By John C. “Chuck” Chalberg.
The recent death of Norman Podhoretz prompted me to return to his “political memoir,” Breaking Ranks. Published in 1979, it deserves to be read or re-read today—and not simply as a historical account of his evolution from left to right during the 1960s and 1970s. Furthermore, it ought to be read today by those on the left and right, if for different reasons, as well as for reasons of both historical and current importance.
The memoir opens and closes with a letter to his son John. Then in his late teens, the younger Podhoretz had asked his father if he really had once believed in “all that stuff,” meaning all that the New Left had preached from the late fifties through much of the 1970s. Norman Podhoretz’s short answer to his son’s question was “yes.” His slightly longer answer was “yes, but . . .” Of course, any “yes, but” might require multiple chapters of explanations. But the senior Podhoretz managed this task in a single chapter. Itself titled “Breaking Ranks,” that chapter, one must be warned, occupies the next 340 pages of the book.
Actually, when “Breaking Ranks” and Breaking Ranks are both broken down, there are many fewer pages given over to confirming the “yes” when set against the many, many more of the “yes, but” variety. And yet there is a consistency to the whole. The young Norman Podhoretz, or Norman Podhoretz until sometime in the mid-1960s, was an American patriot, a defender of middle class American values, a proud Jewish American, a confirmed supporter of Israel, a good family man, an unabashed intellectual, an equally unabashed New Yorker, a staunch anti-communist, and a liberal who occasionally leaned to the left, as well as someone who regarded both America and American power as largely forces for good in the world.
To clarify matters a bit, the post-young Norman Podhoretz remained all of the above, save for being an anti-leftist liberal who was unreservedly committed to the view that a powerful United States was a force for good in the world.
What, no neo-conservative? Not if the senior Podhoretz had anything to say about it. Too young to have been an old right conservative, Podhoretz was never much in sympathy with immediate post-WWII conservatism, whether of the ”repeal the New Deal” or of the pro-McCarthy sort. But as a liberal, he was always an anti-anti-McCarthyite, meaning he recognized that there was both an internal and an external communist problem, but thought that Senator Joe McCarthy was not just an obstacle to solving it, but a gift to those who denied that either branch of communism was any sort of a problem.
As a liberal, Podhoretz was prepared to conserve the welfare state, rather than repeal it. In that sense he was willing to admit to being a conservative, even if he was not yet willing—or perhaps not yet able—to see its failings. While in many ways he was conservative about much more than that, the term “neo-conservative” was never to his liking, while “liberal,” or more precisely, “centrist liberal,” was.
The memoir then closed with a postscript in which Podhoretz declared that the “Movement is dead.” The New Left was no more. Not surprisingly, his “yes, but” followed immediately. While in a “formal sense it certainly is dead . . . it died as much because it won as because it lost. Its ideas and attitudes are now everywhere.”
Welcome to post-1970s America. More to the point of this retrospective review, welcome to today. After all, the same “ideas and attitudes” remain pretty much everywhere. If anything, there has been a fairly recent resurgence of both, especially in large urban places, including one very large East Coast urban place of great importance to Norman Podhoretz in particular and to the country in general, not to mention the ongoing dominance of those “ideas and attitudes” in what all too often passes for higher education and entertainment.
Running through this memoir are two themes with implications quite worthy of current note: 1) the importance of culture in general and the changes in culture that affect our politics, especially the politics of the left; and 2) the failure of nerve on the part of many on the left, including many of the friends (or should that be “ex-friends?) of a certain “centrist liberal.”
No doubt son John had leftist “ideas and attitudes” in mind when he asked his father if he had once believed in “all that stuff.” Yes, his father mostly did, at least for a relatively brief time in what proved to be a very long life. And yet he had other—and much more permanent—beliefs as well. One of them was the importance of culture to the life of the country; another was the importance and basic goodness of middle-class values; and another was the importance and necessity of making up and then expressing one’s own mind, all to assure against any failure of nerve of his own.
