What happened to Bill Kristol?
First, a disclaimer: I don’t have the definitive answer. Second: why would I care? I guess it’s because I’m interested in what makes people tick, and especially interested in political change. Most such change goes from left to right. But someone like Kristol – who was thought to be a leading conservative thinker for many years, and who much later in life changed from supposedly right to effectively left – is of some interest.
What made me think of him today was this Instapundit post mentioning that Kristol has come out for Mamdani, and asking, “Did @BillKristol ever believe anything he said he did for decades?” My answer: it depends on what you mean by the word believe.”
Let me add that I was slightly acquainted with Kristol, having met him perhaps twice – one time of which involved sitting very near him at a table of about eight people, for a dinner after a talk he gave. I also wrote for the online Weekly Standard for some years, and would submit articles to him (the articles still exist, with format somewhat strained, at this URL at the Washington Examiner, in case you’re interested in ancient history). My observation is that he certainly appeared to believe what he was saying, although his personality wasn’t what you’d call intense.
Kristol was a Harvard guy, however, who moved in those circles for quite a while. And he was what you might call a legacy conservative. His father was a leading neoconservative (that is, a left-to-right changer) and his mother Gertrude Himmelfarb was a conservative academic historian and author. Bill Kristol’s Wiki page (at the top of which you can find the unintentionally humorous “Not to be confused with Billy Crystal”) notes his career and then his NeverTrumper credentials. But it’s one thing to not like Trump; it’s another to be okay with Mamdani.
Quite a journey. The easiest explanation – money – doesn’t quite do it for me. My guess is that the legacy aspect of Kristol’s conservatism made it perhaps rather shallow, and if you look at his history he was a fan of McCain, for example, and was the kind of neocon who advocated for military interventions. So he was more of a Republican than a conservative.
Trump offended him in some essential and deep way. But why the swing to the left? It was not his children, as far as I can tell. His son works for Tom Cotton and his daughter is married to Matthew Continetti, who is a Trump supporter (at least, according to recent articles he wrote such as this one). I wonder how Thanksgiving goes in their family? Haven’t seen much information about his wife’s politics, so I can’t speak to that.
Kristol’s father died in 2009, before Kristol’s political change. But his mother lived to be 97, dying in 2019. Is that a clue? Did his full political conversion only happen when his mother was deceased? One telling fact may be that, although Kristol hated Trump from the very start, he didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton but did vote for Biden and then Harris; both votes occurred after the death of his mother. Did that death enable him to cut the final cord with his parents’ viewpoints? He also no longer calls himself a Republican. And although he’s continued to support Israel, as far as I can tell, I see no evidence that he’s religious.
Here’s the fuller text of his explanation for supporting Mamdani; he said it in an interview. His reasoning doesn’t make all that much sense and is extraordinarily shallow as well as pretty meaningless, since Kristol lives in Virginia and can’t vote in the mayoral election at all. But here’s an excerpt:
… Abigail Spanberger, who I think will win in November, is really excellent. It might be Sherrill, actually, in New Jersey, excellent. And so, part of my core praise for Mamdani has been that, you know what, if we elect three Democrats who win in November—the three big races, really—and it’s Spanberger or Sherrill and Mamdani? That’s okay. …
… [T]he idea of going back to Cuomo is just, I think, ridiculous. I think if it had been the first round, I would’ve voted for someone else and maybe wouldn’t have even ranked Mamdani and would’ve had other people who were more centrist, liberal types.
It was very disappointing. All these big shot, you know, finance types in New York, they couldn’t get behind anyone except for Andrew Cuomo. It’s really pathetic, in my opinion. So now they’re rallying to Cuomo with some of them, but I don’t have that much sympathy for that.
And I also just think, practically speaking, New York is a huge city. He’s not going to destroy it, I don’t think. He’s gonna set up five silly government-run grocery stores, I guess. I don’t think he even will do that [inaudible]. And so they’ll be fine. So there’ll be some grocery store somewhere and it won’t be as good as the privately run ones, and it will go out of business in three years and it’ll be a little bit of a waste of taxpayer money, you know? Or it’ll be harmless, you know? And so people—I do think the right’s reaction to Mamdani has been a little hysterical. He’s a very impressive politician. I don’t know that he’s going to be a very good mayor. He’s 33 years old, he’s never run anything. They’re good people who could work for him though, in New York.
Huh? So, whatever.
On another now CNN host and long ago morning talk show host seemed to be quite conservative but te day he said he was voting for Barky was the last day I listened to him in the morning drive.
