Commentary at age fifty

...Several contributors dispute the suggestion that it should be checked while others, including Peter Brimelow, the writer chiefly associated with anti-immigration polemics, advocate restriction...

...There is a convergence here, though strenuously denied by both sides, between conservatives and the postmodernists they so endlessly excoriate...

...Only one, Nathan Glazer, then an assistant editor and now a Harvard professor, had been part of Commentary's inaugural issue...

...The end of communism, the goal more than any other—with the possible exception of repudiating the New Left—that had given rise to neoconservatism, has made little or no difference...

...But there have been greater changes than in the biographical identity of the contributors...

...Throughout the 1970s Podhoretz and other contributors increasingly began to apply such epithets to political intellectuals whose views on Vietnam, the Soviet Union, and the New Left differed at the time only marginally from their own, as Charles Kadushin's sociological study The American Intellectual Elite (1974), based on intensive interviews, plainly revealed...

...Significantly, few symposiasts link its greatest incidence to the inner cities, perhaps because they don't want to expose themselves to charges of racism, but more probably because doing so would localize the problem, minimizing the general force, fervor, and relevance of their overall indictment, as well as highlighting the futility of mere exhortation as a solution...

...Indeed, both Podhoretz and Kristol have recently declared it dead...

...This is further evidence of his almost total "politicization," to use a detestable ancient term of left-wing origin...

...The increase in unmarried motherhood is most frequently brought up, although its recent leveling off escapes notice...

...WINTER • /997 • 105 Magazines To hope for the restoration of something like the old Commentary is vain, for there is no longer a coherent extra-academic intellectual community for it to draw upon...

...Its theme was that the prevailing (1940s) disposition to favor religious commitment on psychotherapeutic grounds was vulgar and specious because "the question of truth—whether we live under God or entirely in the realm of nature—is ignored...

...I am able tentatively to identify just eight symposiasts who cannot be classified as conservatives...

...Yet it was Podhoretz himself, in Making It, who stressed the attractions of fame, power, and to a lesser degree riches in influencing—influencing, not determining— intellectual and political outlooks...

...The growing use by Commentary writers of "anti-American" as an epithet was especially offensive, for in their exaggerated rhetoric and moralistic fervor the youthful protesters seemed thoroughly and even distinctively American...

...Eight possible nonconservatives out of seventytwo is far from a representative distribution of past contributors still living, let alone of contemporary intellectuals or, for that matter, of Jews, considering that the magazine is still published by the American Jewish Committee (AJC...

...He claims to have been subjected to pariandom and even "terror" for boldly questioning orthodox left-liberal assumptions, but he minimizes the effects of his aggressive confrontational style of argument, which contrasted markedly with the more civil and reasoned style of Kristol, "the tutelary saint of neoconservatism" as one of the present symposiasts (Joseph Epstein) calls him...

...ing the old left-wing charge of "selling out" that I have always disliked...

...to find any age in our country's history, golden or otherwise, during which a large portion of intelligent people were not convinced the country was going to hell...

...They include Glazer and Seymour Martin Lipset, who were linked to neoconservatism in its earliest pre-Reagan days but have since unobtrusively distanced themselves from it...

...As he recounts at length in his second memoir, Breaking Ranks (1979), Podhoretz in the late sixties took a deliberately provocative stand against the New Left, which the journal had under his direction previously supported to the consternation of some of the older New York intellectuals...

...As if to confirm this prediction, the August 1996 issue consisted of a symposium on what it means to be a Jew today, with sixty-four contributors, most of them rabbis, officials of Jewish agencies, and professors of Hebrew studies...

...101 Magazines that the 1994 vote did not reflect a wish for a "revolution" to dismantle the welfare state...

...The equation of sixties radicals with the Stalinists of yore seemed grossly overdrawn: the former, while anti-anti-Communist, were not servants or even consistent supporters of a hostile foreign state, and far from concealing their true beliefs and allegiances were disposed to shout them from the rooftops...

...In his introduction to The Commentary Reader (1966), Alfred Kazin described the old journal as "serious, objective, unparochial...

...The contributors chiefly focus on the alleged moral and cultural decline raised in the editorial preamble...

...In a gesture of anti-elitist populism, some contributors point to the preamble's worries of "increased economic and social stratification" and blame the new decadence on the "overclass" (a term several contributors borrow from Michael Lind), on "bohemian intellectuals . . . from Harvard to Hollywood" (Gilder), or, most commonly, on "cultural elites...

...Even in that respect, however, Kazin's reference to a "new maturity and sophistication among Jewish writers" hardly describes the present Commentary's habitual support for the line of the Likud party in Israeli politics, which it treats in an even more predictable manner than American politics...

