Irving Kristol and the Liberals Who Followed the Evidence Rightward

Some people change their minds because they lose an argument. A rarer kind change their minds because they go and look. They are given a program, a promise and a budget, they stay around long enough to watch what happens, and the numbers do not come out the way the brochure said.

That, roughly, is the story of Irving Kristol and the circle of writers who came to be called neoconservatives. They did not wake up one morning hating liberalism. They were liberals, some of them lifelong, who kept asking one embarrassing question: does it work? This post tells how the question carried them across the line, what they built, and what the rest of the right, in fairness, had to say about them.

From the alcoves to the editor's desk

Irving Kristol was born in Brooklyn in 1920 and attended the City College of New York in the late 1930s, where he fell in with a circle of young radicals who argued politics in the school's lunchroom alcoves. He joined a Trotskyist group, the one that opposed Stalin from the far left, in his student days. He later described the experience with some wry detachment, and he left it behind during the war years and the 1940s.

After serving in the army in Europe in the Second World War, he worked as an editor in New York, at Commentary and elsewhere, and in 1953 he became the founding American editor of Encounter, a monthly magazine published in London, which was an outlet for anti-Communist liberals in the Cold War. In his writing of that period he was already a critic of Communism and of the intellectual fellow-travellers who excused it.

Define a term before we go on. Neoconservatism was, in its original sense, the name for a group of mostly former liberals and leftists, many of them New York intellectuals, who by the late 1960s and 1970s had become critics of the liberal consensus on domestic policy and on the Cold War, while retaining much of liberalism's concern for social improvement. It did not start as a foreign-policy doctrine. It started as a quarrel over what government can actually accomplish at home.

The Public Interest, 1965

In 1965 Kristol and the sociologist Daniel Bell founded a quarterly called The Public Interest. The date matters. President Lyndon Johnson had just won a landslide, the Great Society was being written into law, and the confidence in Washington was high. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 had passed, the War on Poverty was under way, and in 1965 Medicare and Medicaid were enacted along with large federal programmes in education.

The new journal's method was its whole point. It did not start from a doctrine; it started from data. It published essays by social scientists, among them Nathan Glazer, James Q. Wilson, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and others, examining specific programmes and asking what the evidence showed. Moynihan's 1965 report on the Negro family, written while he was in the Johnson administration, was an early example of the genre, and its reception shows how hard it was to have an honest argument on those questions.

The contributors were not hostile to government as such. Many were Democrats. But they kept finding the same pattern, and Kristol was the editor who gave it a general form. Call it, in the language of the trade, the law of unintended consequences: a programme, designed with good intentions to change one thing, changes behaviour in ways its designers did not foresee, and some of the changes are harmful.

The empirical method, in four steps

The approach is worth setting down, because it is the movement's most useful legacy and does not require agreeing with any of its policy conclusions.

1. State the goal in measurable terms. Not "help the poor" but "raise the incomes of this group by this much" or "reduce reading failure in these schools."
2. Look at what the programme actually did. Not what it was supposed to do, nor what its sponsors said, but what happened to the people it targeted.
3. Ask what people did in response. Incentives matter. A benefit that disappears when a recipient takes a job changes the decision to take the job. A rule that raises the cost of hiring changes who gets hired.
4. Be willing to conclude that the programme failed. And be willing to say so even when it is your side's programme.

Step four is the hard one. It is also what separates an evidence-based critic from a partisan. A movement that applies the test only to the other side's programmes is playing a game. See Public Choice Theory Studies Politicians as People, Not as Angels for the economics of why politicians and agencies rarely apply it to themselves.

Kristol's circle published studies on welfare, on housing, on schools, on crime and on regulation. I will not claim a particular finding from a particular article unless I can verify it, and I invite the reader to consult the archives. The pattern they reported, over and over, was that ambitious central programmes produced less than promised and sometimes the opposite. Thomas Sowell, who comes from a different intellectual line but made a similar observation, put it in terms of two visions of human nature in Sowell's Two Visions Explain Why Smart People Talk Past Each Other.

A worked example, labelled as hypothetical

Method is easier to see than to describe, so here is an invented case, not a real programme. Suppose a city launches a job-training initiative with a stated goal: raise the employment rate among long-term unemployed residents by ten percentage points within three years.

Step one is done, because the goal is measurable. At step two, an evaluator compares the participants with a similar group that did not take part. Suppose the participants do find jobs at a higher rate, but so does the comparison group, because the local economy improved. The honest conclusion is that the programme cannot claim the gain.

At step three the evaluator asks what people did in response. Perhaps some residents delayed taking a job in order to qualify for the training stipend, so the programme lengthened some spells of unemployment. At step four the sponsors must decide: end it, fix it, or keep it going because it feels good. The Public Interest crowd argued that a democracy should be willing to end it, and the habit of asking was the point. The numbers in this example are made up. The questions are the ones real evaluations ask, and any programme with a published evaluation can be put through them. Social science of that kind is imperfect, and the circle was the first to say so, but imperfect evidence beats no evidence, and it beats a good intention that has never been checked.

Two Cheers for Capitalism

Kristol collected his essays on economics and culture in Two Cheers for Capitalism (1978). The title is the argument. He gave capitalism two cheers, not three, and he explained why.