It came out from him, only hearing from his replacement, he said he was just playing a shtick and all talk show hosts did that.
It’s a case by case why someone changes 180 political, I have no idea either about Bill hearing him long ago but it is a bit fascinating.
“All these big shot(s), you know”…this kind of terminology is generally used by people who are at least somewhat resentful and bitter about their lot in life
My ideas? Brain tumors or money.
My guess is that his dislike of Trump stems from the Manhattanite seeing the outer borough Trump as being rather gauche. Which he is, admittedly. I, for one, prefer a gauche Trump to a refined Democrat.
From the Wiki article on Bill Kristol, we find out that in 2019 he was opposed to Trump’s proposing a withdrawal from Afghanistan. Kristol supported Joe Biden in 2020, who went on to have a disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. Oh well.
(I can think of at least two reasons for withdrawal.1. Having a supply line through hostile Pakistan was not viable long term. 2. Our rules of engagement against the Taliban were too gentle and thus self-defeating, shall we say. )
There is a picture of short-haired Kristol as an intern in Nixon’s White House in 1970. We were on opposite sides of the fence then and on opposite sides of the fence today. Two ships crossing in the night…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Kristol
Hunger Games.
He’s convinced he’ll never experience life in the Precincts.
So he can sip sherry and rub elbows with his friends from Harvard… and those “silly” grocery stores won’t matter to him.
When he ends up in the cattle car, he’ll be shocked.
I dunno, just spit balling here: maybe Kristol likes Mamdani because Kristol likes immigrants. Apparently he likes them better than certain Americans, if his quote from 2017 is any indication: “Look, to be totally honest, if things are so bad as you say with the white working class, don’t you want to get new Americans in?”
Kristol’s descent is now complete.
Kristol has a Ph.D. from Harvard, but his advisor was Harvey Mansfield, a decidedly conservative political philosopher and a disciple of Leo Strauss. So I don’t think Kristol’s Harvard connection has much to do with his conversion into a leftist.
I’ve read that Kristol’s wife is a conventional suburban lefty. That may have something to do with it.
What really makes it remarkable that Kristol has gone so far as to support Mamdani is that, back before 2016, Kristol was always a strong supporter of Israel (although his “democracy” obsession sometimes put him at odds with Israel, as when he supported the US role in deposing Mubarak in Egypt).
Although I am not a psychiatrist, I suspect that professional political pundits who completely reverse their old positions, and turn against their old friends and allies, in a rather short period of time, and are not under any financial compulsion to do so, have some sort of personality disorder. Such an extreme lack of integrity suggests psychological abnormality. This is what I think is going on with Kristol and with Tucker Carlson (who has not gone left but certainly has lurched from neoconservatism and being a conventional Israel supporter to a morbid obsession with attacking Israel and supporting its enemies; indeed, he seems to have little interest in any other issues at this point). In both cases, there were certainly financial rewards for the change, but Kristol and Carlson were already quite wealthy.
Neo in 2015, “Why do so many of the countries of Western Europe appear determined to hasten the end of their own national identity by refusing to draw any meaningful limits to the current influx of third-world “refugees”—a significant number of whom are probably not bona fide refugees, and a much smaller but still-worrisome number of whom are probably jihadis bent on the destruction of their new host countries?”
1. Any answer 10 years later? I think the conventional wisdom is white liberal guilt and the basic hate the Left has for Judaism and Christianity.
2. The invasion has only gotten worse in the past 10 years.
Sgt. Joe Friday:
That statement doesn’t specify illegal immigrants. He could be talking about legal immigrants; lots of people are in favor of that.
NeverTrump is not a popular tendency. It’s a Capitol Hill / K Street / Acela corridor phenomenon.
==
Years ago, a commenter on the old No Left Turns site offered this explanation of the Obamacon phenomenon among the chatterati: “I bet a lot of these guys have liberal wives or girlfriends”. I think an explanation of the NeverTrump residue (apart from people being too vain to revisit positions already staked out) is occult at this point, having to do with idiosyncracies. The only inveterate NeverTrumper I can think of whose conduct actually makes a certain sense is Marvin Olasky (who has retired and producing little new commentary). Robert Stacy McCain has offered an explanation for Charles J. Sykes’ conduct that is plausible. Kristol and Mona Charen are the most baffling of the lot. George Will much less so.
” I suspect that professional political pundits who completely reverse their old positions, and turn against their old friends and allies, in a rather short period of time, and are not under any financial compulsion to do so, have some sort of personality disorder.” djf
The sole alternative is that they were always cynical frauds.
