How Will the Neocon Church Now Divide?
Irving Kristol has died at 89. Kristol is the primary intellectual godfather of the neoconservative movement — which his son Bill Kristol helped transform into a major political force. Kristol and his wife, Gertrude Himmelfarb, were and are respectively profoundly significant intellectuals whose work and public commentary had an enormous impact on Washington’s political culture. But what now will be interesting to watch is the race between those who want to inherit Irving Kristol’s mantle as the “real neoconservative” and who will take the movement into a new generation. This title will not automatically go to his son, Bill Kristol, who committed a great sin in the eyes of many neocons by animating the political pretensions of the anti-intellectual populist former Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin. When neoconservative scholar and author Francis Fukuyama was once venting his frustration about the neoconservatives who were driving America into the wreckage of the Iraq War and defending h
