Irving Kristol Quotes
A welfare state, properly conceived, can be an integral part of a conservative society.
Irving Kristol, 1920-2009, Political columnist, journalist, and writer, Founder of the Neoconservatism Movement, Reflections of a Neoconservative: Looking Back, Looking Ahead, 1983
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Before America, many political thinkers believed that popular sovereignty and liberty are incompatible concepts—that the tyranny of the majority would trample liberty of all kinds of minorities: intellectuals, the wealthy, different religion, smaller religions, original thinking, cultural independence. However, Mandelbaum’s theory is that the social safety net, makes everyone wealthy to enough an extent that most will not trample others liberties for an even greater wealth. Inequality of wealth is tolerable if all have a modicum of a standard of living, but if some or many do not even have that, other’s liberties are less important than their own survival.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 This is a classic example of a twisted logic what was used for many years in the 20th century Red Scare in America. The International Communist Party was critical of the United States legal racial segregation as it was one of the great weaknesses of U. S. Capitalism for most people in the world. The American Communist party also echoed the party line. Almost all socialist organizations supported the Civil Rights Bill as well. Therefore argued Russell and most Southerners, it should be opposed as a Communist effort to weaken America. What they did not mention was that the majority of Democrats and Republicans supported the bill. That the vast majority of all the American churches and other religious organizations supported the bill, that Business groups all across the country wanted legal segregation ended. The only reason there was a long debate is that the Southerners used the filibuster where a small minority could block Senate legislation. But the American majority was so great for civil rights that the filibuster was defeated and the law passed which changed America forever.
Irving Kristol was an American journalist who was dubbed the "godfather of neoconservatism". As a founder, editor, and contributor to various magazines, he played an influential role in the intellectual and political culture of the last half of the twentieth century. After his death, he was described by The Daily Telegraph as being "perhaps the most consequential public intellectual of the latter half of the [twentieth] century".
