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social science could be brought to bear upon federal social and
economic policy, they were attempting to meet an intellectual need
that was widely acknowledged beyond the ranks of those who later
became neoconservatives. I well remember an abortive effort made at
about the same time to create nothing less than an American counter–
part of the original Fabian Society, an effort which enlisted the support
of editors and leading writers from all of the journals that a few years
later were bitterly attacking one another. An elegiac, Burkean tone was
occasionally evident in the early
The Public Interest,
a sign no doubt of
the presence of Kristol , and the reliance on practical, heavily empirical
analyses from experts was congruent with the "end of ideology"
conception associated with Bell. But the journal truly reflected a
common, actively reformist mood among liberal intellectuals and
academics.
It
was only with the waxing of the new radicalism in the late
sixties that
The Public Interest
became widely denounced as the voice
of a soulless, "technocratic" elitism. Since then, the neoconservative
themes of the "limits of social policy," the ravages of egalitarian
ideology, and the gathering "twilight of authority" have become more
prominent in its pages and its detailed explorations of particular
problems have increasingly debunked liberal-left preferences for such
measures as busing and affirmative action to promote racial integra–
tion , broader judicial definitions of civil liberties, mass transit to
combat urban deterioration, and the like. Much of this is presented as a
response to the supposed failures of the Johnson administration's
social programs, but, as Steinfels points out, the failures were not as
total or obvious as they are often asserted to have been and a number of
analysts, even in
The Public Interest
itself, have found many of them to
have been modestly successful while deploring the inflated claims
made for them, chiefly by President Johnson himself. Essentially, it
was not the alleged failure of the Great Society but intense dislike for
the militant protest movements that animated the turn to conservatism
in the seventies. (As one who shared that dislike and expressed it in
Commentary,
I am less than overjoyed to find my words of ten years
ago quoted by Steinfels as examples of neoconservative sentiments,
when they were written long before that term had been invented, and I
ceased to write for
Commentary
after 1970, having no disposition to
make a
Weltanschauung
out of flogging an expiring nag.)
The erstwhile liberal reformers who became neoconservatives in
the seventies were on the right track in their earlier incarnation. The
United States is both a thoroughly untraditional and a profoundly