A further breakdown of the memoir produces a division into three unequal segments: a) a brief account of the left in the 1930s; b) a much longer accounting of this “centrist liberal’s” shift from left to right; and c) his brief and sporadic speculations about the future of the left and, not so coincidentally, the future of the country.
The three parts can also be summarized in this way. There was a failure of nerve on the part of the fellow-travelling left when faced with the Stalinist left in the 1930s. There was also a failure of nerve on the part of too many left-inclined liberals when confronted with the challenge of the New Left radicals of the 1960s and 1970s. And part three? For the sake of the country, Podhoretz more than occasionally hints there had better not be a failure of nerve on the part of those who are anywhere on the left when the next version of the hard left is resurgent.
Pieces of this memoir can also be read as a history of American intellectuals and intellectualism. As Podhoretz saw it, beginning sometime in the late nineteenth century and continuing into World War II, American intellectuals, both left and right, were largely alienated from—or at least at odds with—middle-class American life. For them, judges Podhoretz, there was nothing much good about this America, save for an awareness of “its raw energy and vitality.”
This general sense of “estrangement” among American intellectuals from their own country persisted well into the war against Hitler. Only then did “things begin to change.” While she was far from alone, novelist Mary McCarthy served as the prime exhibit for Podhoretz, if only because at some point during the war she “began to care who won.”
Only then did the United States become “our country” for its Mary McCarthys. Having discovered an American war that was both a good war and a successful one, they also discovered that they had a stake in the country’s future. Moreover, they suddenly found themselves being “looked up to instead of down upon.” To be sure, they were still on the left, but they were no longer fellow traveling, anti-American leftists—at least not for what turned out to be a brief historical moment.
This was the intellectual world in which one Norman Podhoretz would begin to come of age, politically speaking. At the time, he no doubt thought of himself as being somewhere on the left. But, or should that be “yes, but,” at no point did he think of himself as being of the left. Then and forever after, he would defend middle-class American life against the “assault of Bohemia.”
In other words, well before he headed toward believing in “all that stuff,” he had come to believe in a good deal of other stuff. He also read other stuff, including Nathaniel West, who challenged one of the “great articles of faith” of radicals everywhere, namely that all human miseries could be cured by the “right social and economic arrangements.”
Did reading such subversive thoughts lead Podhoretz to abandon radical temptations? No. But surely those thoughts stayed with him. Moreover, even then, he knew that he wanted to experience what he thought was the “real adventure” of life. This was an adventure that had nothing to do with “radical politics” and everything to do with determining how to lead the good “moral life” of the individual. Such a statement could only have been made by a good liberal—or by a good conservative, for that matter.
In any case, the Soviet Union was not the model to follow, certainly not after the 1956 Khrushchev speech denouncing the sins of Stalin, or after the Khrushchev-ordered crushing of the Hungarian rebellion also in 1956. Yes, or “yes but” there might still be an American model for some version of radical reform. That notion had some appeal for Podhoretz even in the good times of the late 1950s, nay especially during such times, since they could—and did—inspire “confidence and daring” in the minds of intellectuals seeking “attention and influence.”
While conceding to his son that “perhaps I should have known better,” Podhoretz temporarily put aside his concerns about Soviet “military power and intentions” to focus on the peace movement, which as of the late 1950s and early 1960s he had come to regard as more important than the civil rights movement, if only because he was then hopeful that ending the Cold War was necessary for a revival of an American radicalism devoid of Marxism.
Was the incoming Kennedy administration a breath of fresh air for this born-again budding radical? Not at all. It simply “couldn’t be trusted” to advance the “old liberal agenda,” let alone the “new radical one.” At best, JFK and crew were an “obstacle”; at worst, they were the “enemy.” Witness the Kennedy version of a southern strategy of slow-walking the obvious necessity of federal intervention to assure black Americans of their basic rights.
In the early years of Podhoretz’s stewardship of Commentary, he also published pieces critical of Kennedy ally John Kenneth Galbraith and the “authoritarianism implicit” in his presumption that he not only knew better than middle-class Americans just what they wanted and needed, but what they ought to want as well. At the same time, Podhoretz seemed at least to flirt with anti-growth notions by running a piece by E. F. Schumacher, of “small is beautiful” notoriety, which questioned both growth and industrialization.
