Norman Podhoretz: An Appreciation

...No Nicotine can be taken into the system while smoking these Cigarettes, us in the mouth-piece of each is placed a small wad of absorbent cotton, which strain, and LIGHT ON THE BOX...

...This was a time when the Ford Foundation, America's largest and most prestigious foundation, could ally itself in the New York City school crisis with militant black separatists...

...Podhoretz was particularly afraid of an "alliance between the patriciate and the underclass against the liberal center," of radical chic, a form of class snobbery masquerading as social commitment...

...The well-to-do, secure in their suburbs or heavily-patrolled city neighborhoods, could scorn the anxiety of the working and middle classes over crime in the streets, and sympathize instead with the criminals who also rebelled against Middle America's bland mediocrity...

...American soil had always nourished a healthy anti-intellectualism, but this latest assault on reason assumed distressing new dimensions, because it was aided, indeed actively encouraged, by intellectuals themselves...

...Under his editorship, Commentary had crusaded energetically for the civil rights and later for the economic rights of blacks...

...On the other hand, anti-Semitism was reviving as many radicals singled out Jews as the archetypal representatives of rational and bourgeois culture...

...This was a time when the front cover of the New York Review of Books, America's paramount intellectual journal, could feature instructions for making Molotov cocktails...

...No, Podhoretz's contribution to the defense of humane values was rather as an editor, as the organizer of other men's ideas, as the orchestrator of other men's voices...

...Innovation in the schools: Samuel McCracken denounced the quackery of fashionable but contentless classroom experiments...

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...Henceforth, he would be kicked around not only by the Right but also by most of the Left, and by many of his closest friends...

...Making it was not so bad as many intellectuals pictured it—indeed, beneath their pretensions, intellectuals shared their fellow Americans' ambitions of success and power...

...It also shows his acceptance, after a phase of intellectual estrangement, of the mainstream of American values and ambitions—the ethic of work and success...

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...Reforming criminal justice: James Q. Wilson cast doubts on the effectiveness of rehabilitation and criticized our overweening sympathy for criminals at the expense of their victims...

...What was frightening about the radical rhetoric of the late sixties and early seventies was not so much the rhetoric itself and its attendant hypocrisies, as the fact that so many persons—many of them influential and well-educated—were seduced, or cowed into acquiescence, by its overtones...

...Jason Epstein, publisher of the New York Review, and once Podhoretz's best friend, reportedly never speaks to him any more, and publicly accused him of returning Commentary to its days of rationalizing McCarthyism...

...Although many of its contributors are not Jewish, Commentary is a Jewish publication, and the third major fear guiding its articles during this period was of nascent anti-Semitism...

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...This spring, the Catholic intellectual journal Commonweal asked, somewhat in disbelief, "Shall We Soon Praise Podhoretz...

...Podhoretz was one of those few sensible men with the courage to uphold American democratic and liberal values —toleration and humaneness, equal economic opportunity, rational discourse, respect for law—at a time when they were seriously threatened...

...Black Power: Daniel Moynihan compared its symbolic demands with the real economic and social needs of black people...

...On the one hand, the values which protected Jewish culture in America were disintegrating...

...But now that the ideals of liberal tolerance, of the work ethic, of rational discourse, were crumbling before vicious attacks from the Left, Podhoretz and some of his writers perceived ominous threats to Jewish life...

...Since 1960 he has been editor of Commentary, the prestigious intellectual journal of the American Jewish Committee, and he has distinguished himself not only by his painstaking editing of manuscripts, but also by his perspicacious selection of authors representing a variety of viewpoints...

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...In the next seven or eight years, cities would burn, campuses would close, the moral energy which ushered in the sixties would become progressively more hysterical and unbalanced, and the fight against injustice would itself become unjust...

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...Give them one trial...

...Today the flames of our recent past have subsided...

...The turn against leftism must have been additionally painful, because Podhoretz was a liberal, long partial to the Left and itsintellectual bases...

...Podhoretz believed there were real injustices in race relations and in our Vietnam policy, and he thought the radical movements were performing a service by pointing them out...

...Alexander Bickel exposed the hypocrisies of its pious participants and its self-righteous commentators...

