The Essential Neoconservative Reader. - book review

Public Interest, Wntr, 1997 by David Brooks

I still remember the shocked expression on the face of the rabbi who performed my wife's conversion. We were sitting on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and this nice liberal rabbi asked what being Jewish meant to me. I threw out the first thing that came to mind, a series of names: Kristol, Podhoretz, Trilling, Bellow - a bunch of Jewish intellectuals around Partisan Review, Commentary, and The Public Interest. The poor rabbi was appalled. He'd prepared my wife for her conversion ritual bath and now here she was potentially emerging from the mikvah straight into a meeting of the Committee for the Free World.

I admit that my answer was appalling, a perfect example of how life can become too politicized. But reading The Essential Neoconservative Reader,(*) I began thinking that maybe the response wasn't completely ridiculous.

The book, edited by Mark Gerson, is a collection, arranged chronologically from 1963 to 1995, of many of the classics of neoconservative thought. The opening section includes two of the formative pieces of neoconservative skepticism about the liberal project: Norman Podhoretz's "My Negro Problem - and Ours" and an excerpt from Daniel Patrick Moynihan's The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. From there, the book moves to the neoconservative response to the New Left - for example, Nathan Glazer's "The Campus Crucible" - and its approach to the free market as developed by Michael Novak, George Gilder, and Irving Kristol. There are also sections on foreign policy - including notably, Jeane Kirkpatrick's "Dictatorships and Double Standards" - as well as sections on the welfare state and the culture wars, featuring essays by Thomas Sowell, James Q. Wilson, Charles Krauthammer, and Leon Kass.

But the last section, appropriately labeled "The Way Home," is about, broadly defined, religion, with essays by Richard John Neuhaus, George Weigel, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and William Kristol.

Though it is true that most of the neoconservative memoirs and analyses were written in the 1980s, when neoconservatism was more secular, if you appraise neoconservatism now, in 1996, a different picture emerges. It is the story of a group of former leftists, who cut their teeth with sectarian disputes over the various strains of Marxist materialism ("Lovestone guilty of Lovestonitism!"), moved their attention to the liberal social sciences, wrote about the limits of social policy, discovered the importance of virtue, and now tend to write about religion and morality.

Perhaps neoconservatism will, in the long run, be seen not merely as a move from left to right but as a move from secularism to a more religious view of public life, as a slow discovery of the sacred in the profane. Neoconservatives are, of course, already famous for their contributions to American politics. They helped the conservative movement come to terms with the civil-rights movement; they helped conservatism articulate a tough, but compassionate, approach to poverty; they pioneered a form of urban conservatism that made clear that being on the right did not necessarily mean you preferred the rural to the urban, the native population to the new immigrants, the parochial to the cosmopolitan. But perhaps there is another legacy they will leave behind that hasn't fully played itself out yet. Perhaps another of their contributions will have been to articulate a way of thinking about religion in public life which is not specific to the Christian right.

The neoconservatives are getting older (they aren't making any more of them) - so maybe their new religiosity is just the product of their facing (how can I put this politely?) the great alcove in the sky. But I think probably not. After all, if you look at the younger people who are loosely affiliated with neoconservatism, you will see many writers who regard religion as central to their social thinking and a merger of Jewish conservatives with Christian conservatives. Elliott Abrams now runs the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a think tank that emphasizes religion in its approach to social problems (and that has never before had a Jewish director). The relatively new Institute for Religion and Public Life was expelled from the Rockford Institute for allegedly being part of the neoconservative conspiracy. The institute's director, Neuhaus, edits the superb magazine First Things about religion and public life. William Bennett is comfortable in both neoconservative and Christian conservative circles. I work at a magazine, the Weekly Standard, at which two of the top editors are Jews (named Kristol and Podhoretz coincidentally enough), while the third, a fellow named Barnes, is an evangelical Christian. And they work together seamlessly on social issues.

Moreover, among the social scientists who have contributed to The Public Interest, Commentary, and other neoconservative magazines, there is a greater emphasis on the public role of religion. John J. DiIulio, Jr., a political scientist at Princeton, has argued that only a religious revival can change the culture in our most distressed neighborhoods. Glenn C. Loury, an economist at Boston University, has been making similar arguments. For example, in a recent issue of the American Enterprise, he wrote: