TDR Interview: Bill Kristol: The Weekly Standard Turns Ten

By Scott Glabe | Friday, October 7, 2005

Editor's Note: Bill Kristol, editor and co-founder of the Weekly Standard, is a jack-of-all-trades, variously serving as an academic, public servant, lobbyist, and political operative before entering journalism. He is one of the nation's leading conservative commentators and is chairman of the Project for a New American Century, which seeks to promote American global leadership. Kristol was educated at Harvard, receiving a BA in 1973 and a Ph.D in 1979. TDR recently caught up with him in the Washington, DC offices of the Weekly Standard.

The Dartmouth Review: With your wide-ranging experience in politics and academia, why found a magazine?

Bill Kristol: Well my father had started a couple magazines, and I figured I should continue in the family tradition as a conservative (laughs). But I didn't really ever expect to do this and didn't plan on it. I came to Washington in 1985 to work for Bill Bennett in the Reagan administration—I had been teaching at the Kennedy School at Harvard—and thought I would go for a year and help Bill out, and then go back to teaching. One thing led to another: I stayed with Bennett, became his chief of staff, and then became Dan Quayle's chief of staff when he was vice president. And then, when I left government, I did some politics, and in particular had this organization called Project for the American Future that played some part in the Republican victory in the 1994 Congressional campaign. I guess, I then thought, I had sort of done what I could on the outside. I thought actually of joining one of the '96 Presidential campaigns and thought, "Well, that's not necessarily my particular skill." I liked electoral politics, but there are other people that do that for a living—polling and media and electoral strategy—and I just really tried to think about what was important. It seemed that there was now a Republican majority, but there needed to be a lot of debate about policies and politics and culture on the conservative side, that there was some risk of having a political majority but not really maintaining the intellectual vigor that originally produced that majority, some risk of that intellectual vigor could not be maintained and fresh ideas would not be proposed and debated. And so I talked to Fred Barnes and John Podhoretz and others, and we went to [News Corp. CEO Rupert] Murdoch, and one thing led to another. Now the Weekly Standard is ten years old.

TDR: Both you and the Weekly Standard have become increasingly identified with foreign policy in general, and the Iraq War in particular, although the magazine did not necessarily start out that way. Do you see that as what your legacy will be?

BK: I have no idea what, if anything, my legacy is going to be, or the Weekly Standard's legacy is going to be, but it's a good instance of the conservative truth, if I can put it that way, the Hayekian truth about the limits of planning. We didn't expect to focus particularly on foreign policy. If you look at the first ten issues of the Weekly Standard, I bet there's not really very much foreign policy in them. Our first major foreign policy position that was controversial was to support Clinton's going into Bosnia in December 1995 and actually criticizing many of the Republicans who opposed that American intervention. We lost of a bunch of subscribers with that. One reason to start a magazine is that you've got a lot of smart people around you and to make yourself think freshly about things to get a little bit out of the day-to-day political fighting and out of the conventional wisdom. The conventional wisdom of the mid-90s was that foreign policy doesn't matter. From talking with [Project for the New American Century co-founder] Bob Kagan and others, we decided it did matter. Kagan and I wrote a piece in Foreign Affairs in 1996, called "Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy." We became increasingly concerned in the late '90s about American weakness in the world. And then, of course, 9/11 happened and took what was kind of a parochial concern of the Weekly Standard and made it a major concern of the nation.

TDR: The news seems to be filled with constant and conflicting reports from the media, from observers, from the administration about how things are going in Iraq. Obviously, your positions are well-known, but, on the empirical side of things, what do you rely on to discern the state of things in a place that is so far away?

