The Public Interest

Irving Kristol re-tells his own "Left Behind" story in the final issue of his magazine, The Public Interest. As for a lot of lesser lights, pulling one lever, and not another, in a voting booth in a presidential election marked the moment of emancipation.

For the first seven years of its existence, The Public Interest was generally regarded (and regarded itself) as a moderately liberal journal. The editors and most of the contributors, after all, were registered Democrats. Pat Moynihan was in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and in 1968, I was on a Hubert Humphrey campaign task force. It was the election of 1972 that precipitated the first political divisions in our community. Daniel Bell could not bring himself to vote Republican and unenthusiastically endorsed George McGovern. ... I, on the other hand, repelled by McGovern's views on foreign policy, unenthusiastically endorsed Nixon's reelection. My Republican vote produced little shock waves in the New York intellectual community. It didn't take long-a year or two-for the socialist writer Michael Harrington to come up with the term "neoconservative" to describe a renegade liberal like myself. To the chagrin of some of my friends, I decided to accept that term; there was no point calling myself a liberal when no one else did. And I had to face the fact that voting for Richard Nixon was, in the university world and in the intellectual world generally, the equivalent of a Jew ostentatiously eating pork on Yom Kippur. It was an act of self-excommunication. In fact, some of my critics regarded it as especially heinous for a Jew to abandon the creed of liberalism. For them, neoconservatism was seen as a religious as well as a political heresy.

I also find much to agree with in his view of religion in America. He's secual, but appreciative.

The culture wars introduced yet another dimension in the neoconservative spectrum. In The Public Interest, those wars were fought mainly in the book review section. Here the journal found allies among liberals, in academia particularly, who were offended by the extravagances of the counter-cultural Left. The counter-culture, for its part, moved steadily toward an aggressive secularism and an animus against religion, foreshadowing an ominous tension between the secular and the religious in American politics. Here, too, The Public Interest found itself on firm ground. It had always had a benign interest in religion-a secular interest in religion, one might say, deriving from traditional political and moral philosophy, which has been appreciative of religion as a social as well as a spiritual force.

De Tocqueville, as usual, said it right: "At the same time that the law permits the American people to do everything, religion prevents them from conceiving everything and forbids them to dare everything."