Legal Commentary

He believed that government programs that were not paternalistic, but merely provided social insurance, would ?engender larger loyalties,? which is ?precisely what the art of government, properly understood, is all about.? David Brooks, Three Cheers for Irving.

I know relatively little about the late Irving Kristol's political thought, other than the intriguing fact that like the founder of the JSP program, Philip Selznick, he began political life as a participant in the Trotskyist (anti-Stalin but Marxist) wing of the labor movement and then moved to the right (Selznick remains well to the left of Kristol's last known political coordinates).  But this phrase from David Brooks' celebration in this morning's NYTimes, of the longstanding intellectual dean of the modern neo-conservative movement caught my eye .  Two quick thoughts. 

First, it echoes almost exactly Michel Foucault's little known late turn to what he thought of as "liberalism" but which we might think of as "neo-liberalism" or even just conservativism.  Having self identified as a Maoist for at least a few weeks in '68, and strongly supported Francois Mitterand's Socialist Party in the 1970s, Foucault in the last year's of his life criticized Mitterand's socialist government for lacking "an art of government" (quoted in Mike Gane and Terry Johnson, Foucault's New Domains (Sage 1993).  In his writings and interviews of these years, Foucault suggested that liberalism was the political philosophy most faithful to the problem of governing as an art.

Second, it made me wonder what the Kristol of the 1960s (before he had himself abandoned liberalism) might have said about our current health care debate.  Is Obamacare a version of "social insurance" that encourages "larger loyalties" in the wonderful phrase from Kristol quoted by Brooks?  Or, is it the kind of "paternalism" that cannot take root in America's highly conservative (read individualist) culture?  One thing is for sure.  The modern Republican Party that Kristol did so much to stock with intellectual protein has largely abandoned serious reflection on the arts of government and Obama has at least expressly embraced precisely this kind of reflection (whether his product is worthy of that promise is open to question).