Neoconservatism’s Populist Mistake

A look back at what the neocons once knew, and what they later forgot

Irving Kristol, circa 1985

From its earliest origins, the postwar conservative movement had a potent populist side.

This was a function of where the American right found itself after multiple electoral cycles in the political wilderness. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal policies had been extremely popular. Not only was FDR elected four times, but for most of the 1930s and ’40s the Democratic Party held super-majorities in both the House and Senate. Harry Truman struggled in his 1948 bid for re-election, but he prevailed. Yes, he was followed by the first Republican president in nearly two decades, but Dwight D. Eisenhower was a thoroughgoing pragmatist who helped to reconcile the GOP to the liberalism that by the 1950s utterly dominated American public life.

In this context, those who sought to challenge liberalism from the right made their case by appealing to ordinary Americans who dissented from the smothering consensus. It wasn’t that liberalism was truly popular, they claimed. Rather, it was pervasive among the elites who ran the government and dominated the commanding heights of the culture. From these positions of power and influence, liberals portrayed themselves—both their aims and their competence at reaching them—as virtuous and benign. But this, the nascent New Right claimed, was a self-justifying liberal fiction. In reality, liberalism prevailed by delegitimizing alternatives—and by directing attention away from its own incompetence and indifference to moral truth and individual liberty.

But, the conservative narrative continued, the American people weren’t fooled.¹ The voters kept older and wiser ways of thinking and acting alive—and their opposition to the conventional wisdom could be mobilized politically to seize power from the liberal establishment. William F. Buckley gave voice to this view when he made his famous joke from 1963 about how he’d prefer to be ruled by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone book than by the faculty of Harvard University. For Buckley, America’s problem was its liberal elites, not the American people, whose moral and political instincts he held to be fundamentally sound. If conservatives hoped to gain power, they would do so by siding with the people against the establishment.

This populist ambition was first tested in Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, and it failed. There simply weren’t enough conservatives out there in the heartland to turn back the elite consensus in favor of postwar liberalism.

But that was just the beginning. Aided by reaction to the Civil Rights Movement and the counterculture, the number of conservative dissenters from the liberal status quo swelled as the ’60s wore on and then slouched into the ’70s. Soon Richard Nixon would dub these discontented voters the “silent majority,” Jerry Falwell would christen them the “moral majority,” and then Ronald Reagan would ride their discontent all the way to the White House, where he sought to infuse the institutions of government with the virtuous spirit of the ordinary Americans to whom the 40th president paid tribute in his first inaugural address in 1981.

Neocons Contra Populism

The liberal intellectuals who came to be called “neoconservatives” as they moved rightward during the 1970s knew better. Though they were slowly coming to agree with Buckley and others at National Review on a lengthening list of issues, Irving Kristol and the writers gathered around The Public Interest during the late ’60s and ’70s tended to reflect more carefully and skeptically on what was happening around them in the country.

In one of their most influential theories, they argued that when modern societies reach what sociologist Daniel Bell called a “post-industrial” level of development they tend to become increasingly dependent on a “new class” of highly skilled “symbolic analysts” or “knowledge workers,” including scientists, teachers, journalists, lawyers, psychologists, and other professionals. Since all societies are dominated by some elite, the rise of this new class was unremarkable aside from one troubling fact: these intellectual elites differ from others in their tendency to adopt an adversarial, even subversive, relation to their own societies.

As literary critic Lionel Trilling noted in an important essay of the mid-’60s that significantly shaped the political imagination of Kristol and the other early neocons, the modern intellectual stakes out and occupies “a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn . . . the culture that produced him.” Using these concepts to analyze America in the early ’70s, Kristol and his colleagues concluded that the tumult and turmoil of the time could be traced to the influence of a decadent and subversive liberal elite.

Yet Kristol and his colleagues initially refused to propose a political response to the rise of the liberal new class—which is to say, they resisted the allure of populism. Adopting Trilling's ambivalent stance toward the adversary culture, Kristol at first explicitly rejected a “populist perspective” that portrayed new class elites as “usurp[ing] control of our media” and using “their strategic positions to launch an assault on our traditions and institutions.” Such a simple-minded view was, for Kristol, “misleading and ultimately self-defeating.”