Cornhead @ 6:33,
Transnationalism… ala George Soros’ Open Borders Society. Plus the woke, cultural Marxist Left’s consistent and subconsciously implicit meme that the ONLY way that the West (i.e. the white race) can ‘atone’ for its ‘ancestral sins’ is through national, cultural and racial suicide.
He seems resigned to the fact that the dreams he had for himself crashed with Dan Quayle’s political future while he was Dan’s chief of staff.Since that time he has been flailing, in search of a cause that he can champion and be regarded as an authority on, no matter the cause.
That passage from Kristol is extraordinarily shallow, as Neo says. Spanberger is “excellent?”
Art Deco:
Well, Kristol’s had the same wife for a long time and it didn’t stop him from being on the right for most of those years. I think in his case the “too vain to revisit positions already staked out” is part of what’s operating, except I’m not sure it’s vanity as much as stubbornness and too much time, effort, and reputation invested in the new position to be able to turn back.
My take on George Will can be found here.
Well, Kristol’s had the same wife for a long time
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I wasn’t suggesting his wife was influencing him. I was suggesting the reasons for the conduct of these people is odd and personal.
My take on Will is that the longer he’s been in Washington, the more he’s a voice of the Washington establishment. You’ll recall the period where it seemed that the only issue in which he was interested was campaign finance regulation (and its perfidy). Please note also his wife’s business is a mix of pr and lobbying, with a scrum of business clients.
Geoffrey Britain @ 8:28,
Engaging in cynically fraudulent behavior as a core element of one’s personality is psychologically abnormal. Anybody who builds an entire career on expressing opinions he does not really hold has some sort of personality disorder. A healthy person couldn’t live like that.
Bill Kristol is who I think of when I think of the people who had iron rice bowls in the Zombie Global Order (a follow on to Peter Zeihan’s explanation of our Cold War Strategy) that GHWB and Bill Clinton attempted to birth after the fall of the Berlin Wall and break up of the Soviet Union. The idea was to co-opt China by folding them into the WTO and other Western multi-national organizations with the US continuing to act as World Cop, bashing heads as needed ala the first Gulf War in the 1990s and various other actions throughout the decade. The “End of History” was supposed to mean that the cost of maintaining the Global Order that way would decline to something acceptable when we didn’t have an existential threat to justify the military expenditure and economic costs of doing it. That all came crashing down, first slowly as our former manufacturing centers turned into the Rust Belt and then suddenly when the Towers went down on 9/11.
I’d say Kristol’s announced voting pattern was probably motivated by thinking Trump was a flash in the pan but later he switched to the Democrats because they are now the party most firmly dedicated to attempting to reestablish the Zombie Global Order. There is something of a path from OG neo-con Cold Warrior to Kristol’s opposition to Trump as the embodiment of the fall of the Cold War Global Order (and its Zombie extension). I don’t think Kristol gives any thought to the domestic craziness of the Democrats, and I suspect most of his anti-Trump commentary is simply chucking bricks conveniently supplied by the Democrats.
If you ever listen to John Yoo on Steve Hayward’s Three Whiskey Happy Hour you get a lot of the same vibes though Yoo at least recognizes how toxic the current version of the Democrat Party is, and is not pining away for the US to act as World Police.
When Kristol was in his glory as an Establishment Republican he was courted by the media and political consultants, etc. When Trump came along the Kristol types were not wanted and even shunned. This drove guys like Kristol, Jonah Goldberg and others to go crazy. They’ve never recovered, forgotten or forgiven. They realize they have been cast out of a party they were only nominally a part of. Not a guy you would like to share a foxhole with. They’d give you up.
So his entire anti communist Cold War spiel was nothing but a grift?
You lose one point off your IQ each time you use the term ‘neo-con’ non ironically.
Bill Kristol isn’t dead. He just smells funny.
(Stolen from Frank Zappa.)
Hatred of Trump and all the filthy MAGA proles along with a insatiable craving to remain relevant and to have praise and accolades from someone; anyone. That’s the explanation.
There’s a lot of money and a modest amount of fame for NeverTrump talking heads. But it’s all from the left. Of course, there are the lefty gazillionaires who fund so much of this astroturf BS. But, I’m thinking more of the legions of upper middle class urban coastal snobs who desperately crave validation for all of their trendy, superficial, neurotic views. They relish smugly stating as a dissmimive aside: ‘actually, my position on______ is quite moderate and bipartisan’. Kristol, like David Brooks and many many others, provide them justification. And do so very happily
Ackler:
I don’t think Kristol is more famous or highly regarded now then he was before he “turned.” On the contrary. Is he richer? I have no idea.
