KRISTOL AND "THE COMMON MAN"

I have previously shown that Irving Kristol, the Godfather of neo-conservatism, has little regard for the common man but I left out an important exception. For Kristol, the common man is terrific when he or she is a conservative.

(From his essay ABOUT EQUALITY (1972), page 198 in his book, Neo-Conservatism (1995) )

Decrying the modern demand that institutions justify themselves, Kristol praises the common folk who apparently don't ask for any justifications:

The only corrective to this shadow of illegitimacy that has hovered threateningly over the politics of Western civilization for nearly two millennia now was the "common sense" of the majority of the population, which had an intimate and enduring relation to mundane realities that was relatively immune to speculative enthusiasm. This relative immunity was immensely strengthened by the widespread belief in an afterlife, a realm in which, indeed, whatever existed would be utterly perfect.

A year later (1973), Kristol becomes much clearer about who the opposition is: The Enlightenment thinkers. He also claims that the "ordinary" person is immune to this thinking:

(from UTOPIANISM, ANCIENT AND MODERN, page 191 in his 1995 book):

Scientific rationalism also emerges in the sixteenth century, persuading us that reality can be fully comprehended by man's abstract reason, and that therefore whatever exists should be capable of being rationally explained in a clear and consequential way. As applied to all social institutions, this came to mean-it is, indeed, the essential meaning of that period we call the Enlightenment-that existing institutions could be legitimized only by reason: not by tradition, not by custom, not even by the fact that they seemed to be efficacious in permitting men to lead decent lives, but only by reason. It was against this mode of thought, an inherently radical-utopian mode of thought, that Edmund Burke polemicized so magnificently. It was against this radical utopian temper that modern conservatism emerges. Modern conservatism found it necessary to argue what had always been previously assumed by all reasonable men: that institutions which have existed over a long period of time have a reason and a purpose inherent in them, a collective wisdom incarnate in them, and the fact that we don't perfectly understand or cannot perfectly explain why they "work" is no defect in them but merely a limitation in us. Most ordinary people, most of the time, intuitively feel the force of this conservative argument.

Kristol is also frank about the importance of the fundies to the GOP:

(from THE COMING "CONSERVATIVE CENTURY" (1993), page 365)

The religious conservatives are already too numerous to beshunted aside, and their numbers are growing, as is their influence. They are going to be the very core of an emerging American conservatism. ... The three pillars of modern conservatism are religion, nationalism and economic growth. Of these, religion is easily the most important because it is the only power that, in the longer term, can shape people's characters and regulate their motivation.