Up from the Sixties

Reactions to the political disorderliness of the Sixties were often quite dramatic. In response to the violent repression of protestors at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, a splinter faction of Students for a Democratic Society formed the infamous Weathermen, an underground revolutionary cell ultimately responsible for exploding several small bombs, including at the Pentagon. At the other end of the power spectrum, the Nixon White House countered high-profile leaks of classified information by setting up a clandestine special investigation unit, the notorious "plumbers" who, among other illegal activities, broke into and wiretapped Democratic National Headquarters at the Watergate Hotel. Intellectual responses to Sixties ferment were no less striking. This is made clear by new biographies of Christopher Lasch (1932-94) and Norman Podhoretz (b. 1930), two of the most renowned figures in recent U.S. intellectual history. Lasch's and Podhoretz' stunning political reorientations help us make sense of the post-Sixties fractures that still characterize contemporary American social thought.

Christopher Lasch grew up in the Midwest and was raised by highly educated secular liberals. Norman Podhoretz grew up in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn and was raised by working-class Jewish immigrants. But despite such divergent beginnings, the intellectual biographies of Lasch and Podhoretz converge in remarkable fashion. Both studied at Columbia University, Lasch as a graduate student, Podhoretz as an undergraduate. They were mentored by world-famous scholars: Lasch, informally, by historian Richard Hofstadter; Podhoretz, intimately, by literary critic Lionel Trilling. And although Lasch never lived the life of a full-fledged member of "the family"—Murray Kempton's apt signifier for that nepotistic and dysfunctional group otherwise known as the New York intellectuals—they both internalized the habits of mind that defined the postwar American intelligentsia. In other words, Lasch and Podhoretz were quintessential members of the so-called "new class," those artists and intellectuals who seemingly challenged and even disparaged social reality as understood by most Americans. To ascribe Lasch and Podhoretz to the "new class" is, in retrospect, ironic, since they later became two of its harshest critics. But in the early 1960s, they helped define the New Left, an uprising that, in seeking to upend traditional America, was the political expression of the "new class."

Lasch taught history at the University of Iowa and Northwestern University throughout the 1960s, during which time he nominally aligned himself with the student movement that sought to end the war in Vietnam. Lasch was, in the words of his biographer Eric Miller, "an earnest, outraged opponent of imperial America . . ." (Miller, p. 122). A growing New Left devoured his essays, including, most famously, "The Cultural Cold War," in which Lasch assailed the Congress of Cultural Freedom—an organization of anticommunist intellectuals formed in 1950—after revelations that it had long been the benefactor of Central Intelligence Agency largesse. That 1967 essay served as one of Lasch's many shots against intellectuals whose work was distorted by their proximity to power. More importantly, it reflected his decade-long attack on the Cold War consensus.

When not studying literary criticism at Oxford, Podhoretz spent the 1950s rapidly ascending the ranks of the New York intellectual hierarchy. A prodigy of sorts, he was named chief editor at Commentary in 1960, a position he held for thirty-five years. Under Podhoretz' editorial prowess, the little Jewish publication quickly became one of the most exciting and, eventually, influential magazines in the United States. His first move was to publish, in three parts, Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd, which became one of the literary anthems of the New Left. Signaling the direction Commentary would take during the Sixties, Podhoretz also showcased prototypical New Left writers such as Norman Brown and Norman Mailer, the latter of whom Podhoretz would count as a close friend, at least for a short...