I got the alert via New York Times and I checked over at the Weekly Standard and sure enough Irving Kristol has passed.
Via The New York Times:
Irving Kristol, the political commentator who, as much as anyone, defined modern conservatism and helped revitalize the Republican Party in the late 1960s and early ’70s, setting the stage for the Reagan presidency and years of conservative dominance, died Friday in Arlington, Va. He was 89 and lived in Washington.
His son, William Kristol, the commentator and editor of the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard, said the cause of death was complications of lung cancer.
Mr. Kristol exerted an influence across generations, from William F. Buckley to the columnist David Brooks, through a variety of positions he held over a long career: executive vice president of Basic Books, contributor to The Wall Street Journal, professor of social thought at New York University, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
He was commonly known as the godfather of neoconservatism, even by those who were not entirely sure what the term meant. In probably his most widely quoted comment — his equivalent of Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame — Mr. Kristol defined a neoconservative as a liberal who had been “mugged by reality.”
[….]
By now Mr. Kristol was battling on several fronts. He published columns and essays attacking liberalism and the counterculture from his perches at The Wall Street Journal and The Public Interest, and in 1978 he and William E. Simon, President Nixon’s secretary of the treasury, formed the Institute for Educational Affairs to funnel corporate and foundation money to conservative causes. In 1985 he started The National Interest, a journal devoted to foreign affairs.
But Mr. Kristol wasn’t railing just against the left. He criticized America’s commercial class for upholding greed and selfishness as positive values. He saw “moral anarchy” within the business community, and he urged it to take responsibility for itself and the larger society. He encouraged businessmen to give money to political candidates and help get conservative ideas across to the public. Republicans, he said, had for half a century been “the stupid party,” with not much more on their minds than balanced budgets and opposition to the welfare state. He instructed them to support economic growth by cutting taxes and not to oppose New Deal institutions.
Above all, Mr. Kristol preached a faith in ordinary people. . “It is the self-imposed assignment of neoconservatives,” he wrote, “to explain to the American people why they are right, and to the intellectuals why they are wrong.”
Mr. Kristol saw religion and a belief in the afterlife as the foundation for the middle-class values he championed. He argued that religion provided a necessary constraint to antisocial, anarchical impulses. Without it, he said, “the world falls apart.” Yet Mr. Kristol’s own religious views were so ambiguous that some friends questioned whether he believed in God. In 1996, he told an interviewer: “I’ve always been a believer.” But, he added, “don’t ask me in what.”
“That gets too complicated,” he said. “The word ‘God’ confuses everything.”
In 2002, Mr. Kristol received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, often considered the nation’s highest civilian honor. It was another satisfying moment for a man who appears to have delighted in his life or, as Andrew Sullivan put it, “to have emerged from the womb content.”
He once said that his career had been “one instance of good luck after another.” Some called him a cheerful conservative. He did not dispute it. He had had much, he said, “to be cheerful about.”
I will not lie. I did not agree with Mr. Kristol’s Politics or his version of Conservatism. In fact, I have been known to make a crack at people on other blogs; when they were spewing stupidity, especially the George W. Bush Cheerleaders, I would always say, “Where did you learn that line? From Bill or Irving Kristol?” or something usually to that effect. Some of Irving Kristol’s ideology was very controversial; like the desire for a full scale invasion of Iran; of which I found to be horrifically stupid. Thankfully, Bush’s people agreed. Much of his ideology can be summed up as Wilsonian; the man believed that war was the answer, always. I disagreed then and I still do.
However, it is not to say that Kristol was a total loss; He did work to take the Conservative movement away from the Anti-Semites within the Republican Party. He also exposed and expelled the blatant racists that had taken root since the days of Abraham Lincoln. Between Kristol and Buckley; Conservatism become a bit more intellectual and not the knuckle-dragging simpleton nonsense that it has become now; Sarah Palin being a perfect example.
May God Bless the man, I am sure will be missed. May he rest in peace.
Cross-Posted at Alexandria