...He praised Nietzsche and Freud for squarely facing up to this question...

...Abortion and homosexuality go unmentioned, though crime and the criminal justice system come in for familiar criticisms...

...Religion is treated simply as a Good Thing: an enforcer of "traditional values" and a safeguard against social and cultural "unraveling...

...It clearly has not carried with it the larger American Jewish community, which continues to vote disproportionately for liberal Democrats, although Commentary writers habitually claim to discern faint signs that Jews are beginning to vote along class rather than ethnic lines...

...For roughly the first twenty-five years of its existence, Commentary could at most be described as "critical liberal" in outlook...

...I have often wondered just what would happen if one of those endowed John M. Olin Foundation professors should publicly proclaim his or her conversion to liberalism or even to views strongly opposed to those favored by today's conservatives.' After saying something like this once before I was attacked by Epstein for echo• I wrote this before the controversy involving Ronald Radosh, the Olin Foundation, and George Washington University had become public...

...Podhoretz's sharpest insights clearly depended on regular multiple contacts with their objects at editorial conferences, public panel discussions, lunches, and dinner parties...

...I will never forget its review of Truffaut's movie The Last Metro, about a love affair in German-occupied Paris, intended, the reviewer claimed, to soften up its audience for a future Soviet occupation...

...106 • DISSENT...

...As Alfred would now certainly agree, only the last adjective still applies, for the journal continues to avoid exclusive concentration on Jewish affairs...

...I am pleased to see, however, that at last attention is being paid to the issue of whether a university should grant permanent academic appointments outside its regular departmental channels to particular persons who are funded by foundations of known and pronounced views on public policy...

...A student of Jewish affairs recently told me that since Podhoretz's retirement as active editorin-chief, he expected the journal to return to the primary emphasis on the Jewish community that had characterized its predecessor, the Contemporary Jewish Record...

...with sixtyfour contributors...

...Podhoretz himself had a real gift for discerning the subtle connections between careerist self-interest and intellectualideological fashions—he reported that he had once been called "the Boswell of the Partisan Review circle," though this was not intended as a compliment...

...Only Glazer shows concern over growing class inequalities in their own right...

...Of the rest, eight are former political appointees in Republican administrations and one consultant to a Republican presidential candidate, and nineteen are professors, despite an animus in the symposium against the academic world...

...A few contributors echo Andrew Ferguson's sensible observation that "it is hard...

...In the present symposium, however, no one suffers doubts about the possibility of religious faith without the offering of an "intellectual sacrifice," in Max Weber's words...

...These are mostly exercises in liberal- and left-bashing at a level only slightly above that of the New York Post and Washington Times, for which, indeed, several of the symposiasts, including Podhoretz, have written columns...

...He sees us as having long been headed toward perdition, gloomily declaring that "the confidence and serenity of 1945 were wholly misplaced, though we did not know it then...

...In any case, it is by now plain, to repeat a bon mot of mine from way back in 1981, that the "neo" in neoconservatism has finally faded like the Cheshire cat's smile...

...No fewer than seventy-two writers contributed...

...It is habitually said that the neoconservatism for which Commentary became the intellectual flagship was a departure from a previously liberal outlook—that indeed is what the "neo" prefix was meant to WINTER • 1997 • 103 Magazines signify...

...One difference from the similar complaints of liberals and Democrats is a pronounced emphasis on the need for religion as a restorative and conservative force...

...distrust of authority...

...Several, notably Kramer, Kimball, and some of the professors, lump together declines in "morality" and in cultural/intellectual standards as if the highbrow intellectuals of the past had been staunch defenders of bourgeois rectitude...

...It could never have been taken as an activist voice of contemporary liberalism, let alone of the Democratic party or even of the strongly anticommunist labor movement...

...Just short of another third are fellows or administrators of right-wing foundations, the largest number (seven) from the American Enterprise Institute...

...Commentary still prints a few valuable articles, usually by foreign writers on subjects tangential to American or Israeli politics, but not as many as the Public Interest or on most cultural topics the New Criterion...

...Small groups, especially when lavishly funded like the conservatives, can achieve high visibility and appear more influential than they actually are when they speak with a unified voice in many different media...

...They are likely to be disappointed yet again in 1996, in view of the concern among Jews over the increasing power of the Christian Coalition in the Republican party...

...Podhoretz insisted that his aggressive opposition to the radicalism of the sixties was continuous with its earlier forceful anticommunism...

...A special anniversary issue appeared in November 1995, devoted almost entirely to a symposium entitled "The National Prospect...

...Their comments were obviously written before the opinion polls turned sharply against the Republican Congress and it became evident WINTER • 1997...