The rise of the new class and the adversary culture could not simply be willed or wished away, since they had emerged from out of and had their roots in the extraordinarily complicated dynamics of modern, urban civilization itself. The appropriate response to recent troubling trends was thus careful study and reflection on the complexities of contemporary American life—not futile and destructive calls to stamp them out or overthrow them through populist political action.

A Change of Heart

All of this was before the New Right ascended to power in 1980. By 1985, shortly after Reagan’s landslide re-election, Kristol’s views had changed. Now he placed himself firmly on the side of The People in an important essay titled, “The New Populism: Not to Worry.” It’s undeniably true, Kristol noted, that from the constitutional framers on down through the recent past, populism had gotten a bad rap for being “democracy at its least rational, its least sensible.” But things were different now. The electoral triumph of the conservative movement had demonstrated the abundant “common sense of the American people,” who have been rightly “outraged, over the past 20 years, by the persistent un-wisdom of their elected and appointed officials.” Judging the voters “basically commonsensical, not at all extreme,” Kristol concluded on a note of good cheer about the new populist order of things:

The important point to emphasize … is that this new populism is no kind of blind rebellion against good constitutional government. It is rather an effort to bring our governing elites to their senses. That is why so many people—and I include myself among them—who would ordinarily worry about a populist upsurge find themselves so sympathetic to this new populism.

From that point on, the neocons were fully on board with what might be called tactical populism. When the Democrats were in power, Kristol’s friends and allies would encourage grassroots rage at the establishment, talk respectfully about Rush Limbaugh’s popularity and demagogic influence among Republican voters, and happily cheer (and appear) on Fox News as it demonized Bill Clinton and Barack Obama day-in and day-out for the entirety of their terms in office. When Republicans controlled the White House, this right-wing media complex would reverse course to become a propaganda organ for the GOP, defending and urging unqualified support for the political establishment. But as soon as a Democrat took charge, the angry populism was back—and the neocons accepted and encouraged it.

This extended to their view of electoral strategy. The key was to find candidates who could fire up the base with outrage so the party could ride to power on the populist wave of indignation, at which point the grownups would supposedly take over and govern responsibly, all the while stoking the embers of populist fury for use the next time an election rolled around.

The emblematic example was (Irving’s son) Bill Kristol’s enthusiasm for then-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as a potential running mate for John McCain in 2008. Palin, rather notoriously, proved incapable of mastering even the most rudimentary aspects of policy or disciplining her rabid populist instincts on the stump. And GOP voters lapped it up—many of them far more than they warmed to the high-minded pro-immigration, pro-muscular internationalism, and pro-free-trade message they were hearing from the top of the ticket.

The Populist Reckoning

The rest of the story is a familiar one: The Republican Party establishment attempts to continue riding an increasingly rabid tiger of populist anger through the Tea Party midterms of 2010 and the 2012 presidential election only to get its face eaten once the base falls in love with Donald Trump, a populist demagogue of world-historical instincts and talents.

Interestingly, a Trumpist intellectual recently resurfaced some statements of Bill Kristol from the summer of 2015, just after Trump launched his presidential campaign. A few months later, Kristol would become one of the first and most prominent conservative intellectuals to define himself as Never Trump, a position from which he has never wavered. But Kristol’s initial instinct after the real-estate mogul and reality-show television star descended the escalator at Trump Tower in June to announce his run for the presidency (by fearmongering about Mexican rapists) was to side with the xenophobic rabble-rouser against the establishment.

Here's Kristol, first from June 2015, then from two months later:

There’s something impressive about some of what [Trump] says…. It’s good for the party to have him in it. I much prefer the Republican field with Donald Trump…. I’m so sick of all the establishment types being so earnest in disdaining him.

….

I remain not pro-Trump, but I’m once again drifting into the anti-anti-Trump camp. So much at the sniping at him misses the point…. Much of the criticism of Trump has the feel of falling (fairly or unfairly) into the hobgoblin-of-small-minds category.

Given where Kristol has subsequently ended up—the second-generation neocon might be more accurately described today as a neopaleoliberal—these takes are surprising. But in light of the history that preceded Trump’s campaign launch, they aren’t noteworthy at all. They are, instead, exactly what one would expect a neoconservative intellectual to say prior to the hostile takeover of the Republican Party in 2016.

Curious about how Kristol now views the history of populist boosterism on the right, and his role in it, I asked him. Here’s what he had to say: