Norman Podhoretz Was the Ultimate Neocon

Podhoretz eventually settled into neoconservatism, an intellectual movement that began as a liberal critique of the New Left counterculture, hardened into anti-liberalism, then degenerated into an indiscriminate military interventionism. You don’t hear much about neoconservatism these days because the Iraq War discredited it starting around 2005. (Though Donald Trump’s latest folly, a potential regime change war in Venezuela, threatens a revival.) Podhoretz was perhaps neoconservatism’s last surviving active practitioner, and certainly the last survivor of an earlier milieu of Upper West Side liberal intellectuals known as “the family,” from which Podhoretz exited noisily with the 1967 publication of his memoir, Making It.

Making It is a better book than is remembered, mostly for the way it captures Podhoretz’s youthful resistance to assimilation into the goyische ruling class. His tutor in these matters was a high school English teacher he calls Mrs. K. who mentored him between the ages of 13 and 16. “My grades were very high and would obviously remain so,” Podhoretz writes, “but what would they avail me if I continued to go about looking and sounding like a ‘filthy little slum child’ (the epithet she would invariably hurl at me whenever we had an argument about ‘manners’)?” Podhoretz carried this identitarian resistance into Columbia, which sought to make of him “a facsimile WASP,” and what he writes about that is thrilling. But Podhoretz also came to regard academic achievement as a kind of cynical game, and what he writes about that is just depressing.

Podhoretz’s cynicism comes across most fully when he relates how, in graduate school, he shifted his intellectual loyalty from his mentor Lionel Trilling at Columbia (of whom Podhoretz had been “capable of an effortless imitation of the master’s style”) to F.R. Leavis, who taught Podhoretz on a fellowship in England: