Beginning to See the Light: Sex, Hope, and Rock-and-Roll

My Podhoretz Problem—and His

My Podhoretz Problem— and His Mention Norman Podhoretz to a radical, or even a liberal, and chances are the response will be something like "That asshole! I can't take him seriously!" Chances are also that the vehemence of the dismissal will belie its content. The left's reaction to Breaking Ranks: A Political Memoir has been no exception; the general tone was captured best by Nicholas von Hoffman in New York, going on at vituperative length about how boring and inconsequential Podhoretz is. Anyone so hated by people who insist he doesn't matter must be hitting a nerve. And in fact, Podhoretz hits nerves all the time, with what he says and what he blurts, who he is and who he purports to be. He gets under radicals' skin in the way a William Buckley never can because he could so easily be one of us; he comes from the same impolite, urban middle-class milieu, long on brains and (relatively) short on wealth, inclined to bloody fights rather than elegant debates, imbued with left-wing assumptions. Like many leftists, Podhoretz is Jewish; also like many leftists, Jewish or not, he has relied on verbal braininess as his chief means of getting on in the world. He purports to be, among other things, an intellectual. Yet despite 2 45 A M E R I C A N G I R L S W A N T E V E R Y T H I N G his occupation and his manifest engagement with ideas, he has always impressed me as far more visceral than cerebral. The power of his writing to anger or, conversely, to evoke the superior eyeroll depends largely on its subtext. On some level Podhoretz is usually raising a basic question: is real freedom desirable, or even possible? For the past decade his answer has been an aggressive and passionate no. Since his message often comes packaged in frenetic exaggeration and dubious logic, he is an easy target. But because radicals are not nearly so sure of their own answer as they pretend, he makes them nervous. Though radicals would prefer to dismiss it as the reflex piggery of a self-satisfied elite, neo-conservatism is a politics of reaction in the literal as well as the political sense—a response to the failures and weaknesses of the left. The major figures in the neo-conservative camp, most of them self-proclaimed liberals, many of them exsocialists , developed their formative ideas in the wake of the old left's worst trauma—its confrontation with socialism according to Stalin. As a distinctive politics, neo-conservatism crystallized at the end of the sixties, about the time the new left collapsed into sectarian dogmatism and nihilistic violence. Like the rest of the crew, Podhoretz keeps bringing up the embarrassing fact that Marxist revolutions have produced not free societies where workers control their lives but dictatorships that deny both political and personal liberty. He insists that capitalism, with all its imperfections , is the only alternative to tyranny. Yet for all his democratic rhetoric, he is hardly a libertarian. What appalls him about the sixties and post-sixties left is not just its Marxism but its cultural and above all its sexual radicalism. It is in fact this animus, or anyway its intensity, that most clearly marks him as conservative rather than liberal. As Peter Steinfels points out in his book, The Neoconservatives (a fine piece of analysis, of the non-eye-rolling, know-your-enemy genre), there is a muddle in the neo-conservatives ' logic—the free market they defend erodes the authority of the family, religion, and government, creating the "adversary culture" they deplore. But this contradiction masks a deeper one. 246 My Podhoretz Problem—and His Why is it that as soon as people have any real choice in the matter, they start rejecting authority? Could it be that they are asserting a fundamental and legitimate need for freedom? That's what I think; Podhoretz takes for granted that authority is necessary to civilized life. Stripped to basics, our argument is not unlike the one I've always had with my father, now retired from his anomalous (for a Jewish liberal) career as a New York City cop. His experience convinced him that people are basically antisocial and will do anything they can get away with. That, finally, is the quarrel conservatives (whatever they call...