BK: It's not so easy. Obviously, our own people have been in Iraq and, if [executive editor] Fred Barnes or [staff writer] Steve Hayes go on a reporting trip to Iraq, I trust them more than anyone else. But there are a ton of people at other newspapers and magazines and other forms of media whom I trust, within the limits of what they are able to learn. There are people in government I know. I guess I would say two things. First of all, I think it is important to get empirical information. I mean, one can have all the ideas one wants and one can have principles, of course, and points of view, but, reality really does matter. I notice the left now calls itself the "reality-based movement," or something like that, whereas Bush is allegedly faith-based. We shouldn't let the Left claim that term. Like my father [Irving Kristol, "Father of Neoconservatism"] said at the very beginning, neoconservatives are liberals who are mugged by reality. We really need to be attentive to reality. You can change reality, too, but we need to ground our policies in reality, obviously, and adjust them based on reality. One of our criticisms of Bush is that he hasn't adjusted in Iraq in accordance with reality. In terms of finding out what's really going on, having multiple sources of information is very important. Listen to your friends in the administration, but also listen to their critics. Listen to friendly critics, people who wish the administration well, wish the U.S. well, but are doubtful about some of the tactics and means. But also read the Nation and read the New Republic and read real critics of the policy. And make sure that you think that you know the answers to their arguments and also to their factual claims. So I actually spend quite a lot of time reading left-wing magazines, even left-wing blogs. And I do think the Internet has helped. I mean you can really learn much more by reading—

TDR: Iraqi bloggers?

BK: Yeah, Iraqi bloggers and the like. And of course any single one could be giving you a misleading view. Not even intentionally; you could just be in a particularly quiet area or a particularly difficult area. But, again, I think if you have more sources of information, it helps a lot.

TDR: A lot was made of the coalition that elected George Bush in the 2004 election—Orthodox Jews became more Republican, as did orthodox Catholics. Do you see that trend continuing, and what effect do you think that infusion might have on the Republican Party in the future?

BK: The fight to get my fellow Jews to be more conservative has been going on a long time on the part of some of us, and I expect, unfortunately, it will have to go on a lot longer. But you're right about Orthodox Jews and about church-going Catholics and obviously evangelical Protestants, conservative evangelicals in particular. And I think what you're seeing—and the political science data confirms this—is that the more observant you are, the more likely you now are to be Republican, and the more secular you are, the more likely you are to be Democratic. That's just a fact. The cultural divide is now more important in American politics than the economic divide. And that's a big deal as a matter of history, as a matter of political science. The economic divide was really central for most of the 20th century; that's what the New Deal was about: a common class interest, allegedly, that overcame all kinds of sociological and cultural and religious differences. Now, you have sort of the opposite, which is common cultural interest overcoming class or economic differences. So that's just a fact of American politics. It's one that people didn't really predict; it's one that has some positive and negative implications for liberal democracy. I don't think it's really healthy, ultimately, to have a religious party and a secular party. Other nations have gone down that road, and it's generally not a recipe for moderation or for healthy politics. On the other hand, you can't ask people not to be what they are and not to vote the way they think is right, so there's no point complaining about it too much. It's a good example of how the most interesting phenomena are often utterly unexpected. I think if you predicted this in 1960 or even 1970 or '80, people would have said, "That's the future? This is going to be one of the main dividing lines in American politics?" I don't think people ever expected that.

TDR: Well Nixon turned a few of the economic issues into social issues.

BK: But I think Reagan much more. Nixon was really before that. There was no religious right. Nixon was kind of angry Middle America, but that was a secular angry Middle America. I mean think about: Archie Bunker, I don't believe, is much of a churchgoer. It's just sort of interesting sociologically, you know? His kids would be, I would say, grandchildren maybe.

TDR: Turning attention to campus issues, you now have children of college age. How would you compare, on the surface, their campus experience and what you've seen going around colleges with your own experiences?

BK: It's so hard to compare. It's both better and worse. It's both better and worse intellectually; I think it's both better and worse politically. Politically, on the one hand, there's no question conservative views are, in general, more respectable today than they were 35 years ago. Conservative magazines, newspapers, FOXNews, blogs—that was stuff that didn't exist when I entered college, which was 1970. There was the National Review, and that was about it. The Wall Street Journal editorial page wasn't even particularly well-known (Bartley hadn't taken it over yet). Charles Krauthammer didn't exist, nor did George Will; I mean, this is a different era. So, on the one hand, I'm struck when I go around speaking to campuses how many well-informed young conservatives there are. On the other hand, the universities themselves were much less politicized. There were plenty of professors whose political views you didn't know. They were moderate, they were old-fashioned liberals, they were old-fashioned conservatives in some cases, but it wasn't how they defined themselves. And I think that's really different. The universities have become so politicized. To be a conservative student is not just to oppose the liberal media or your local liberal members of Congress or something; it's to be a…

TDR: Cultural iconoclast?

