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nothing about them-that are spoken about in articles and books that
take us to task for being neoconservatives . One is economic policy.
There I 'm even more innocent of theory than in social policy. But there
too I have reluctantly come around to the position, as so many people
have, even
The New Republic
in recent editorials, that Keynesianism,
which I once took to be gospel, is badly flawed, and that the economists
who emphasize the need for investment in productive resources
to
contro l inflation , have a great deal going for them. It is not economic
theory which has convinced me of all of this, but the examples of Japan
and Germany, and the recent figures on how little we save in this
country for investment. In the third area in which a neoconservative
position has been discerned and attacked, foreign policy, I remain
skeptical of many of the positions of my friends. But here I will follow
the advice I would give to our State Department: Don 't issue a report
on the state of the world or on the state of human rights in each of the
150 countries in the world-it will make too many enemies.
William Phillips:
There is one question I want to ask you, and I hope
you will answer when it's your turn to speak again. You seem to say
that the left got the facts all wrong. Does the left have a monopoly on
ignorance and does the right always get the facts right? Peter
Steinfels is the next speaker.
PETER STEINFELS
Having arrived late, I did not hear Nathan Glazer's definition, or I
suspect nondefinition, of neoconservatism . Almost everybody claims
that he or she is following the facts rather than bringing their
preestablished ideas to interpret the facts. And I certainly don't have
Nathan Glazer's experience or knowledge about social policy to
challenge him on those grounds. I do know, however, that when I was
reading for my book on neoconservatism, although I did not find what
might be called a strict ideology, I did find a school of opinion
possessing certain common themes. One of them was the need for
stability-in no way was social instability regarded as an opportunity
for useful change. Second was the theme of a cultural crisis, a crisis of
authority and legitimacy. Unlike various left critics the neoconserva–
tives did not locate the sources of this crisis in the social-economic
structures, but treated them as mainly arising from the cultural
