Sweet Neo Cons

"Today, roughly 70 percent of Americans say they don't believe in the American dream. That loss of faith is like a giant bomb detonated in the middle of our society, robbing us of our central, unifying vision. Absent that shared vision of possibility, people revert to a tribal, us-versus-them morality. If the ghosts of the original neocons have anything to tell us about specific policy choices, it's that we need to do what we can to expand social mobility and restore faith in the American dream."

David Brooks at The Atlantic argues that "[t]he neocons were right."

While Chris Ryan at Tangentially Speaking asks, "Just How Cynical is David Brooks?"

"The Earliest Neoconservative"

"Banfield did not abandon altogether the possibility of policy interventions, although it’s true he thought policymakers' room to maneuver was severely constrained. Likewise, Kristol remarked in his 1985 retrospective that 'the failure (or at least non-success) of so much of social policy in the past twenty years can be exaggerated. Not every program failed and there are a few important ones that represent positive achievements.' Indeed, 'The Public Interest has always emphasized the modestly positive along with the skeptical.' Yet on the right writ large there has been a clear decline from skepticism toward nihilism—toward a belief that policy interventions fail so often and character is so intractable that it is almost never worth it to attempt to solve social problems through policy."

Joshua Tait at The Bulwark recalls political scientist Edward C. Banfield.

And David Klion at The Nation looks at varying definitions of "neoconservatism."

"A Politico-Cultural Counterpart to the Marshall Plan"

"Despite the genuine threat to attendees' physical safety (the Soviets had kidnapped and 'disappeared' several critics from Berlin's Western sector), the event attracted such luminaries as A. J. Ayer, James Burnham, Herbert Read, H. R. Trevor-Roper, Sidney Hook, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Carlo Schmid, as well as five honorary presidents–the eminent philosophers Bertrand Russell, Karl Jaspers, John Dewey, Benedetto Croce, and Jacques Maritain. Delegates also included 'the cream of the anti-Stalinist left,' such as Arthur Koestler and Ignazio Silone, some of whom had been imprisoned in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Fascist Italy, or Falangist Spain. Indeed, one of the forum's organizers, Margarete Buber-Neumann, had been incarcerated by both Hitler and Stalin."

At The American Interest, Michael Allen and David E. Lowe look back to the 1950 creation of the Congress for Cultural Freedom.

"Attaining New Levels of Political Power and Cultural Visibility"

"Perhaps the essence of left-conservatism is its plea for social cohesion and a concomitant rejection of post-national elites with their one-two punch of economic liberalism and the adversary culture. At root, the New Class/Anywhere elite is attached to a transnational status culture, much like Europe's aristocracy prior to the age of nations. Michael Lind captures this milieu well in The New Class War (2020), contrasting those who 'derive their personal status from their prestigious occupations, not their local or national communities; abandon their low-status class or ethnic or regional accents in order to succeed in metropolitan careers; and jettison ancestral traditions in favor of ever-changing transnational elite fashions.'"

Eric Kaufmann at Tablet describes the "Rebirth of the Left-Conservative Tradition."

"A Socialist in Economics, a Liberal in Politics and a Conservative in Culture"

"In 'The End of Ideology' he contended—nearly three decades before the collapse of Communism—that ideologies that had once driven global politics were losing force and thus providing openings for newer galvanizing beliefs to gain toeholds. In 'The Coming of Post-Industrial Society,' he foresaw the global spread of service-based economies as generators of capital and employment, supplanting those dominated by manufacturing or agriculture.
"In Mr. Bell’s view, Western capitalism had come to rely on mass consumerism, acquisitiveness and widespread indebtedness, undermining the old Protestant ethic of thrift and modesty that writers like Max Weber and R.H. Tawney had long credited as the reasons for capitalism’s success."

In The New York Times, Michael T. Kaufman writes an obituary for Daniel Bell.

Roberto Foa and Thomas Meaney in The Utopian give Bell one of his last interviews.

"At Home Everywhere and Nowhere"

"From the 1930s, other sociologists had written about the social effects of mass media and mass consumption, and The Lonely Crowd's other-directed type bore some resemblance to Erich Fromm's 'marketing personality' (Fromm had been Riesman's analyst). But The Lonely Crowd made more of the way in which an older industrial culture of production and saving had given way to one of services, sales, and consumption—what Daniel Bell, a decade later, would call a 'postindustrial' society."

In The Chronicle Review, Rupert Wilkinson revisits David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd, upon the book's sixtieth anniversary.