BK: Right. And the difference is, when I was in college, the student body was more liberal than it is today, but the faculty, at Harvard at least, was a little bit more open-minded and more balanced. The student body was a little off the deep end, you know? Now the faculty are unbalanced and not open-minded in some ways, and the student body, I think, is more diverse. Students are predominantly liberal, probably, at the Ivies, but my impression is not overwhelmingly so, actually, and not intolerably so. The faculty is more the problem than the students, which is really weird.

TDR: Do you see students today as more virtuous than those of your generation? With things like Peace Corps and Teach for America, you see students more active in community service and the like than they were in the 60s and 70s. Is that sort of a shallow passing fad or an indication of students searching for more solid meaning?

BK: It's hard to tell. I think these students are serious; I don't think they're shallow. But there were some serious students in my generation, too. These cultural trends are so hard to figure out. Young people have such contradictory impulses and tendencies; it's hard to get a read on "where they are" sociologically or culturally. I would say, in general, from teaching at Harvard two years ago, speaking at a fair number of campuses in the last year, and sort of watching my kids' friends, that students are a little more serious than we were, a little more career-minded than we were, and a little more mature than we were—that's really striking to me. And that's good and bad, you know? You're impressive people, I'd say; you're not as irresponsible as me and my friends were. On the other hand, we were living in the late 60s, early 70s…People do grow up faster today, and that's good on the whole. It probably means there's a little less intellectual daring, I would say. You know, an awful lot of people at age 18 kind of know what they want to be and what they think, and they're not reading some book at midnight and just changing their mind about everything—which can be good and bad obviously, but it is part of education. The late 60s can be caricatured as people sitting around being ridiculous—you know, asking "Is God dead?" reading Nietzsche or whatever—but that is part of what college is supposed to be about, you know?

TDR: I recently read Austin Bramwell's cover story in a recent issue of American Conservative. His basic argument is that, with success, conservatism has lost its philosophical edge. You have a lot more people being born into the movement than coming to it, as your father did—and basically every conservative did before a certain time—and that there are more pundits and fewer thinkers. Is there a generation of intellectuals to replace the Harvey Mansfields [Kristol's Harvard adviser] of the world?

BK: I think so. I guess it's a legitimate concern, although it's tough to know what to do about it. I mean, I would by no means limit it to conservatives. In general, if you grow up in a time of total flux—the Great Depression, World War II, Nazism, Fascism, Communism, socialism, liberalism in crisis—you're going to produce more interesting thinkers than if you grow up in the period after the Cold War, at least until 2001, or even the late Cold War period, when everything was kind of settled in. So I don't quarrel with that. I think the generation of Bill Buckley, my father, Harvey Mansfield, Jeff Hart—and there's a little bit of age difference between them, but not that much—I mean that's a very interesting intellectual generation. Not just among conservatives, incidentally, but on the Left as well, there are very, very smart people; and people went from Left to Right, and some people went from Right to Left. Maybe other periods, when there was less turmoil, in some ways produced fewer interesting thinkers, but I'm not so sure that's true. I think post 9/11, that's not going to turn out to be true. Post 9/11 has produced a very interesting, very challenging moment, and I think people are rethinking lots of things. If you put together the foreign policy issues of "empire-republic," if you want to call it that, the issue of Islam and democracy, the domestic issues of religion and politics and liberal democracy, and science—the bioethics issues—I expect your generation to turn out to be quite an interesting one because there's a lot of interesting questions about the future that you're forced to confront.

TDR: Who among conservatives is tackling those big questions? What books will sit along [Russell Kirk's] The Conservative Mind and [F.A. Hayek's] Road to Serfdom on the bookshelf fifty years from now?

