Barbara Kay: 60 years ago, Norman Podhoretz's writing led me to conservatism

Iconic American intellectual Norman Podhoretz died earlier this month, peacefully at 95. Reading this news, I recalled a luncheon conversation with my then colleague George Jonas, whose brilliance and wit graced these pages from 2001 until his death in 2016, during which he asked me to rank the formative intellectual influences that had steered me towards conservatism as my default mindset. I named several writers, but Podhoretz led the pack. 

I took out a subscription to Commentary Magazine in the early 1960s, shortly after Norman Podhoretz assumed its editorship. I never missed reading an issue cover to cover until his retirement in 1995. The ideas he advanced were intellectually persuasive and brimmed with moral clarity, but I mainly recall burning with futile envy of the eloquence with which they were expressed. 

Podhoretz was one of a loosely defined assemblage of New York intellectuals known amongst themselves as The Family. Almost all of them were first generation American Jews — liberal and pro-Freud, but anti-Soviet — who considered themselves resident at the crossroads where politics and literature met.  

In 1960, Esquire called Commentary “the red-hot centre of the literary world.” And because of his increasing fame in that world, Podhoretz himself became the red-hot centre of a social whirl amongst cultural and political elites that he embraced with unabashed delight in the social stimulation and professional networking it provided. He and his wife, Midge Decter, a powerful cultural critic in her own right, threw A-list parties themselves.  

Resentment simmered amongst his faux-humble, leather-elbow-tweed-jacket peers. Following publication in 1967 of his self-promotional book, Making It, they turned feral in their criticism. Catholic novelist Wilfrid Sheed sneered that Podhoretz had evolved “from arriviste to apple polisher to sellout.” (Thirty years later, Sheed saw Podhoretz at a social gathering and Podhoretz refused to shake hands with him, saying “The statute of limitations has not run out yet.”)  

Commentary was a prophylactic against muddy thinking, because Podhoretz himself and those who wrote under his aegis refused to write in the abstract about essentially transgressive ideas such as pacifism, sexual liberation, multiculturalism and anti-racism, which ignore the limitations of an unchanging human nature and invite ugly boomerang effects. Ideas had always to be attached to specific situations, spokespeople and, above all, consequences.  

The most controversial example of this principle was his 1963 article, “My Negro Problem and Ours,” which managed to offend almost everyone — integrationists, black nationalists, whites and Jews — and which he feared might shut Commentary down. 

Podhoretz had grown up surrounded by Blacks in Brownsville, Brooklyn. His Jewish tribe was poor and powerless. The very idea of physical confrontation to gain respect was anathema to them. Podhoretz’s black neighbours were strong, confident and prone to bullying Jews, him included. So Podhoretz had no use for double standards or black separatism, which in his observation coincided with candidly guilt-free antisemitism, a fact that guilt-ridden liberal Jews were too squeamish to acknowledge. (Podhoretz revisited his original essay on its 50th anniversary in 2013, explaining how he came to write it; both are gripping reads.) 

In his 1971 essay, A Certain Anxiety, he identified the widespread negative reaction to Israel’s near-miraculous victory in the 1967 Six-Day War as American Jews’ wake-up call to the realization, severally and collectively, that “if Israel were destroyed and its Jewish inhabitants pushed, as the Arabs were so vociferously promising, into the sea, the Jews of America would be next.” More than 50 years before October 7, Podhoretz concluded, “And it is more than anything else the breaking of … the taboo against the open expression of hostility to Jews, which has caused some of us to feel a certain anxiety about the Jewish position in America.” 

Podhoretz simply could not understand the denial and complacency of liberal Jews’ alignment with Israel’s enemies. Post-9/11, Podhoretz sounded the alarm on supremacist Islam — Communism with a theocratic face in his view — in a long, riveting Commentary essay that went viral, “How to Win World War IV,” subsequently published as the best-selling of his dozen books.  

In his 2010 book The Prophets, Podhoretz wrote that the ancient prophets’ principal calling was to obliterate idols. In the past, men made idols of stone and metal. In the present, they make idols of utopian theories. It can be dangerous to smash idols, because those who believe in them often believe with ferocity, but prophets do it anyway. 

Conveniently, it is the season for gratitude. I am grateful, as a product of western civilization, on the cusp of its likely decline and fall, to Norman Podhoretz for his prophetic ability to see around historical corners and to set a noble example by smashing, as best he could, the destructive idols of our era he found there. And I am personally grateful, because he shaped my ideal of opinion journalism on the subjects I have cared the most about, long before opinionating became, quite accidentally, my late-life calling.  

National Post

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