Encounter (magazine) - Left-liberals Vs. Early Neoconservatives

Left-liberals Vs. Early Neoconservatives

The more explicit development of that very skepticism, as it happened, came to mark the evolution of the political side of Encounter as it entered the 1970s and beyond. The ideological fissures in the world of Anglo-American political/literary journals began to see hairline crack turn to outright cleavage in the wake of the rise of the neoconservative tendency. The biweekly New York Review of Books, founded in 1963, began to enlist from its outset a regular roster of the cream of the very sort of prestige British humanists and scientific essayists who had so distinguished themselves in the pages of Encounter in its first ten years, creating a rival outlet for them whose greater prominence in the much larger American market would only deepen after the 1967 high-profile resignations of Spender and Kermode, both of them at the very summit of Anglo-American literary life. The then largely intra-Democratic rifts issuing from reactions to, e.g., the Vietnam War, student radicalism and the New Left, urban strife, the Great Society, the rise of Black Power and affirmative action, played out on the contents pages of the highbrow journals in a sharpening of sides among the political contributors to the liberal-to-radical (in politics if not in art and literature) New York Review in opposition to the post-1970 rightward shift of Commentary under Norman Podhoretz; the New York Review had already as of its third year (1965, when Kristol and Bell founded The Public Interest) shed the future neoconservatives who had marked its first two years. Another sign of the times came in 1972, when Daniel Bell, firmly of the social-democratic, anti-Stalinist, Old Left/Menshevik tendency, resigned from his co-editorship of the Public Interest, rather than strain his long friendship with Irving Kristol, who had recently left the Democratic fold and come out for Richard Nixon, easing into his final four decades in the ideological orbit of, e.g., the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. Some among the nascent neoconservatives, like Bell's successor Nathan Glazer, would remain loyal Democrats, while others would form the advance intellectual guard of the “Reagan Democrats who played a pivotal role in the 1980 and 1984 elections.