NEOCONSERVATISM: PRO AND CON*
William Phillips:
Welcome LO tonight's discussion of neoconserva–
tism, one of a series of meetings conducted under the auspices of
Partisan Review
and Boston University. This evening has been
partially funded by the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humani–
ties and Public Policy, and of course we 're very appreciative of that.
Conservatism, which used to be a dirty word in intellectual
circles, has now become quite popular and even respectable. For the
first time in this country, there has arisen a new conservative
movement led by intellectuals and addressed to the educated public.
It
has been advanced by such well known writers as Irving Kristol,
Nathan Glazer, Martin Lipset, Robert Nisbet, Daniel Bell, James
Q.
Wilson, and Norman Podhoretz, and is promoted by such publica–
tions as
Commentary, Public Interest,
and
The American Scholar.
Nevertheless, the fact that many conservatives, or neoconservatives,
still deny that they are conservatives would suggest some uneasiness
in accepting their success.
In
fact, one of the strategies of conserva–
tism is to deny that the old categories of conservative, liberal, radical
have much meaning LOday because there have been some crossovers
and reversals of positions.
Commentary
magazine had two symposia
on some aspects of this question.
In
the first, known conservatives
argued that the term "conservatism" had no meaning. Without
going into the merits of the argument, I might simply say that
common sense tells us that there are conservatives, liberals, and
radicals in the world today even though, through the perversions of
contemporary politics, many liberals hold some conservative posi–
tions and vice versa. The second symposium in
Commentary,
aimed
mostly at discrediting the idea of liberalism, asked whether liberal–
ism is good for the Jews. That is like asking whether jogging or
wholewheat bread is good for the Jews. This is indeed an age of
specialization, especially when we remember that we used
to
ask
whether a social movement or outlook was good for humanity, not
for the Jews or the Catholics . Generally, neoconservatives have
"This discussion took place last April.
