Rebel on the Right
BRUNN, JACOB HEIL
Rebel on the Right My Love Affair with America By Norman Podhoretz Free Press. 256 pp. $25.00. Reviewed by Jacob Heilbrunn Contributor, "Times Literary Supplement," "Wall Street...
...On one side is the Old Right...
...By the 1970s, the Lefthad become the new establishment...
...The rather parochial studies of the New York intellectuals until now have scanted, if not altogether ignored, the international character of the liberal anti-Communist movement formed by the Congress for Cultural Freedom...
...It was the Black Power movement's descent into antiSemitism and hatred of Israel that rattled him out of his Leftism and headed him in the direction of what would come to be called "neoconservatism...
...As conservative pundits continue to lash themselves into a frenzy over Clinton's iniquities, one of the few commentators to recognize his transformation of the Democrats has been Norman Podhoretz...
...Gone are the confiscatory taxes on businesses and individuals...
...Columbia further Americanized him...
...Perhaps that's why Democrats like Clinton are busily swiping ideas from the GOP...
...Reviewed by Jacob Heilbrunn Contributor, "Times Literary Supplement," "Wall Street Journal" When conservatives set about fashioning the Reagan revolution, they could hardly have realized that some of their ideas would be used to remake the Democratic Party...
...Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Robert Lowell, and many others were doing some of their best work...
...Although Gore may not be as politically ambidextrous as Clinton (though his re-reversal on Elian Gonzalez suggested new depths of opportunism), his instincts have always been firmly centrist...
...Still, Podhoretz makes much of his angry denunciation of a symposium in First Things where Richard John Neuhaus and other contributors speculated that the failure to halt abortion might mean the "American regime" was coming to an end...
...Podhoretz' own patriotism was strengthened by his encounter with British snobbery toward the United States...
...In his first book, Making It (1968), arguably a work that pioneered the revelatory memoir, Podhoretz ruffled the feathers of the New York intellectuals by confessinghis white-hot ambition topenetrate their ranks...
...given the agency's dismal track record, Encounter may have been one of the few useful things that the CIA funded during the Cold War...
...He reminds us that in mid1941 Clement Greenberg and Dwight Macdonald produced an essay claiming fascism could be defeated only if a "social revolution" took place in England and America and "working class governments" dedicated to Socialism were installed...
...Itmirrors the '80s struggle pitting Old Left Democrats against the fledgling Democratic Leadership Council Clinton and Gore helped found...
...Podhoretz says he spurned Howe's bleak view, but he himself lurched into infantile Leftism in the 1960s...
...The author moves from his childhood to his current differences with leading social conservatives to describe his own political evolution from radical Leftist to neoconservative...
...During his fellowship at Cambridge, he, like many Americans, became enraged by the facile contempt the British and other Europeans expressed...
...But this charge has always seemed overwrought...
...Podhoretz evokes these intestine struggles to show how both the Left and the Right succumbed to anti-Americanism...
...Podhoretz is not slow, either, to chastise some of the New York intellectuals for their obtuseness when it came to the fight between the Western democracies and fascism...
...Overall, though, the tone is more valedictory than combative...
...If there is a theme winding through his memoir, that is it...
...Its Great Books program, Daniel Bell has observed, jolted students into "a new appreciation of the dimensions of thought and feeling...
...He isn't interested in recounting salacious details from his personal life...
...Accent-free English helped Podhoretz overcome social anti-Semitism, but it also attuned him to the nuances of poetry and literature...
...will ever persuade me that I would have won the scholarships I later did to Columbia and Cambridge Universities if even a residual trace had remained in my speech of the little boy who told a teacher that he was 'goink op de stez' when he was going up the stairs...
...He ascribes much of his success in life to a remedial speech class he was forced to attend: "Nothing...
...Encounter, a Congress magazine whose editors included Irving Kristol and Melvin J. Lasky, played an important role for European intellectuals...
...But the editor-essayists of his generation may be nearly extinct...
...Audaciously, Podhoretz seems to suggest that perhaps the New York crowd has received attention out of proportion to its true significance, a theme previously touched upon by Sam Tanenhaus that deserves more exploration...
...Even in The God That Failed, Podhoretz notes, Stephen Spender and Arthur Koestler qualified their denunciations of the Soviet Union by taking a whack at the U.S...
...on the other, the boisterous young conservatives clustered at places like the Weekly Standard, vigorous McCain supporters who seek to revive neoconservatism inside the GOP...
