Making Politics Simple

...To be subtle, to use dependent clauses, to entertain both sides of a question feelingly-he sees these as wavering...

...The irony of '60s conservatism-remember the Young Americans for Freedom?-was that it depended as much on the issues and climate of the time as did, say, the music of Phil Ochs...

...Mild cases of this disease are common, but I know just two people in whom the symptoms are far advanced...

...This is anti-intellectualism outright...

...Some of Trilling's remarks during the Columbia troubles of 1968 have stuck in Mr...

...This mistake about the nature of Trilling's genius (yes indeed) reminds us of how difficult it is, under all circumstances and in all times, to be a liberal...

...He wants to be seen as-I can't believe he is really-the kind of man who thinks that to be complex and self-critical is a sign of weakness...

...He tends to be, alas, mystical about strength...

...The finest fruit of the Puritan imagination, for example, is the anti-Puritan fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne...

...Podhoretz will not have...

...When people talked like that, son-the book is addressed to Norman Podhoretz' son, an undergraduate at the University of Chicago-you could really let fly...

...The times we had then, and the stories we can tell . . . Today, you see, people come at you with little, annoying, wishy-washy issues: the profit-margins of the oil companies, the unemployment rate, skin diseases picked up around some damn chemical plant . . . It's not that we can't answer these, we can and do...

...This comparison was later to become a commonplace of radical talk, but I had never heard it made before, and it so infuriated me that I literally roared in response...

...This is a clear expression of something that is not said directly in Breaking Ranks but persists as subtext: Wasn't it nice when the Left made such overtly stupid, refutable statements...

...I knew it was there, and I detested the sight of it in action, but I suppose I thought that I personally had nothing to fear from it...

...Podhoretz, with his deep and gorgeous thirst for combat, misses the days of good guys and bad guys: "I myself did not take the 'terror' seriously for a very long time...

...thing into Right and Left anachronistic, it is also out of step with any authentic American conservatism...

...But we can't, well, "roar...

...That evening Jason backed down...

...Podhoretz says at the end of his book that what he is to himself is a "liberal," and I think the dictates of a good liberal conscience on the issue of national strength ought to be clear...

...Certainly I was not afraid of Jason...

...One instance of this in Breaking Ranks is his attack on Lionel Trilling...

...The root difficulty is this: It is hard to think of any distinctively American achievements not marked by an effort to break free of fathers, conventions, dogma, creeds...

...If we are to represent Justice and Freedom internationally, the more determined we must be not to compromise them in our own public institutions, not to support tyrannies abroad, and not to allow poverty to deny justice and freedom to our own citizens...

...The political emphasis of this is widely known: He is "for" an America that does not vitiate its strength by criticizing itself...

...I stress this nostalgia for the polarization of '60s politics because through Norman Podhoretz' considerable influence it has become an implicit feature of '70s neoconserva-tism...

...At the time, there was dignity in that role: The New Left increasingly broke faith with the ideals of tolerance that inform liberal society...

...Except, of course, about the Soviet Union...

...How can a man admit such a thing, Mr...

...No need to be complex or sympathetic to the personal, psychological, sociological sources of such rhetoric...

...Nothing should grow faster, as we rise to the inherent perils of the world situation, than our capacity to say where and how we are in the wrong...

...Now Mr...

...Of course, this defense of liberal principles magnifies the paradox inherent in all genuine American conservatism...

...The more one has invested in the hopes for true conservatism, the more distressing will be Norman Podhoretz' relentless disdain for its complexities...

...One works in a record shop, talks compulsively about Eric Clapton and Baba Ram Dass, and has stubbornly held out against the newer, shorter hairstyles...

...And it is regrettable that Mr...

...But Mr...

...but then on the other hand...

...Yet that, he surely knows, is a clumsy cartoon of liberalism, created (ironically) by the radical Left...

...the second half records his breaking ranks with the radicals to return to a newer, not-so-liberal anti-Communism, leaving the radicals wondering what he was doing so far Right...

...And surely it is one of that interesting group's more regrettable features, for not only is the easy division of everyJohn Romano, our guest columnist, teaches English at Columbia and is the author of Dickens and Reality...

...Consequently, the stronger America needs to be (and it needs to be very strong just now), the more self-critical it must simultaneously become...

