1965: Neoconservative Political Movement Begins

Irving Kristol’s 1995 book, ‘Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea’ [Source: Yurica Report]Academic Irving Kristol founds a magazine, “The Public Interest,” and fills it with political and social commentary by himself and his increasingly conservative followers. Kristol will later describe himself and his comrades as “liberals mugged by reality.” He leads a nascent ideological movement—later turned “neoconservativism”—marked by attacks on President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” economic policies and “New Left” thinkers. Early shapers and proponents of this new, aggressive conservatism include Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Norman Podhoretz, Diana Trilling, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Midge Decter. The more unpopular their views become with their friends and academic colleagues, the more insular and withdrawn they become. Author Craig Unger will write in 2007, “In part, their apostasy could be attributed to angst about their careers and social standing” along with their shifting political beliefs. Kristol’s group tends to live, work, and socialize with one another, in an increasingly exclusive and insular group. Much of their attacks on their former liberal and counterculture friends are rooted as much in personal antipathy and a desire to avenge social slights as in ideological differences, and their attacks tend to veer away from criticism of positions and into personal invective. (Interestingly, Podhoretz once tries to convince his former friend, Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, to join his neoconservative group, an effort which Ginsberg harshly repudiates. The poet later recalls Podhoretz’s conversion attempt as “an epiphanous moment in my relation with Podhoretz and what he was part of—a large, right-wing, protopolice surveillance movement.”) At this point, most neoconservatives still identify themselves, however reluctantly, with the Democratic Party. [Unger, 2007, pp. 35-36]