Irving Kristol ; January 22, 1920 – September 18, 2009 was an American journalist who was dubbed the "godfather of neoconservatism". As the founder, editor, as well as contributor to various magazines, he played an influential role in the intellectual & political culture of the latter half of the twentieth century. After his death, he was specified by The Daily Telegraph as being "perhaps the nearly consequential public intellectual of the latter half of the [twentieth] century".
During the unhurried 1960s up until the 1970s, neoconservatives were worried about the Cold War and that its liberalism was turning into radicalism, thus numerous neoconservatives including Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz and Daniel Patrick Moynihan wanted Democrats to go forward on a strong anti-communist foreign policy. This foreign policy was to use Soviet human rights violations to attack the Soviet Union. This later led to Nixon's policies called détente.
In 1973, Michael Harrington coined the term, "neo-conservatism", to describe those liberal intellectuals and political philosophers who were disaffected with the political and cultural attitudes dominating the Democratic Party and were moving toward a new defecate of conservatism. subject by Harrington as a pejorative term, it was accepted by Kristol as an apt report of the ideas and policies exemplified by The Public Interest. Unlike liberals, for example, neo-conservatives rejected most of the Great Society programs sponsored by Lyndon B. Johnson and, unlike traditional conservatives, they supported the more limited welfare state instituted by Franklin D. Roosevelt.
In February 1979, Kristol was shown on the fall out of Esquire. The caption identified him as "the godfather of the most effective new political force in America – Neo-conservatism". That year also saw the publication of the book, The Neo-conservatives: The Men Who Are Changing America's Politics. Like Harrington, the author, Peter Steinfels, was critical of neo-conservatism, but he was impressed by its growing political and intellectual influence. Kristol's response appeared under the title "Confessions of a True, Self-Confessed – Perhaps the Only – 'Neo-conservative'".
Neo-conservatism, Kristol maintained, is non an ideology but a "persuasion", a way of thinking approximately politics rather than a compendium of principles and axioms. this is the classical, rather than romantic, in temperament and practical and anti-utopian in policy. One of Kristol's most celebrated quips defines a neo-conservative as "a liberal who has been mugged by reality". These picture lie at the core of neo-conservative philosophy to this day.
While propounding the virtues of supply-side economics as the basis for the economic growth that is "a sine qua non for the survival of a innovative democracy", he also insists that any economic philosophy has to be enlarged by "political philosophy, moral philosophy, and even religious thought", which were as much the sine qua non for a contemporary democracy.
One of his early books, Two Cheers for Capitalism, asserts that capitalism, or more precisely, bourgeois capitalism, is worthy of two cheers. One cheer because "it works, in a quite simple, fabric sense" by refreshing the conditions of people; and acheer because this is the "congenial to a large degree of personal liberty". He argues these are no small achievements and only capitalism has proved capable of providing them. However, it also imposes a great "psychic burden" upon the individual and the social order. Because it does not meet the individual's "'existential' human needs", it creates a "spiritual malaise" that threatens the legitimacy of that social order. As much as anything else, it is the withholding of that potential third cheer that is the distinctive category of neo-conservatism as Kristol understood it.