Reddit mentions of The Neoconservative Persuasion: Selected Essays, 1942-2009

So cleaning out my downloads folder today, I found I had a PDF copy of Irving Kristol's The Neoconservative Persuasion tucked away in a little cobwebbed corner of the hard drive, and I have no idea how it got there. Either I'm having serious memory loss, or the CIA has put four hundred pages of wonderful malware on my computer.

In any case, after having perused it for a short while, I can confirm that Mr. Kristol is a brilliant writer:

>Finally, for a great power, the “national interest” is not a geographical
term, except for fairly prosaic matters like trade and environmental regulation.
A smaller nation might appropriately feel that its national interest begins
and ends at its borders, so that its foreign policy is almost always in a
defensive mode. A larger nation has more extensive interests. And large nations
whose identity is ideological, like the Soviet Union of yesteryear and
the United States of today, inevitably have ideological interests in addition to
more material concerns. Barring extraordinary events, the United States will
always feel obliged to defend, if possible, a democratic nation under attack
from nondemocratic forces, external or internal. That is why it was in our
national interest to come to the defense of France and Britain in World War
II. That is why we feel it necessary to defend Israel today, when its survival
is threatened. No complicated geopolitical calculations of national interest
are necessary.

But I'm also finding that the views Our Glorious Founder, perhaps more than expected, don't necessarily align with those of this sub and a lot of modern Neoconservatism, at least from what I've read so far. From the same essay (emphasis added):

> And then, of course, there is foreign policy, the area of American politics
where neoconservatism has recently been the focus of media attention. This is
surprising since there is no set of neoconservative beliefs concerning foreign
policy, only a set of attitudes derived from historical experience. (The favorite
neoconservative text on foreign affairs, thanks to Professors Leo Strauss of
Chicago and Donald Kagan of Yale, is Thucydides on the Peloponnesian War.)
These attitudes can be summarized in the following “theses” (as a Marxist
would say). First, patriotism is a natural and healthy sentiment and should be
encouraged by both private and public institutions. Precisely because we are a
nation of immigrants, this is a powerful American sentiment. Second, world
government is a terrible idea since it can lead to world tyranny. International institutions that point to an ultimate world government should be regarded
with the deepest suspicion. Third, statesmen should, above all, have the ability
to distinguish friends from enemies. This is not as easy as it sounds, as the
history of the Cold War revealed. The number of intelligent men who could
not count the Soviet Union as an enemy, even though this was its own selfdefinition,
was absolutely astonishing.

I get the feeling that many of the lines that jumped out at me as rather strange utterances from the Godfather of Neoconservatism are merely instances of miscommunication; Kristol had a very specific way of putting things -- supposedly "not having beliefs" on foreign policy is really, if you read further, a statement on the practicality and the importance of the lesson of history regarding that policy -- but the break between Kristol's philosophy of Neoconservatism and the modern persuasion -- for it remains, I'll agree with him, a "persuasion" and not a philosophy or a doctrine -- is very real and much more easily spotted than I'd previously assumed. As he says in this essay, however, our roots are in the American-led rules-based world order, not necessarily in the precise words of various moral justifications for it. Regardless of Kristol's particular suspicions of policies or institutions we might hold dear, he did a mighty fine job of defining this here ideology's place within American conservatism.

On just this, he opens:

> What exactly is neoconservatism? Journalists, and now even presidential candidates,
speak with an enviable confidence on who or what is “neoconservative,”
and seem to assume the meaning is fully revealed in the name. Those of
us who are designated as “neocons” are amused, flattered, or dismissive, depending
on the context. It is reasonable to wonder: is there any “there” there?
Even I, frequently referred to as the “godfather” of all those neocons, have had
my moments of wonderment.

And soon concludes, after mulling a bit on the subject of just where his "persuasion" should be in the world:

> Neoconservatism is the first variant of American conservatism in the past
century that is in the “American grain.” It is hopeful, not lugubrious; forwardlooking,
not nostalgic; and its general tone is cheerful, not grim or dyspeptic. Its
twentieth-century heroes tend to be TR, FDR, and Ronald Reagan. Such Republican
and conservative worthies as Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Dwight
Eisenhower, and Barry Goldwater are politely overlooked. Of course, those worthies
are in no way overlooked by a large, probably the largest, segment of the Republican
Party, with the result that most Republican politicians know nothing
and could not care less about neoconservatism. Nevertheless, they cannot be
blind to the fact that neoconservative policies, reaching out beyond the traditional
political and financial base, have helped make the very idea of political
conservatism more acceptable to a majority of American voters. Nor has it passed
official notice that it is the neoconservative public policies, not the traditional Republican
ones, which result in popular Republican presidencies.

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Tl;Dr

I'm glad I downloaded this, even if I don't remember it. I think I'm in for a wild ride.