And David Brooks hasn’t changed that much as a result of Trump. Kristol seems to have changed profoundly. The two exhibit very different phenomena. Brooks also was originally somewhat of a left-to-right changer, so any change he’s undergone has been more of a return. Kristol was always on the right, so the change is more profound.
I think Occam would probably say, “Just another nut”.**
There’s scads of ‘em out there…
…especially after Covid.
(WTH did they PUT in that “vaccine”, anyway???)
**Through in Kristol’s defense, he might merely want—as was already mentioned, I think—to believe he still is relevant… A “voice”…
File under: Alas poor Bill, we [thought we] knew him…
Not sure Kristol is worth this much discussion any more. I’ll only say that even many years ago pre-TDS when I was more in accord with most of his beliefs at the time I was never a big fan, he always seemed smug and supercilious. Not unlike Will.
I used to watch BK years back on discussion shows when he was doing the conservative thing. Viewing habits have changed, National Review subscription was dropped, so I wasn’t following that crowd.
There are liberals and conservatives who are close to the middle of the road, albeit on different sides. The last I knew of BK, he seemed to be close. Has he gone further?
As to military interventions; I grew up among WW II veterans including my father and all my uncles. Plus neighbors. And classmates’ fathers. I was a grunt half a century back. Did not deploy. Lost a brother. I do history from time to time, particularly milhist.
There is an IRON LAW of military althist: If, says one party, Germany, or Russia, or Japan, or Britain, or Ruritania had done this thing differently, victory would have resulted and there is no–this is the Iron Law–possibility of any other outcome than that proposed in the suggestion. Cannot possibly fail.
Military interventions which neocons presumably oppose are generally built on forestalling something worse. The neocons insist that nothing could possibly have gone wrong a year or a decade hence if we’d just let…..something or other go on. And they have their own Iron Law. They could not possibly have been wrong that letting Saddaam have Kuwait would have led to peace in the Middle East. And if those mean Israelis wouldn’t blow up his reactors–see Osirak–he’d only want nuclear power on account of running out of oil. Or something. And nobody’d told him you can make phosgene merely by derailing a train near East Palestine and lighting the tank cars on fire. All the guys who’d made the poison gas for the Iran-Iraq war had lost their notes.
Similar for any other intervention.
That said, you don’t win a war when the other guy has a sanctuary. As regards Astan, it is Pakistan. You either pay the annual bill to stay there or you leave. Or you don’t respect the sanctuary.
Apparently things are heating up there anyway. Pstan bombed Kabul on account of some Taliban group holding their maps wrong and attacking…somebody. No explanation about the recent border festivities. No telling what will happen there. But Pakistan has nukes.
Hope it doesn’t get the point where people say, if only the Americans had stayed….
This is a fascinating matter. It made me remember that I had the opportunity to attend a conference given by Gertrude Himmelfarb in Lisbon, 23th May 1997. It was a memorable event in a time very much oriented towards left-wing thought. At the end, among other surprised interventions of the audience, a young lady remarked that she had not listened to such a reactionary talk since the times of Salazar (the leader of Portugal’s government in the previous authoritarian regime).
Jen Rubin is another former “conservative” who went off the rails after 2016. Now she’s teamed up with Norm Eisen on Substack.
I used to listen to Bill Kristol on the Weekly Standard podcast. This was back in 2015/2016, after the escalator ride and during the primaries. In every podcast, Kristol would calmly advise that Trump was doing all right in these early primaries, but he was not what the American people wanted and the wheels were about to fall off his campaign.
That, of course, never happened. Bill Kristol, for all his ability to read tea leaves, was wrong about the American people. He thought they wanted more of what the Republicans had been giving them. He and others like him (Peggy Noonan, the National Review,etc.) still believed the right consisted of Reaganites or Bushites, that the Tea Party years were an flash in the pan.
I think he was extremely disillusioned by 2016. Then the Weekly Standard collapsed, then his mother died. Imagine being in your mid-sixties and the world you thought was there, the one that had made you important and respected, wasn’t there anymore. Is it unreasonable to think Kristol is simply adrift? Or just doesn’t care anymore and is playing out his string in his rarefied existence?
Cornhead, neo,
I can give you some Europeans’ reasons. When we discussed this with my wife’s German cousins in the ’90s they thought my wife and I were strange for marrying (“why not just live together?”) and having multiple kids, or even having kids at all. Even in their 20s they were focused on early retirement, travel… And they were onboard with importing immigrants (mainly Turks, at the time) to feed the lower portions of the social welfare pyramid so they would have funding for 30+ years of retirement in a few decades.