...Podhoretz' craw, particularly the remark that the students* demands "at least begin to make sense...

...So conservatives defended the War as an abstraction, attacked the Great Society program on principle, but were most vivid, most vocal, most specific in their opposition to the tactics of "the movement...

...it is always under assault...

...I never hesitated to cut him off when he began making outrageous statements about others, and once I even made a drunken public scene in a restaurant when he compared the United States to Nazi Germany and Lyndon Johnson to Hitler...

...The virtue of Beyond Culture, for instance, is its exquisite balance, more useful as a touchstone than the rigidities and attitudinizing that ranged round it in the discourse of those years...

...Podhoretz does not realize, because his affection for Trilling was great and sincere, what disservice he does the elder critic's memory when he accuses him of "retreat[ing] in the face of the radicalism of the late sixties...

...Thus the essence of the conservative's task in America is a delicate mediation, marked by self-criticism and even a vigorous, morally keen ambivalence...

...Now there's a subject...

...Podhoretz' melancholy opinion, though, toward the end Trilling failed to take enough stands, and even when he did, he failed to do so strongly enough...

...and I don't mean anti-those-intellectuals-who-are-soft-on-Russia, I mean anti-those-people-who-think-too-much...

...The other Sixtomaniac-the other man for whom personal identity and social-historical moment mated once and perfectly in that gone time-Is Norman Podhoretz, the distinguished editor of Commentary and the author of Breaking Ranks (Harper & Row, 375 pp., $15.00...

...Yet one merely needs to read those lively pages in which the author recounts his feud with Jason Epstein, a founder of the New York Review of Books and his old Columbia classmate, to feel how sorely Mr...

...The sufferer compulsively refers to the '60s, pines for the '60s, understands the '50s or the '70s only in relation to the '60s, understands himself only in relation to the '60s, etc...

...Its own positive hopes came to grief with Barry Goldwater...

...In the annals of campus radicalism especially, the Right-wing of the late '60s will go down as those who hooted down the hooters-down...

...But that is just what Mr...

...therefore, hating LBJ from his first moment as President, the Right could hardly feel comfortable simply defending him from New Left enemies, despite a Vietnam policy nearly indistinguishable from Goldwater's...

...In Mr...

...It's not that we don't have traditions...

...Podhoretz, in the compulsive polemics of his soul, can only deplore the balance of such a vision as weakness and (an unfair quote from Trilling himself) "fatigue...

...It's that, at our best, we question them...

...and so come out nowhere, leaving the earth to less ambivalent forces of evil...

...Conservatism in America is not, nor should it be, a consistent ideology...

...He concedes that Trilling always tended to make matters "complicated" and deplores this habit of mind, but insists that for "most of his life" Trilling managed to "overcome" complexity and take strong stands...

...To succeed in preserving the American tradition, the true conservative must support those changes that strengthen our society while opposing those that will undermine the framework which makes change possible...

...Actually, the capacity lo acknowledge the justness of competing claims in an open democratic field is a triumph of human seeing...

...Podhoretz chooses to join its assailants...

...In Breaking Ranks Norman Podhoretz reveals what is perhaps most unsupportable in his present position...

...In short, what must be conserved is the tentative, unrigorous, self-correcting, nonideo-logical character of our public life-In ways that do not destroy human freedom...

...For Podhoretz, liberals are the people who say "On the one hand...

...it's banal and dumb and actually evil...

...Trilling's "double-ness"-a very unfortunate word of Podhoretz', because of its ring of duplicity-Seems to me to have derived from a breadth of sympathy-a sympathy with moral promptings even in mistaken movements for social change, tempered by anguish over the costs of change to our moral heritage...

...Johnson-as-Hitler is an equation one can attack with an undivided heart and mind...

...it is a sadness to all his friends, for he was once a prize-winning political science major at Stanford...

...As if intelligence were something to overcome, like dyslexia...

...Podhoretz seems to ask, about the other side...

...Power to do good does not increase without power to do wrong increasing apace...

...Lacked a little of the ol' John Wayne, he did...

...Half of this book is a record of how Podhoretz broke from the ranks of liberal anti-Communists to join (a species of) '60s radicalism, leaving the liberal anti-Communists wondering what he was doing so far Left...

...the hallmark of its health will always be its liberalism...