Ross Douthat, "The Art of Persuasion," Claremont Review of Books, Fall 2011. (A review of The Neoconservative Persuasion by Irving Kristol.)

Excerpt:

At times, the essays in The Neoconservative Persuasion suggest that these critics have a point. Neoconservatism may not be a rigid ideology, but even as a “persuasion” it comes with certain defining attributes, which recur throughout Kristol’s repeated explanations of his worldview. In domestic policy, these include a preference for economic growth over balanced budgets, a belief that the post-New Deal welfare state should not be torn up root and branch but rather “reconstruct[ed]…along more economical and humane lines,” and a sense of the importance of religion and public morals that extended naturally to a sympathy for the post-1970s Religious Right. In foreign affairs, they include an emphasis on military strength and moral clarity, a skepticism of international institutions and a hostility to anything that looks remotely like world government, and a definition of the national interest that’s both geographically expansive and includes “ideological interests in addition to more material concerns.”

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