...Not surprisingly, most of them enthuse about the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 and the emergence of Speaker Newt Gingrich as a power in Washington...

...It was from the beginning resolutely anticommunist, the founding editor, Elliot Cohen, having had Trotskyist associations...

...A similar insight is supplied by, of all people, Robert Bork, who reminds his colleagues not to blame everything on the sixties because "the unraveling of American culture . . . is not a sudden development but a continuation of a trend of many years that was temporarily suppressed by the Depression and World War II...

...As the editor responsible for two marked and opposed changes in its political direction, Norman Podhoretz boasted in his first memoir, Making It (1967), it was essentially an expression of the New York intellectual community...

...Norman Podhoretz, now retired as active editor, tells us that "about 25 years ago my eyes were finally opened to the wonders of American capitalism," and a few other contributors, including, unsurprisingly, Robert Bartley, the editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal, repeat standard Republican doctrine about economic growth, the tyranny of the graduated income tax, and the abuses of the welfare and regulatory state...

...There are, to be sure, some strong disagreements, especially over immigration...

...What started it all he does not say...

...Religion and morality are treated as virtually identical, and concern over the intolerance and even implicit anti-Semitism of the Christian Coalition is usually mentioned only to minimize it...

...But there was in 1976 a much wider representation of people on what the British call the broad left (full disclosure: I was a contributor) and even a few radicals were included...

...The remainder include several members of foundations (such as RAND and Brookings) that resist easy classification by ideological tendency, and a few editors and writers of whom the same is true...

...It would require real sacrifices for any of their many beneficiaries to reject all this...

...The journal had already by that time turned toward the right—a friend of mine complained that the title was biased for suggesting that liberals were things ("whats") while only conservatives were persons ("whos...

...The complaints about moral decline are fairly general and scarcely differ except for their more intemperate language and scattershot quality from those often made by nonconservatives, including those in the symposium...

...Richard Brookhiser perhaps recognizes this when he claims in the symposium that conservatives need more "hacks," though I must say I have not noted any shortage in the supply of such types...

...Its old adversary the New York Review of Books for the most part simply ignores "political correctness" and the cultural left against which Commentary fulminates, but occasionally publishes articles criticizing them that are more informed and nuanced than the sort of attacks in which Commentary specializes...

...Most contributors huff and puff about "demoralization" (William Bennett), "nihilism" (Midge Decter, Richard John Neuhaus, Michael Novak), "moral insensibility" (Hilton Kramer), "barbarism" (Roger Kimball), the triumph of "bohemian values over bourgeois virtue" (George Gilder), the "turning of adolescence into an ideology" (Ruth Wisse...

...These traits and tendencies were fully in evidence by the late 1970s, but the Reagan administration marked the final break with the liberal past...

...Perhaps others of more diverse orientations were invited but declined out of distaste for the ideological stridency now typical of Commentary...

...Commentary utterly fails to recognize any ground between its anti-left assaults and the "political correctness" it targets...

...At the end of his statement, Edward Luttwak hints at this connection when he approvingly quotes from another writer: "The conservatives are fools: they whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth...

...The magazine is a good deal thinner than it used to be and its articles are considerably shorter, reflecting, one suspects, the reported sharp declines in circulation since it became what is now just one of many rightwing journals of opinion...

...While his and 104 • DISSENT Magazines Commentary's anti-left jeremiads have become even more hyperbolic, his ferocity in print and in person long ago cut him off from informal contacts in even moderately liberal circles...

...But the old journal was not remotely as partisan, as closely identified with one of the major political parties or connected to power centers in the federal government, the mass media, and the foundation world...

...The very identity of "intellectual," combining seriousness, cosmopolitanism, rational skepticism toward any and all ideologies and institutions, strong sensitivity to the historical moment, and sympathy with avant-garde art and literature, no longer exists in that there are no longer identifiable persons forming at least loose groups often centered on journals who combine all or most of these traits...

...Lipset coolly introduces historical and sociological perspective to the effect that "our sectarian-inspired moralism inspires public and private efforts to expose evil and to enforce 'correct' behavior and thought...

...I recall one of the first things I read by Kristol, back in 1949—a Commentary essay that he has reprinted in his recent collection Neoconservatism: the Autobiography of an Idea (1996...

...Yet the number of people, that is, writers, intellectuals, and academics, rejecting both of these poles is undoubtedly greater than those in either camp or even in both taken together...

...Several contributors suggest hopefully that another Great Awakening is occurring...

...The New York intellectual community no longer exists: Howe's justly famous 1968 Commentary article that gave it its name was essentially a requiem...

...The statement to which the symposiasts were asked to respond notes that "many observers," alarmed by "multiculturalism and/or racial polarization...

