Eulogy is a troublesome essay mode: invariably the writer must lard his work with fulsome praise for his intellectual enemy. De mortuis nil nisi bene be damned. I remember Irving Kristol as a dangerous crackpot who sired another. To understand him, we must first understand his world.
The year was 1947 and the world was sick of war. The wreckage of ancient Europe was still smoking and housewives in kerchiefs trundled wheelbarrows full of rubble to the vast piles. The Red Army was systematically raping every woman they encountered.
While Leon Trotsky and his vision of universal democracy lived, honest intellectuals blew hot and cold on Communism: had not the Communists been the first to oppose the totalitarian Fascists? Lenin’s pitiless brutality was but a pale foreshadowing of Stalin’s monstrous crimes. Yet still the West treated with Communism, as if mere social and political interaction might dissuade Communism from its path into darkness. This approach had not worked with Fascism: Stalin grinned from behind his moustache and let the talkers talk. He was a man of action, a man of lies and the truth was not in him.
The intellectuals of Europe, especially those who had known Trotsky, understood they had been deceived. They should have known long before, when Trotsky had been hounded out of the USSR in 1929. When the Trotskyites were rounded up in 1936, put on trial and executed, the writing was on the wall. When Trotsky himself was murdered on the 21st of August, 1940, the jig was up. Yet still the leftist Western intellectuals flirted with Communism. They flirt with it still.
I love the word "Disenchanted". It is a word invariably used by the Stupid becoming Wise against their will, converted, in the Greek - metanoia, - repentance, literally to-change-direction. After Lenin hijacked the Russian Revolution, the woeful rump of Trotskyites was sorely disenchanted with Communism. In the late 1920s, the American James P. Cannon, much exercised by the need for worker’s rights, read a critique of the Comintern by Trotsky and was converted. Cannon’s disenchantment with the totalitarian aspects of Communism would lead to the rise of Neoconservative thought through a long and troubled route, and eventually to Irving Kristol.
Trotsky, like many of the earliest apostles of Communism was a Jew. Without wishing to bumptiously connect either Trotskyism or Neoconservative thought to any one race, the number of Jews in the lineage of Communism and anticommunism came as a surprise to me while researching the life of Trotsky and the Neoconservatives.
Once burned, twice shy goes the old proverb. The jejune idealism of the Trotskyites gave way to a deep and abiding fear of the Law of Unintended Consequences. Trotsky had given everything to the Revolution, led it in battle, held it together against overwhelming odds. He had told it the truth when such truths were inconvenient. Ultimately such truth-telling would lead to his murder. Idealists cannot govern: their mandates are inevitably usurped by cynical pragmatists.
Yet still Idealism springs eternal like the dandelions in spring. The end of WW2 had not proven the end of the world. Trotsky was dead but his vision for universal democracy was not. Into this rubble-strewn wasteland emerged the post-Trotskyites, the immediate parents of what would be called the Neoconservatives. Among these men were Melvin Lasky and Irving Kristol, editors and writers for various intellectual-cum-political magazines of the period, including Encounter.
Lasky and Kristol had enemies on the Left and the Right. The Hard Left still lived on in France, given a new lease on life, distilled from the ferment of angst and self-loathing, come to a foul head in the authoritarian Vichy regime. On the Right, in 1947, the French government seized the offices of the Communist newspapers. The labor unions were rioting and derailing trains. Lasky and Kristol, along with Hannah Arendt and Arthur Koestler and many others would form the core of a dedicated anticommunist faction which would lead eventually to both political triumph and in time to intellectual disgrace.
For Neoconservatives never truly abandoned their Trotskyite roots. They were above all things Theorists. The practical application of power eluded them, though among their ranks were writers, including George Orwell and Arthur Koestler who warned most explicitly of the dangers of idealism given free rein.
Ultimately, Irving Kristol failed. He failed, and his son fails, Podhoretz and all those of like mind fail because their idealism did not eat their own dog food. The Neoconservatives arose in principled opposition to one tyrannous philosophy, Communism, only to be undermined by unprincipled rogues who stole all their good lines and sold arms to our enemies. The apotheosis of this transmogrification would be George W. Bush 43, an affable idiot who would break America in sunder and lead it to endless wars abroad in pursuit of some ignis fatuus of Exported Democracy.
At least Irving Kristol lived long enough to see the terminus of his philosophy, and for that we must thank Providence. Irving Kristol stood against many evil things in his world but he stood for many evil things as well. Kristol, like every other anti- this and anti- that writer, had much to say about Unintended Consequences, and insofar as these consequences were self-evident in the newspapers of his day, he was right. But that was predicting the past. The consequences of his own polemic are now self-evident: today’s Conservatives are now in full retreat and populist idiots yammer from every pulpit in the land. With Irving Kristol dies an eloquent voice and a fundamentally decent man, but his legacy continues to bode ill for we who survive him.