The GOP's master strategist - William Kristol - Cover Story

Washington Monthly, Sept, 1994 by Jon Meacham

But Kristol is not spending his time wondering how to make America a happier place in practice. Instead, he is doing all he can to turn Washington into a place where Democratic ideas are met with monolithic Republican opposition. A political tactician who wants to win, he believes he has to knock out his opponents altogether: "Inevitably," he says, "Republicans in Washington are going to spend most of our time fighting Clinton."

Kristol's effective, reflexive opposition (the only thing Clinton has done to win even a grudging nod from him has been NAFTA) sadly comes at a time when rarely has there been a greater consensus identifying the country's problems: schools, welfare, crime, values. Kristol has the skills - insights, shrewd political instincts, the ability to communicate clearly - to advance any idea or cause he chooses. But instead of seeking common ground with Democrats to produce solutions, Kristol, who is widely touted as the next GOP White House chief of staff, is raising adversarialism to empyrean heights: Defeat the Democrats, no matter what the issue, no matter what the consequences.

Left in Charge

This adversarialism has deep cultural roots, for conservatives have long felt themselves to be outside the mainstream of respectable elite opinion. In the thirties and forties, liberalism was generally thought of as the prevailing philosophy of the thinking classes, and the fault line seemed to run like this: Liberalism was for smart people - the Schlesingers and the Galbraiths - and conservatism was for dumb people - the McCarthys and the Goldwaters. But William F. Buckley, Jr.'s God and Man at Yale, in 1951, his founding of National Review, in 1955, and the writings of Russell Kirk in the early fifties began to inch conservatism toward intellectual respectability. A second landmark came in the late sixties and early seventies, when men like Kristol's father and Norman Podhoretz - former leftists who moved to the right on defense, foreign policy, and values - founded the neoconservative movement, establishing a conservative beachhead in what Lionel Trilling once called "the adversary culture" of academics, artists, and writers.

Growing up in the house of a neoconservative was Kristol's first formative philosophical experience; the other came at Harvard, where he encountered the teachings of Leo Strauss, the German-born political philosopher who had a long postwar American career at the University of Chicago. Straussianism attracted bright young people like Kristol to conservatism by the mid-seventies - the kind of bright young people who staffed Reagan's Washington. Strong believers in virtue and natural law, Straussians are fundamentally anti-utopian and skeptical of the idea of human progress. "My philosophical background gave me a healthy respect for reality," says Kristol. "Straussianism is very hostile to the notion that we can radically change the world for the better."

Hence Kristol's dark vision of the New Deal/Great Society worlds. He is right to say that many public enterprises fail; so do private ones, a point that conservatives always seem to overlook. And Kristol is certainly wrong in campaigning on the idea that government can't work, period. In the thirties, the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Tennessee Valley Authority worked; in the late forties and early fifties, the G.I. Bill sent a generation of veterans to college; in the sixties, NASA was superb in getting America to the moon. And just recently, the military in Bush's Persian Gulf War did its job.