I was making lunch and only caught about ten minutes of Bill Kristol's speech at the Young America's Foundation yesterday. But this is a blog, and ten minutes is enough for a post.
I was surprised by how backward-looking and rueful Kristol seemed about the whole conservative enterprise. No one could have anticipated our victories, he said. We didn't really know which way history was going, we just committed and said what was right. Whittaker Chambers did the right thing, he didn't think history would vindicate him. (I think these are really smart points.) No one predicted Reagan, Thatcher, no one predicted the fall of the Communist bloc as rapidly as it occurred. No one anticipated the triumph of capitalism.
But the implication was: no one could anticipate the recent collapse either.
Backward looking. How many kids in the audience had even heard of Whittaker Chambers (who died nearly 50 years ago)? I didn't hear the second half of the speech when presumably Kristol talked about the present and applied some rouge to events on the Euphrates. But I got a foreshadowing of gloom. He said that a lot has worked out well, and some other things haven't worked out so well. Like, maybe we were on the wrong side of history?
Kristol's mood was different two years ago when he spoke at Yivo. He was plucky and defiant, though he obviously felt hunted by people like me, who were blaming Jewish Israel-loving neoconservatives for the Iraq war. Jewishness has never been a factor in my progress, he said on that stage, until recently, when there has been this "insanity" and conspiracy theory. The names Walt and Mearsheimer came up, and he called them "schmucks." He suggested that Judy Miller might have gotten hung out to dry by the Times because she was Jewish. Two years on and what has happened–Joe Klein has endorsed that insanity; Klein has said that the Jewish neocons with divided loyalties pushed the Iraq war. And I wonder if it hasn't gotten to Kristol a little, if his reflectiveness at the event yesterday shows some greater awareness of the ways that conservative Zionists misplayed their hand, got on the wrong side of history.