...On the contrary, Podhoretz quite convincingly argues, the 1950s were a time of cultural efflorescence...
...To be sure, Podhoretz dredges up a few old scores and displays his legendarily rébarbative temperament at several points...
...You might even call them neoconservative...
...They are not insubstantial...
...In retrospect, an important distinction has to be made: To be a neoconservative in the 1970s was quite different from being one in the 1990s...
...An early opponent of the Vietnam War, he denounced the Cold War and urged the U.S...
...In a recent piece in the National Review, Podhoretz made the obligatory noises about the President's moral failings, but the thrust of the essay was to detail his achievements...
...his consuming interest is the power of ideas...
...To remain a rebel—what he is at heart—Podhoretz had to keep moving farther to the Right...
...to recognize that the world had become, as the political scientists were fond of saying, polycentric...
...He astutely singles out Jacques Barzun as one of Columbia's most eminent scholars—contradicting the disdain Barzun was held in by the New York intellectuals...
...Kristol had already made his name with an attack on liberals in Commentary that might be termed anti-antiMcCarthyite when Podhoretz started to contribute to the journal...
...It is hard to conceive of today's liberals getting involved in a similar dustup...
...He ends on a generous note, concluding that America has weathered difficult times in the past and that the sense of panic among some of his fellow conservatives about the state of the union is unwarranted...
...as well...
...Podhoretz himself recounts that "before Columbia, I had never truly understood that, as an American, I was the product of a tradition, that past ages had been inhabited by people like myself, and that the things they had done and the thoughts they had thought bore a direct relation to me and to the world in which I lived...
...Though he is often grouped with Irving Kristol as a movement elder, Podhoretz actually belongs to a younger generation...
...But before long Podhoretz and Co...
...Certainly it was far less dogmatic than most American journals that independently shared its worldview...
...Spender declared: "The effect of these years of painful experiences has only been to reveal to me that both sides are forces producing oppression, injustice, destruction of liberties, enormous evils...
...If you wanted to be a radical, you moved to the Right...
...And he did, all the way into the arms of Pat Robertson and the Christian Coalition...
...Koestler was not much better: "The choice before us is merely that between a gray twilight and total darkness...
...Podhoretz' latest installment in what has come to comprise an autobiographical series thus arrives at an opportune moment...
...Contrasted with the wildly self-indulgent, not to say pornographic, memoirs that have been appearing in recent years, Podhoretz' original book seems like a model of restraint...
...That club will forever be wielded against it...
...True, but it was also a reminder of the conservatives' penchant for going back to first principles...
...Podhoretz does not ignore the hot water Encounter landed in when its CIA funding was disclosed...
...At first that was an epithet coined by Michael Harrington...
...Such apocalyptic rhetoric, Podhoretz and others noted, was all too reminiscent of the fulgurations of the '60s Left...
...Yet that was true only in the context of the 1970s...
...From embracing school uniforms to signing the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, Clinton has wiped out the last vestiges of the McGovern wing of his party and firmly established his own New Democrat orthodoxy...
...Recently, Washington Post book critic Michael Dirda devoted an entire column to lamenting the CIA's having decisively influenced the monthly's contents...
...Podhoretz attacks Irving Howe for stating in his 1954 essay "This Age of Conformity" that intellectuals were being seduced by "a commercial civilization.' According to Podhoretz, Howe saw himself "as a lonely upholder of the true faith against the mass apostasies occurring around him...
...His attack on Saul Bellow's Augie March is less than persuasive...
...would acknowledge its appeal...
...The primary tussle between John McCain and George W. Bush showed the result of Clinton's actions: a rift among Republicans...
...This paradox nevertheless occurred thanks to President Bill Clinton, who despite the Right's hatred of him, has been the functional equivalent of a Republican mole...
...So uninhibited has our journalism become as it chases after "buzz" that My Love Affair with America has a slightly old-fashioned feel...
...Podhoretz' account of his childhood is deft and humorous...
...Gone is the anti-Americanism that prompted lockstep party opposition to foreign intervention...
...If elected to succeed him in November, Vice President Al Gore would most likely do little to alter that...
...As Podhoretz noted, today it is the GOP that has begun to return to isolationism...
...William Phillips and Philip Rahv, in their essay entitled "Ten Propositions and Eight Errors," rejected the notion that supporting the "Roosevelt-Churchill war regimes" was a mistake...
...Merely...
...Warnings about the Soviet threat and Communist human rights abuses have ended up becoming conventional wisdom...
Vol. 83 • May 2000 • No. 2
