who slew the evil giant. “You know his daughter must have been beautiful because there’s no guy whose gonna die for an ugly girl,” Mattera chortled. “Our women are hot. We have Michelle Malkin. Who does the left have, Rachel Maddow? Sorry, I prefer that my women not look like dudes.”

http://www.campusprogress.org/fieldreport/4585/taking-it-personally

Republican Party Chart

Meritocracy

This is a pretty funny story….

“I remember back in the late 1990s, when Ira Katznelson, an eminent political scientist at Columbia, came to deliver a guest lecture. Prof. Katznelson described a lunch he had with Irving Kristol during the first Bush administration.

The talk turned to William Kristol, then Dan Quayle’s chief of staff, and how he got his start in politics.

Irving recalled how he talked to his friend Harvey Mansfield at Harvard, who secured William a place there as both an undergrad and graduate student; how he talked to Pat Moynihan, then Nixon’s domestic policy adviser, and got William an internship at the White House; how he talked to friends at the RNC [Republican National Committee] and secured a job for William after he got his Harvard Ph.D.; and how he arranged with still more friends for William to teach at Penn and the Kennedy School of Government.

“With that, Prof. Katznelson recalled, he then asked Irving what he thought of affirmative action. ‘I oppose it,’ Irving replied. ‘It subverts meritocracy.’ ”

http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2009/jan/28/campos-to-the-manner-born/

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/09/from-kristol-to-beck.html#more

“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.” – Irving Kristol

The Father of Neo-Conservativism Dies

Had I known Irving Kristol was alive I probably would have attempted to email him to let him know that I thought he would go down in history books as the philosopher who doomed civilization as we know it.

Irving Kristol is the original and self-labeled “neo-conservative” and father to William Kristol, one of the most influential men in Republican politics despite having an impressive record at being wrong on every prediction and judgment that’s been offered up for public consumption. Irving Kristol started off as a Trotskyist but rejected that in the 30s for Liberalism, only to reject that in the 60s following the rise of the New Left. Yet his book “Neo-Conservatism” shows that the old man never left behind that Leninist love of controlling the minds of the masses. In it, he praises Machiavelli was the first great “post-Christian” philosopher. He laments the “tragedy of ‘Multiculturalism'” and pines for the America of the 30s, which he saw as “stronger” and “healthier” than the America of the 60s. You know, before blacks were allowed to go to white schools. His interest in banning pornography is not from a sense of religious zealotry but from the belief that strong nations are built on strong families, which is why he identifies with Orthodoxy (be it Jewish or Christian) over that of Gnosticism. It’s kind of scary reading someone who divides the world the same way you do only takes the opposite side.

Knowing this, it’s all the more revolting seeing how the Kristols so easily manipulated people whose beliefs are so different than their own. They’re former Marxists who tricked their sheep into accusing the center-left of “socialism,” Jews defining through Hannity and O’Reilly what it means to be a modern Christian, segregationists trying to claim that they are the party of Martin Luther King Jr. But it’s their own failed attempt at creating a “bedrock of bourgeois capitalism” (Irving’s words) that has brought about this economic crisis, their own self-delusion of Communist-style “liberation” propaganda that has trapped us in two decade-spanning wars, and their own “left-wing” ideology of cultural relativity that has allowed them to question global warming, arguing that it’s a “religion” even as they lead a resurgence of Creationism. When New York is flooded by the oceans in 2040, I’ll blame Irving Kristol, and probably curse William Kristol’s own lying brat, not realizing that the bastard who brought about so much misery in my own generation is still alive and culpable.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8264260.stm