...The Commentary critique of conventional wisdom was by no means monolithic, but several fears underlay its diverse prongs of attack, and under Podhoretz's direction, they came together with great forcefulness...

...Jews have fared best where liberal and intellectual values prevail, and in America they have thrived in greater numbers than anywhere else in modern times...

...And a rhetorical war on "fascism," on repressive "Amerika" with all its Kafkaesque implications, would dominate a movement which at the time posed the greatest totalitarian threat to our nation...

...Perhaps our mood is changing, perhaps as we look back now upon the late sixties and early seventies we shall better understand the assault on our values and institutions during that period, and perhaps we shall better appreciate those who defended them...

...WE •lIALLENtiE ANALYSIS...

...And in an age of rhetoric against "fascism," Podhoretz, who understood the fanaticism of real Nazi anti-Semitism, saw the real threat of fascism as coming from those who declaimed against it so fanatically...

...Indeed, the reader familiar with the brilliance of Podhoretz's literary criticism in the fifties, or with the vigorous insight, for example, of his "Hannah Arendt on Eichmann" of the early sixties, will be disappointed to find his writings of the late sixties and early seventiessomehow lacking in his customary spirit and subtlety...

...University turmoil: Robert Nisbet called for a restoration of authority and a return to traditional ideals of scholarship...

...There is a ring of truth to these criticisms, for Commentary came to the defense of values and institutions which had enabled the "Establishment" to prosper...

...The New Politics: Roger Starr contrasted the sympathy of the Lindsay administration for the poor and the black with its seeming disdain for the middle and working classes...

...The threat to liberal and intellectual values persists—now in the form of neo-Malthusianism and mindless egalitarianism—and Commentary continues to point out their dangers...

...Podhoretz's decision to turn against the New Left and the counterculture was a difficult one, for he had always been very sympathetic to the Left's moral energy...

...In the many scurrilous attacks on Commentary, magazines a la mode such as Ramparts accused Podhoretz and his writers of constructing an ideology to defend the economic interests of the "Establishment," particularly the "Jewish Establishment...

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...But among traditionally liberal intellectual circles, Norman Podhoretz was one of those few men with the courage to protest the rampages of the New Left, the implications of the counterculture, and the dangers of a conventional wisdom dizzied by their influence...

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...This threat took many forms: the disregard for academic freedom, the preference for moral assertion over reasoned argument, the glorification of "sensitivity" and emotion, the mind-destroying drugs, the violence, the classroom emphasis on social adjustment rather than on skills and knowledge, the prevailing scorn for history and contempt for science, the hysteria...

...In 1967, when Israel's very existence as a state was threatened again, Commentary articles warned of the dangerous implications portended by the fatuous but widespread radical manifestoes against "Zionist imperialism...

...The upper-class patriciate which menaced liberal and rational values allied itself not only with the lumpenproletariat, but also, as Nathan Glazer and other Commentary writers pointed out, with prominent intellectuals...

...In issue after issue, Commentary writers assaulted the rallying cries of the New Left and the counterculture...

...But by the late sixties, the commitment to traditional American values like hard work had been -replaced by grand posturing about "white racism" or "repressive society...

...Podhoretz saw the greatest threat to intellectual life arising from within the intellectual community itself, and article after article in Commentary stung the forces of self-hatred as well as of hatred...

...In the New York City school crisis of 1968 and 1969, Earl Raab and others warned that the calls for community control and decentralization masked an emerging black anti-Semitism...

...Podhoretz continued to battle for civil rights and economic rights, for all people, but he was opposed by movements which cared neither for civil nor for economic rights...

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...The discerning lucidity and sharpness of Podhoretz's protest did not emerge primarily in his own words...

...But the threat to these values is less violent and less immediate than it was several years ago, and the public discourse is slightly more reflective...

...But the overriding concern for Podhoretz and Commentary, more so than for many of their radical detractors, was as much to provide the opportunities for those who had not yet made it, as it was to protect the interests of those who already had...

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...A rhetorical opposition to "materialism" would cloak the snobbery of parasites who lived very comfortably off the greatest material prosperity yet known to man...

...In his autobiography Podhoretz admitted the importance of status and approval in his and other New York intellectuals' lives, and other New York intellectuals dismissed him for being petty...