...Nowadays Commentary is accurately described as a conservative journal and grouped with National Review, the American Spectator, the Public Interest, the New Criterion, Partisan Review, the American Scholar, the newer Weekly Standard and First Things, and also with such daily newspapers as the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and the Washington Times...

...The preamble also invoked the now-familiar pet conservative issues of economic growth, affirmative action quotas, and big government...

...Eighteen writers contributed to both the 1976 and the 1995 symposia, mostly "card-carrying" conservatives like Bartley, Novak, Kristol, and William Buckley...

...I myself contributed in its pages to its criticisms of the sixties left, but it was not long before I developed doubts about the magazine's polemical excesses and the big-city provincialism of its New York-centered outlook...

...Bartley even thinks that a religious revival is challenging the "moral legitimacy" of the New Deal...

...As one who wrote fairly regularly for Commentary for over twenty years beginning in the late 1940s when I was introduced to it by my fellow-graduate student Nat Glazer, I feel some sadness in contemplating the thoroughly predictable outlook it has exhibited for at least the last twenty-five years...

...Irving Kristol declares himself "persuaded that a serious religious revival is underway in this country...

...The founding of Commentary in the same year hardly ranked with these momentous events, but the anniversary did not pass unnoticed in the pages of the journal itself...

...Feminism is assailed only by 102 • DISSENT Magazines Harvey Mansfield, who oddly brands it "a form of Marxism" that is "now the greatest blight on our national prospect...

...Counting the editors of Commentary itself, fully one-third of the contributors to the symposium come from the mastheads of these journals...

...Apparently it never occurs to them that you can't make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the society as well . . . ." This statement is from the manifesto of the Unabomber...

...the effects of unchecked immigration...

...Is it only nostalgia to think that a comparable symposium on the state of the nation in the old Commentary would have been richer in content, less exhortatory in predictable ways in its judgments, and marked by a wider and deeper historical sense...

...The editors ask whether their invited contributors agree and what hope they discern in the current "conservative resurgence, social and cultural as much as political...

...A few of them, recalling the denunciations of "declinism" engaged in by Commentary and other conservative publicists in the 1980s in conformity with the upbeat rhetoric of Ronald Reagan, are uncomfortable with the editors' suggestion and declare themselves "optimists," stressing the strength of the economy and more rarely the nation's post—cold war status as the sole superpower...

...By now there is in place a huge infrastructure of wellfunded journals, newspaper columns, television talk-show slots, ties to Republican politicians, temporary and permanent positions in rightwing think tanks, grants and fellowships, endowed professorships, and, at least under Reagan's presidency if not Bush's, second-level appointments to federal offices and advisory boards...

...In recent issues Commentary has published articles by a nonscientist author that are critical of natural science, physics in one case and biological evolution in another...

...These qualities were certainly more evident in their last symposium of comparable size—a 1976 effort called "What is a Liberal—Who is a Conservative...

...Commentary was launched by the AJC as the successor to an earlier journal, the Contemporary Jewish Record, whose managing editor, Clement Greenberg, it retained...

...the dissolution of shared moral and religious values," have concluded that "our national project is unraveling...

...I recall Irving Howe, like me a contributor in its early years (which coincided with ours as writers), once remarking to me with amazement that Commentary had become "more ideological than the New Masses ever was...

...Few suggest that the wonders of capitalism might have a direct connection with the roundly deplored evidence of moral and cultural decline...

...If the era of Commentary's formerly high stature as an intellectual journal has undeniably passed, it did not and does not have to be what it has become...

...increased economic and social stratification...

...But it was by no means inevitable that the journal should come to espouse a populist Republican conservatism as if the only alternative, insisted on so tiresomely and repetitively by its present writers, was embracing the ethos and ideological leftovers from the 1960s counterculture and short-lived New Left...

...And these feelings and efforts make each generation believe it is living in the worst of times...

...Podhoretz claimed in Breaking Ranks that Commentary was able to criticize the New Left so effectively because unlike the established right its writers (including Howe and I) had "some degree of experience with the Movement" and thus were able to "penetrate its selfprotective rhetoric...

...Contributors to the older journal included most of the leading New York intellectuals, who continued to write often for Commentary well into the 1960s...

...Nor has the movement of the Republican party beyond Reagan in its efforts to repeal the New Deal, privatize public services, and limit the authority of the federal government...

...That community was preponderantly if not exclusively Jewish...

...This genuine perceptiveness endows his two memoirs with permanent interest quite apart from their self-serving justifications of the various moves along the way in his passage to the right and the Republican party...

...He has not, incidentally, subjected his recent political allies and associates to anything like the probing of their intellectual, ideological, and careerist roots he once devoted to his erstwhile liberal and literary friends...