As a founder, editor, and contributor to various magazines, he played an influential role in the intellectual and political culture of the latter half of the twentieth century.

In college he was a member of the Young People's Socialist League and was part of a small but vocal group of Trotskyist anti-Soviets who later became known as the New York Intellectuals.

He also was the executive vice-president of the publishing house Basic Books from 1961 to 1969, the Henry Luce Professor of Urban Values at New York University from 1969 to 1987, and co-founder and co-editor (first with Daniel Bell and then Nathan Glazer) of The Public Interest from 1965 to 2002.

Following Ramparts' publication of information showing Central Intelligence Agency funding of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which was widely reported elsewhere, Kristol left in the late 1960s and became affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute.

Kristol died from complications of lung cancer, aged 89, on September 18, 2009, at the Capital Hospice in Falls Church, Virginia.

[2][11] Defunct Newspapers Journals TV channels Websites Other Congressional caucuses Economics Gun rights Identity politics Nativist Religion Watchdog groups Youth/student groups Social media Miscellaneous Other During the late 1960s up until the 1970s, neoconservatives were worried about the Cold War and that its liberalism was turning into radicalism, thus many neoconservatives including Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz and Daniel Patrick Moynihan wanted Democrats to continue on a strong anti-communist foreign policy.

[14] Intended by Harrington as a pejorative term, it was accepted by Kristol as an apt description of the ideas and policies exemplified by The Public Interest.

Because it does not meet the individual's "'existential' human needs", it creates a "spiritual malaise" that threatens the legitimacy of that social order.

Due to this the most America could hope for would be to "remove this little, backward nation from the front line of the Cold War so that it can stew quietly in its own political juice".

[22] In July 2002, he received from President George W. Bush the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.