...Some of the most baneful attacks on America and on a rational discussion of foreign policy oozed from the pen of Noam Chomsky, the founder of modern linguistics, and hardly an upper-class patrician...

...Address : SCOTT & CHAMBERLIN, 842 BROADWAY, N. Y. The Alternative: An American Spectator December 1974 17...

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...Podhoretz saw the alliance between the well-to-do and the poor as in many ways a sham to protect the social position of those already wealthy...

...What struck Podhoretz about America was that no other country offered so many opportunities for making it, no other country allowed so many to advance so far and so quickly...

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...The list of issues, the list of names, goes on and on...

...The well-to-do, already secure economically, could scorn the petty materialistic concerns of their bourgeois underlings and look instead to the spontaneous expressiveness of the lumpenproletariat...

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...One was a fear of anti-Americanism, or more properly, of an antidemocratic elitism directed against the middle-class values of most Americans...

...Upon taking editorship, Podhoretz had consciously changed the direction of Commentary, moving from a strong anticommunism that had rationalized, if not encouraged, McCarthyism, to a more moderate anticommunism...

...The drivel which 16 The Alternative: An American Spectator December 1974 passed for conventional wisdom about crime, for instance, was distilled from the work of leading social scientists...

...The gurus and hooligans of the sixties often met their just deserts in the pages of National Review and other conservative journals...

...As late as 1968, in an article for Harper's , Podhoretz had chided another critic of the New Left, George Kennan, for failing to balance his disapproval of its excesses with an appreciation of the virtues of its moral temper and its insistence that justice be done...

...Podhoretz's autobiography, entitled Making It, shows his own rise as the son of a milkman to a position of some prosperity and of greater fame and influence...

...And at many universities, faculty were often among the most flatulent prophets of destruction...

...As the sixties moved onward, the moral temper became more and more threatening as it became more and more hysterical, but the real injustices of American life continued and it was with some discomfort that Commentary articles during this period increasingly lashed out at the dangers of moralism...

...in other words, blacks needed better jobs, better education, better housing, better protection from crime, and better self-discipline...

...And this was a time when the President's Commission on Campus Unrest could stress the "high ideals" of rebellious students, while buildings burned, classes were disrupted, and speakers were wrenched from podiums...

...They provided symbolic rather than real responses to social problems, giving money, for example, to the Black Panthers, when what blacks—and most whites too—really needed was to advance their social and economic positions...

...Under his editorship, Commentary published many writers whose thoughts would later have great influence on the rhetoric of the late sixties: Paul Goodman, for example, or Edgar Friedenberg, or Herbert Marcuse...

...Podhoretz continued to disrelish McCarthyism, but he saw that the major threats to democratic and intellectual values now came from the Left rather than from the Right...

...In the polemical debate of the late sixties and early seventies, Podhoretz narrowed the spectrum of those viewpoints, but he selected and actively encouraged a group of perceptive writers expertly equipped to strip the hide from smug conventional wisdom and thereby reveal its ugly bones...

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...They did not need moralistic charades...

...A rhetoric of "sensitivity" would emerge among a generation that was itself appallingly insensitive...

...But for someone supposedly petty, Podhoretz had the great courage to risk the popularity he so coveted, in taking his stands of the last few years...

...And just as Podhoretz and some of his writers feared the threat to the intellectual community from within, so they argued that the greatest expositors of anti-Semitism were Jews themselves, and that some Jews, especially some Jewish intellectuals, with their virulent anti-Americanism, anti-intellectualism, and anti-Semitism, menaced everything Commentary and Judaism stood for...

...And so now, as the outrages of the late sixties finally give way to the vapidities of the middle seventies, and as we acquire the distance to look back upon our recent tumults, it is refreshing to come upon the name of Norman Podhoretz...

...A second fear motivating Podhoretz and the writers he selected for Commentary was of the threat to reason and intellectual discourse...

...And under his editorship, even as the excesses of rebellion were crippling North America, Commentary published articles sympathetic to revolutionary movements in Latin America...

...Of all the indignities Podhoretz has suffered recently in the intellectual press, few were so cruel or further from the truth...