Succeeding waves of elitist opposition to our inherited moral, aesthetic, and spiritual standards had issued finally in a nihilistic anti-culture, hostile not only to religion, family, patriotism and traditional morality, but even to the promise of enlightenment reason itself.

The other war on poverty: Finding meaning in America

The Irving Kristol Lecture, American Enterprise Institute Annual Dinner, May 2, 2012.

Leon R. Kass | AEI

On this occasion twenty years ago, in his Boyer Lecture entitled “The Cultural Revolution and the Capitalist Future,” Irving Kristol explored the growing gap between our thriving capitalist economy and our unraveling bourgeois culture. Regarding the economy, he showed how capitalism had produced a widely shared prosperity that put paid to arguments in favor of the socialist alternative. Regarding the culture, he showed how succeeding waves of elitist opposition to our inherited moral, aesthetic, and spiritual standards had issued finally in a nihilistic anti-culture, hostile not only to religion, family, patriotism and traditional morality, but even to the promise of enlightenment reason itself.

Concluding with a look to the future, Kristol foresaw both good news and bad. In the short run, he was confident that the nihilism preached by our elites would not prevail politically, because our sensible, bourgeois, property-owning democracy breeds its own antibodies that “immunize it, in large degree, against the lunacies of its intellectuals and artists.” For the long run, he was much less sanguine

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