BK: Well, that's hard to tell. Obviously, there are a lot of very, very smart books now. I mean, I would say if you read the New Atlantis, the journal that Eric Cohen edits on science and politics and society, if you read the Weekly Standard and National Review…We'll see what [senior editor] Chris Caldwell writes about Europe and Islam, let's see what [New York Times columnist] David Brooks's next book is, to say nothing of a whole bunch of other people writing about the war and about religion and politics — I think there'll be lots of interesting stuff produced. I think books are less central. There are people like Chris Caldwell and [First Things editor and former books and arts editor] Jody Bottom and [Middle East expert and contributor] Stephen Schwartz and [Yale professor and art critic] David Gelernter, to take just colleagues of mine; I'm not sure their best work is in books necessarily. But David Gelernter certainly has fertile a mind as anyone of that previous generation.

TDR: I read a great anecdote about you wearing a Spiro Agnew T-shirt around in college even though you didn't really like the guy. And, of course, we at the Review have done our share of envelope-pushing in our day. How important is it, in a campus dominated by liberals, to be a little outrageous in order to move the center of debate?

BK: I think people should do what they want, and if you're the type who enjoys that you should do it. I wouldn't do it all the time; it gets a little tiresome. I think it's important to show a sense of humor. It's important to show that you're not intimidated, that you're willing to outrage people a little…I would say we didn't have the real problem of political correctness that you have. And I do think ridicule and mockery are very important on campus. It's very good for conservatives that they become the party of satire and ridicule and parody. We have a parody at the back of our magazine, and a lot of conservative magazines and newspapers actually use parody. They're gratuitous, they're often funny; the Left does not laugh at things, and that's a real weakness on their part. And that would not have been the case, obviously, 50 or 60 years ago.

TDR: I read another anecdote about you meeting with a small group to do a close reading of Plato's Republic [at Harvard]. What's your take on the core curriculum, students' awareness of Western civilization, the stuff that Robert George is doing at Princeton with the Madison Institute—how important is that? Should it be more emphasized among conservatives?

BK: I think everyone should read Shakespeare and Lincoln and Plato, but I probably wouldn't myself expend most of my effort on trying to get core classes: the people who teach them aren't going to be good in some cases, and they'll teach a bad version of Plato, which is almost worse than nothing. But I'm very interested in undergraduate education, I've gotten much more interested in the last few years. I'm really worried that really bright students can go to very good schools and have rather few opportunities to have really good teachers. I think kids deserve better. That's actually why I'm teaching at Harvard this year. I'm not flattering myself; I don't think I'm that good of a teacher, but I'm going to co-teach with Steve Rosen and Harvey Mansfield. I figured my role is to bring in some students who wouldn't otherwise come to these classes, and let them hear Rosen and Mansfield. But I really am interested in what Robbie's doing at Princeton, and other things. I'm going to work a little bit this year on some other projects to try and bring more good teachers to campus, or bring more students from campus to summer school with good teachers. It would be a shame if the best kids didn't get exposed to these arguments and the interesting professors who could show them how to read a novel, how to read a book of theory. I don't even care about the particular field and the particular approach; I just want really smart people committed to really taking the life of the mind seriously…[But with the Canon] in some ways, if that's taught badly, I'd almost prefer people not read it.

TDR: So it's more method than curriculum?

BK: It's more method, it's more just really having good teachers who really care about finding out the truth and really care about thinking deeply about important topics. That is what I am worried about; that is a real concern. You can't expect 18-year-olds to know who the good teachers are, but if there are some of them there, they'll stumble into the right class. They'll hear from someone else, "This is a good teacher; this is really interesting; reading Plato, I couldn't believe there were all these things to be learned." I worry that students can go through school and get a decent education—I mean, it's not like they're going to come out foolish or ignorant—but they really won't have a really deep educational experience.

TDR: Last question. Do you have any notable memories of Dartmouth?

BK: I went to Harvard, and we never went to Dartmouth. There was no reason when we were in Cambridge to go to Hanover. But I remember the one weekend every two years when the Dartmouth kids came for the football game, and we had to put up with them being in Cambridge for a whole weekend, lowering the general tone of life at Harvard Square. But I'm sure that's not the case anymore. I'm trying to think, Dartmouth was then not co-ed, I believe.

TDR: '72 is when they first admitted women.

BK: Right, my undergraduate years were '70-'73, so I remember the pre-coed Dartmouth. Not a pretty sight (laughs). But I'm very fond of Dartmouth despite that.

TDR Interview: Bill Kristol: The Weekly Standard Turns Ten

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