Norman Podhoretz

SOURCE: August Pollak

Norman Podhoretz, pundit, literary critic, and unflinching defender of the Iraq War, stands—alongside Irving Kristol—as a patriarch of today’s neo-conservative movement. Podhoretz’s writings have influenced generations with their scathing critique of the liberal ideology.

Podhoretz’s neo-conservatism blossomed from liberal seeds. His early history is one of liberal activism, when Podhoretz was associated with the likes of Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac.

By exploring Podhoretz’s turn from radical leftist to neo-conservative crusader, one can chart the history of neo-conservatism itself—a paradigm brought to calamitous culmination by the administration of George W. Bush.

Podhoretz’s life embodies the quintessential American dream. Born in 1930 in humble surroundings, he used intellect to springboard into America’s elite. In his memoir Making It, he writes, “One of the longest journeys in the world is the journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan—or at least from certain neighborhoods in Brooklyn to certain parts of Manhattan.”

Starting as an undergraduate Pulitzer Scholar at Colombia University, Podhoretz obtained an additional bachelor’s and a master’s degree from Cambridge University, where he was a Fulbright Scholar, and yet another bachelor’s from the Jewish Theological Seminary.

Back in New York City in the 1950’s he started contributing to intellectual journals like Commentary magazine and The Partisan Review. His early articles focused on literature, reviewing authors such as Herman Wouk, Saul Bellows, and William Faulkner.

By 1960, Podhoretz had become Editor-in-Chief of Commentary—a position he would hold until 1995.

At Commentary, Podhoretz fostered a generation of neo-conservative thinkers. Prominent neoconservatives Irving Kristol, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Charles Krauthammer, and David Brooks are among the monthly’s many contributors. Commentary was founded as an outlet for liberal thought; critiquing President Kennedy’s economic policies from the left and bemoaning the rise of fundamentalist conservatism. Under Podhoretz, Commentary became a bastion for neo-conservative policies. A fierce critic of arms control, during the Reagan years Commentary staunchly defended supply-side economics and a hard line on the Soviet Union. Commentary also advocated a strong U.S. military presence in the Middle East. Today it unflinchingly defends the Iraq War, and opposes American accommodation with Iran. Just look at Commentary’s lead article in November 2006: “Getting Serious About Iran: For Regime Change.”

Throughout these years Podhoretz gravitated to the political right. The shift had early roots, made clear by his 1958 polemic against the Beat Generation, The Know-Nothing Bohemians, in which he decried the poisonous glorification of the adolescent in American popular culture.

By 1970, in his memoir Breaking Ranks, Podhoretz’s distain for the radical left had only deepened: “It was out of an infection of self-hatred and self-contempt…that the radicalism of the sixties was born; and as it grew and spread, the infection reaches the proportions of an epidemic.”

In regards to foreign policy, Podhoretz traded extremes. As a critic of the Vietnam War, he saw American power as a threat to international stability. But he soon turned, considering global American hegemony as world’s sole hope for security. In his 1980 work, The Present Danger, Podhoretz repudiates his past opposition to the Vietnam War—calling Nixon’s détente policy one of “withdrawal, retrenchment, disengagement,” and defending the “domino theory” that justified American military action in Vietnam.

Today Podhoretz proudly waves the neoconservative banner in the face of mounting criticism about the Iraq War. In November 2006, Podhoretz defended Bush’s Iraq policy:

…The fact of the matter is that what has happened in Iraq is three years is amazing. You’ve had three elections, giant steps towards democratization. You’ve also had difficulties because of sectarian violence, which is incidentally something that was expected to erupt right after the invasion. One of those things that was planned for was a huge civil war that didn’t happen.

Podhoretz did not only pave the way for the Bush administration’s radical foreign policy. He also provided the intellectual fodder for today’s assaults on affirmative action and welfare programs.

Key to Podhoretz’s domestic neo-conservatism is the embrace of the welfare state as a tool to further the conservative agenda. He details this evolution in Breaking Ranks:

…[what made neo-conservatives different] was precisely their acceptance of the welfare state; instead of working to dismantle it, as the “old” conservatives (or the Right) wanted to do, the neoconservatives wanted to make sure it remained consistent with traditional American principles.

By “traditional American principles” Podhoretz apparently meant “classical liberalism”—a laissez-faire economic agenda that is identified with conservatives today. Instead of programs that strive for economic equality, Podhoretz views government’s proper role as only ensuring a roughly equal ability for citizens to express their innate talents.

Programs like welfare or affirmative action are, in Podhoretz’s view, anathema to the American way of life. Podhoretz views these programs as merely encouraging disadvantaged groups to remain disadvantaged. As he states in Breaking Ranks:

"The only thing left for government to do is stop providing incentives [i.e. welfare and affirmative action] to the creation of such conditions, and it has at long last to do just that through various reforms to the welfare state."

The move for “welfare reform,” pushed for years by conservatives and finally adopted, in somewhat less harsh form, by President Clinton, —is an example of Podhoretzian thought turned into action. Instead of basing calls for reform on libertarian beliefs in smaller government, conservatives instead made a paradoxical argument: Cutting benefits to our nation’s most needy will actually make them better off.

While welfare reform has had some success in reducing government spending and increasing employment for America’s poor, a large number of single parents are unable to meet the strict employment guidelines of the program. Additionally the reforms have only encouraged—not reversed—the breakdown of the nuclear family, a chief goal of the legislation.

Podhoretz’s pro-government conservatism has been a springboard for the Bush administration’s “ownership society” platform. Fundamental to this agenda is that the stock-market, not government-backed programs, should provide for Americans’ financial security. President Bush’s failed attempt to privatize Social Security found its roots in Podhoretz’s neo-conservative logic.

Both examples highlight Podhoretz’s faith that upward mobility, not government-forced equality, is the key to solving the problems of the less fortunate. Conservatives now embrace government spending to foster free-market forces, believing the market’s returns will not only provide handsomely for ordinary Americans but also curtail government spending.

Yet he, and the policy-makers who follow him, forget that mobility can go in more than one direction. Indeed, as pointed out by Jacob S. Hacker in The Great Risk Shift, swings in family income are now three times larger than they were in 1970s. This economic yo-yo-ing, a feature of today’s globalized economy, has pushed millions of hard-working, middle class Americans down the economic ladder. Furthermore the neoconservative embrace of tax credits to spur market-based solutions to social spending—to the tune of $250 billion annually—mostly rewards America’s wealthiest citizens.

Podhoretz is the philosopher behind today’s king—providing the intellectual framework to the Bush administration’s neo-conservative agenda. Both the administration’s “compassionate conservatism” and regime-change foreign policy trace their roots to Podhoretzian thought.

Liberals and conservatives alike have heralded this year’s Congressional elections a repudiation of neo-conservatism. Yet the ruinous effects of this failed revolution that Podhoretz helped spur—both within the foreign and domestic spheres of our nation—will not dissipate anytime soon.

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