Now their attitude has changed. (Although, being typical Germans they will not admit they were wrong.) But they are fatalistic about it. The streets of their villages now echo with the Muslim call to prayer five times a day and crime and violence are up. Que sera, sera. (And we don’t even bring up ecology and energy when talking with them, despite all the times they lectured us about the U.S.’s policies over the years.)
In part, Kristol is a credentialist. His credentials gave him entree into top DC conservative circles. He sees Trump as an outsider who threatens the organizational structure that he’s been a part of for 40 years. Years in DC made him “go native.” Still, that doesn’t explain why he moved so far left.
My understanding is that Kristol’s new operation is funded by Pierre Omidyar, who’s certainly a Democrat, whether you want to call him a leftist or not. When people say it’s not about the money, it’s not always about the money. It may be about entre into circles where the accepted views are different from one’s own earlier opinions. There’s an element of “going native” there as well.
I don’t think his mother’s passing had much to do with Kristol’s change in views. It’s possible that her death freed him to turn left. Other possibilities are that Himmelfarb wasn’t very strident in her views, or that she’d mellowed over the years, or that she didn’t much like Trump either, or that she disengaged from politics as she aged.
I ignored Kristol then, and do so now. Yawn.
The need among many “educated” persons from “gifted” families–be it money or academic expertise–is to stay “intellectually With it”. Kristol’s language betrays an essentially lazy intellectual inclination.
Here is some good news: there is a new small movement on some extreme liberal campuses. It is called New Era Conservatives. Young people determined not to destroy the envionmnet while at the same time preserving the essentials of our democracy and constitution.
Jimmy:
Jen Rubin was never conservative. She was a lawyer turned columnist (initially blogger) who was mainly anti-terrorist post-9/11. That was her big issue, and she supported the right because of it. She had previously been on the left, and as far as I know she never really espoused most of the beliefs on the right. I suspect that her change back to the left was easy for her.
Anne,
I wish them well, but “not destroy the environment?”
Any organization that thinks humans need to be held back from destroying the environment needs to think more deeply. Humans like to be healthy and clean. The more economic circumstances allow them to live healthy and clean lives, the more they will do so. This is not only human nature; it is innate in most all sentient life on planet Earth.
The parents, grandparents, great, great grandparents (and on, and on) of the New Era Conservatives have been doing what they can to minimize living in filth for generations. To think this is an original enough thought to include in their charter doesn’t instill confidence.
Perhaps we need to remember that we all change and view different content on the internet now than we did previously. While I have continued to read Neo’s blog from my initial exposure however many years ago, I no longer follow the NRO or Ann Althouse, or some others. They have been replaced by newer (sometimes MAGA related) sources. They have also grown in number to the point I cannot keep up with the entries in my mailbox so some of necessity get dropped or perused less frequently.
I honestly don’t know how some of you manage to (or at least seem to) be on top of so many sources. Part of the reason for me to read here. 🙂
neo: You’re right about Rubin’s earlier years, but she seemed pretty conservative in the 10 or so years leading up to 2016, and not just on terror issues. She supported Likud, she was highly critical of Obama on a range of issues during his administration. Now she also has BDS (Bibi Derangement Syndrome) as well as the most severe TDS, and seems to like the idea of a two-state solution, even if she thinks it’s not likely to happen any time soon.
“He’s a very impressive politician. I don’t know that he’s going to be a very good mayor. He’s 33 years old, he’s never run anything. They’re good people who could work for him though, in New York.”
This paragraph … just stunning!
It helps explain how he and many others could vote for Biden or Harris. They seem to believe that “good people” on POTUS’s staff &/or cabinet can overcome any negatives.
Whew!!
As I moved from left to right more than a decade ago, discovering non-progressive political commentators, I eventually learned about Kristol. He came across as snobby and as “established” as a conservative political commentator can be on the East Coast. Besides the Weekly Standard, I wondered what qualified him for the positions he held (non of which impressed me). As someone from the midwest I eventually did not care for his insights.
Looking at this resume, has this guy ever lifted a finger? He seems so … soft. He’s neither a real academic, a non-profit leader nor a thought leader. He’s some odd American gentry who made a living bouncing between DC and NYC amongst other conservatives in his social class. He’s some bizarre mishmash of Boomer conservatism, working as “an assistant” in many jobs, as his blackshirt has never experienced a single crumble.