The Godfather of Neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, has died at the age of 89. As is so often the case, he was no longer a member of the movement he started, which he famously said was made up of "Liberals mugged by Reality". It had been taken over, or perhaps we should say hijacked, by several sons of the founders, including Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan (son of Donald), John Podhoretz (son of Norman), and Daniel Pipes (son of Richard). Unlike them and most of those they brought into the movement, Irving did not believe that the United States could spread democracy by force of arms. He wanted to get out of Vietnam in the 1960s lest it become like South Korea, where a military coup ousted the corrupt US puppet, Syngman Rhee. (If you are as old as I am, you may remember that there was in fact a military coup in Vietnam against a corrupt government, followed by a chain of others. Or you young whippersnappers could look it up.)
As for Korea, which I saw firsthand, that's below the jump.
I was in South Korea a few years after the coup there, as a Peace Corps volunteer, and I saw what Irving meant about their political mess (although I had not heard of him at the time). Kristol was wrong about South Korea, of course. The North had fought a conventional war, with Chinese help, and accepted an armistice. There were no nationalist forces there independent of the Communist Party of Kim Il Sung, able to carry on a war in the South, and no tunnels under the DMZ. But Kristol was absolutely right that the US could not create democracies, both for lack of suitable interest and experience in the countries, and for lack of any serious understanding about how democracies with serious human rights protections have historically come to be. (Over long periods of time, with a lot of violence, in general, but with the determination to protect one's enemies arising out of a previous history of rather arbitrary persecutions and punishments)
It has taken decades for Koreans to learn how to want and how to create their own still messy democracy. Vietnam has not yet caught up with them, of course. You could hardly expect them to, under Communist rule. We could argue how Taiwan and Japan, among others, are doing as democracies.
But if you compare them with the United States in 1827, four decades after the Constitutional Convention, they don't look so bad. That was when the John Adams-Thomas Jefferson hostilities ("royalists" vs. "atheists", among other things) and the John Adams-Andrew Jackson hostilities (the "Corrupt Bargain" of 1824) were both hot, and Jackson was campaigning against The Bank of the United States and its "fiat money", while the country drifted toward a Civil War that we are still fighting today.
I guess I'm with Zhou Enlai, who was asked what he thought of the French Revolution, and replied, "It's too soon to tell."
As far as I can tell, Irving Kristol didn't understand the history of democracies and human rights any better than any other Neocon. For example, he was dead against providing civil liberties to Communists. The argument that Freedom of Speech must necessarily protect highly objectionable speech, or be a dead letter, had no weight for him.
I think that for most of us, the most surprising thing Irving Kristol ever said is, "A welfare state, properly conceived, can be an integral part of a conservative society." ("A Conservative Welfare State", in ''The Neocon Reader'', by Irwin Stelzer) In this essay, the elder Kristol argues for expanding Social Security, Medicare, and tax exemptions for children. You wouldn't know that any sort of Conservative had ever said that, judging from the Neocon kids, or from the current politicians and talking heads trying to mug President Obama. (Did I mention that death threats against Obama are running at four times the rate for Bush? Hard to imagine, what with the vicious, visceral, vitriolic hate we Lefties had and still have for George W. Bush, jr. III. According to the Righties.)
On other points, particularly welfare itself, Kristol runs off into the usual fantasies of the armchair analyst, attributing motives to people he has never met, who live under circumstances that he cannot imagine. So I am not saying that he is even as Liberal as Edmund Burke (as I described in an earlier Diary Entry). But I do argue that he does not deserve the public mugging that his son and his supposed friends have given him, and the rest of us.
Well, Reality has trumped politics (as usual, in the end), and has caught up with Irving Kristol for good. RIP, Irv.