The first two cheers were for what capitalism does: it produces prosperity, it protects liberty and it gives ordinary people a chance to better their lot. Kristol, a graduate of the school of radical doubt, was convinced that no other system had done as well.

The third cheer he withheld, because he thought capitalism could not on its own supply the values it needs. It had inherited a moral capital from religion and tradition, and it tended to spend it down. A purely commercial society, he suggested, does not generate answers to the questions people actually care about, such as what makes life meaningful or what the community owes its members. That put him in the company of Wilhelm Röpke, who made the same point from a different angle; see Wilhelm Röpke Defended Markets and Warned They Need Something Beyond Them. It also set him apart from the libertarians, who tended to think the market answered every question worth asking.

The book also carries a critique of what he called the "new class," a group of educated professionals in government, universities and the media, who tended to be hostile to the business civilisation that paid for their prosperity. Whether the description is fair, it was a precursor of arguments conservatives still make about the credentialed elite.

Later he wrote Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (1995), where he reflected on the movement's history. The line most associated with the group, that a neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality, is commonly attributed to him. I give it as the common attribution rather than a verified quotation.

The foreign policy

By the 1970s and 1980s, the movement had added a foreign-policy side. Neoconservatives were deeply anti-Communist, sceptical of détente with the Soviet Union and supportive of a strong American military and of support for democratic allies. Kristol founded The National Interest in 1985, a journal of foreign policy. Many of his allies served in the Reagan administration in the 1980s, in posts dealing with defence and diplomacy.

After the Cold War, the movement's attention shifted. Some of its members came to argue for an active American role in promoting democracy and in confronting hostile regimes. The debates over that approach, especially over the Iraq war that began in 2003, were fierce, and it is fair to say that the label neoconservative is now more often used as a term of abuse than as a precise description. In the spirit of this site, I will say only that foreign policy is a field where thoughtful conservatives disagree, and they should be allowed to.

The paleoconservative critique, stated fairly

Kristol's rise did not please everyone on the right. The people who objected were conservatives of an older style, later called paleoconservatives, among them Russell Kirk, the author of The Conservative Mind (1953), and, later, writers such as Paul Gottfried and Pat Buchanan. Their objections deserve a fair statement.

On origins. They argued that the neoconservatives were newcomers who had not shared the long struggle of the old right and who brought liberal assumptions with them. A former Trotskyist, they said, might reasonably be suspected of treating politics as a field for ideological projects.

On the welfare state. The older right wanted to dismantle the New Deal and the Great Society. Neoconservatives, in their view, wanted to manage them better, thereby accepting the premise of a large federal role. Kristol did argue that the welfare state was here to stay and that the task was to improve it, not abolish it.

On foreign policy. The paleoconservatives were sceptical of overseas commitments, preferring a more restrained foreign policy, and worried that an ideological commitment to spreading democracy was a form of the very rationalism conservatives distrust. That echoes Oakeshott's objection to politics by blueprint; see Oakeshott Said Being Conservative Is a Temperament Before It Is a Program.

On culture and nation. Many paleoconservatives emphasised national particularity, immigration and tradition more strongly than the neoconservatives did.

How should a fair reader weigh this? The critics were right about one thing: a movement that arrives with a theory of how to improve the world is open to the charge it levels at others. The neoconservatives were right about another: you cannot govern a modern country by pretending the welfare state does not exist, and a conservative who proposes nothing in its place will lose to the person who does. Both camps have a point, and the right is stronger for having both of them in the room. The same coalition tension, between a camp that wants to run the machinery better and one that wants to stop it, comes up in Populism and Conservatism Agree on Who Gets Ignored, Not on Every Remedy.

What it gives us

Strip away the personalities, and Kristol's circle left three durable lessons.

1. Judge by results, not intentions. A programme's name is not its effect. Ask what it did to the people it was meant to help.
2. Culture sits upstream of politics. Kristol came to believe that the strength of families, religion and civic habits determined what government could do, which is also the point of Robert Nisbet Saw Lonely People Turn to the State for Belonging.
3. Change your mind in public. The intellectual honesty to say "I was wrong about that" is rare and valuable. Kristol said it often, and the movement he helped found began with people saying it.

Irving Kristol died in 2009. His son, William Kristol, is a well-known commentator, which is the only fact about the family this post will report.

The case in brief

1. Irving Kristol, once a young Trotskyist, founded The Public Interest in 1965 with Daniel Bell, and its writers examined Great Society programmes by their results.
2. The group's central finding was the law of unintended consequences: ambitious programmes changed behaviour in ways their designers did not foresee.
3. In Two Cheers for Capitalism (1978) Kristol defended the market's achievements and warned that it depends on moral inheritance it cannot itself replenish.
4. The paleoconservative critique, that the movement accepted the welfare state and leaned toward ideological foreign policy, is a fair challenge that every conservative should weigh.
5. The lasting lesson is the method: set measurable goals, look at what the programme did, and be ready to say it failed.

What you can do: pick one federal programme that affects your community, look up its stated goal and its results in the program's own published evaluations, and write to your representative with what you found.