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PERSON PROFILEIrving Kristol[EXCERPT FROM: The Feeding Trough, by Phil Wilayto]. Irving Kristol, a Depression-era student - radical - turned - reactionary, is often called the "godfather" of the neoconservative movement. He founded and edits The Public Interest, one of the first conservative publications to actively address issues of culture, religion and "values," as opposed to simple reactive hostility to the New Deal liberal politics of the 30s. A former professor (of Social Thought-- whatever that is!) at New York University and a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, Kristol has long been associated with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). He played a pivotal role in the recruitment of conservative and formerly liberal writers, professors and intellecturals into the neoconservative movement. His son, William, was chief of staff to former Vice President Dan Quayle and principle director of the "Bradley Proejct on the 90s." Irving Kristol says that he personally arranged for Wall Street Journal editorial writer Jude Wanniski to get a grant from the AEI to write the first book on supply-side economics. Says Kristol, "It was Jude who introduced me to Jack Kemp, a young congressman and a recent convert. It was Jack Kemp who, almost single-handed, converted Ronald Reagan to supply-side economics." To give a flavor of the racial politics of these characters, here's a quote by Irving Kristol from a 1991 essay entitled "The Tragedy of 'Multiculturalism'": "Though the educational establishment would rather die that admit it, multiculturalism is a desperate -- and surely self-defeating -- strategy for coping with the educational deficiencies, and associated social pathologies, of young blacks. Did these black students and their problems not exists, we would hear little of multiculturalism." ["Neo-Conservativism, The Autobiography of an Idea, Selected Essays 1949-1995" by Irving Kristol.] -- The Feeding Trough [EXCERPT FROM: The Idea Brokers: Think Tanks and The Rise of the New Policy Elite, by James A. Smith, 1991]: Kristol is the editor of The Public Interest and a professor of social thought at New York University. For many years Kristol made his Washington base of operations at the American Enterprise Institute...Kristol, in particular, serve[d] as a broker between conservative funding sources and the Washington-based research organizations, [and] supplied new arguments--if they were really needed--for supporting AEI and similar research endeavors... Kristol and other neoconservatives infused conservative intellectuals, executives of foundations, and corporate donors with a missionary zeal. He announced to his readers, in an essay in the Wall Street Journal (provoked by the resignation of Henry Ford II as a trustee of the Ford Foundation), the "fact" that most large foundations and major universities "exude a climate of opinion wherein an antibusiness bent becomes a perfectly natural inclination." With a polemical style that managed simultaneously to accuse and retract, he conceded that foundations and universitites "are not homogeneous or totalitarian institutions" but that they tended to be populated by a "New Class" that was hostile to the private sector and more sympathetic to the public sector. This "New Class," a term borrowed from Milovan Djilas's analysis of the Communist party functionaries who controlled the economies of Eastern Europe, seemed in the American context to mean primarily those white-collar professionals whose careers depended on the public sector. Kristol included scientists, lawyers, city planners, social workers, educators, criminologists, sociologists, and public health physicians whose hidden agenda, he discerned, was to propel the nation toward an economic system "so stringently regulated in detail as to fulfill many of the traditional anticapitalist aspirations of the Left."... ...Kristol asked whether it was in the long-term interest of corporations to continue to support institutions that had proved so hostile. He appealed for a more discriminating corporate philanthropy that would identify and support those academics and intellectuals who believed in a strong private sector. Though they were few, they could be found, he insisted. And through the *Institute for Educational Affairs which he and William E. Simon founded in 1978, financial resources directed toward sympathetic scholars and the research projects of think tanks. -- The Idea Brokers *The organization that provided the launching pad for the career of the Bradley Foundation's Michael Joyce [tft.])
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MORE LINKSIRC Right Web profile of Irving Kristol
Irving Kristol The Neoconservative Persuasion...the historical task and political purpose of neoconservatism would seem to be this: to convert the Republican party...
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Neoconning the Media