At no point, however, does Podhoretz really make clear just what his radical vision for America was, circa 1963. Perhaps that was because no such clear Podhoretz vision existed, aside from a general rejection of statist solutions (beyond acceptance of the welfare state), a brief infatuation with the likes of Paul Goodman and other similarly-minded utopians, as well as his own discomfort with and distaste for conventional politics, whether Democrat or Republican.
Yes, there was his presumption that inter-racial marriage might offer the ultimate solution to the race problem in America. At least this was his speculation in his controversial essay, “My Negro Problem—and Ours.” Yes, the United States should take the lead in ending the Cold War. Yes, there were his on-again, off-again infatuations with some sort of generic radicalism. And then came Vietnam.
Actually, his self-described “turn against Cold War liberalism” may well have begun before the American war in Vietnam became a major issue. Perhaps that turn was signaled by his willingness to run pieces written by the likes of Staughton Lynd and H. Stuart Hughes of the “blame America first” variety that Jeane Kirkpatrick would reference and castigate years later.
As unlikely as it seems, Podhoretz even found himself being “pushed” into defending the proposition that surrender to the Soviet Union would be preferable to a nuclear war “if matters would ever come to such a choice.” To be sure, pushing the Norman Podhoretz around does seem highly unlikely, but perhaps at the time he was still smitten with radical possibilities and still feeling his way in the editor’s chair.
His initial response to the American escalation of the war in Vietnam was close to that of Hans Morgenthau, the foreign policy realist whom Podhoretz also published. Put simply, for Morgenthau—and for Podhoretz—the war was “impossible to win.” Therefore, what was possible for Podhoretz was opposing American military intervention without “surrendering” his anti-communist credentials.
At no point did Podhoretz share the position of the Staughton Lynd radicals, who wanted a communist victory in Vietnam. Here Podhoretz, the young quasi-radical, was in full agreement with Norman Thomas, the perennial socialist presidential candidate, who dismissed the Lynd position as amounting to loving the Viet Cong more than loving peace.
Podhoretz’s suspicions about where the left was heading were also apparent in his decision not to publish the 1962 Port Huron Statement. In the first place, it was “not on its intellectual merits worth publishing.” That should have been that, but not far below the surface of the statement was something much more troubling, namely, a “steady current of moral smugness and self-satisfaction.”
Podhoretz conceded that his friend and ally Nathan Glazer was right to note that the idealistic tone of the SDS in 1962 was very different from the “snarling and violent revolutionism” of the SDS of 1968. And yet Podhoretz went on to contend—and rightly so—that the “seeds of 1968 were present in 1962.”
In any case, for Norman Podhoretz, “centrist liberal” and perhaps quasi-radical, the war was a mistake, not a crime. For many of his soon-to-be-ex-friends among the intelligentsia, it was not just a crime, but evidence that the United States was, to borrow from Podhoretz, “the major obstacle to the birth of a better world.”
To be sure, both “unreconstructed Stalinists” and “equally unreconstructed fellow travelers” had joined Podhoretz in opposing the war from the outset. By then, many of the original fellow travelers could finally admit that they had been wrong not to see the evil of the Soviet Union in the 1930s. But unlike Podhoretz, they now claimed to be right about the evil of the United States and its effort to “impose its national obsessions on the rest of the world.”
To make matters even more contentious, in the midst of all these debates Podhoretz published his first memoir, Making It, a volume which concluded not with a reaffirmation of his past radical loyalties, but with a declaration of defiance against the New Left’s anti-Americanism and a defense of the pursuit of success as both the “dirty little secret” of the intellectuals themselves and “not necessarily a corrupting force” for anyone.
Podhoretz also wanted his son and his readers to know that the book amounted to a denial that the intellectuals—and the “educated class” in general—represented a “true or superior alternative” to the middle-class values that he had been pursuing for the entirety of his adult life. After all, those values had always served Norman Podhoretz very well, and he knew it. This was true well before he believed “all that stuff,” and it remained true afterwards.
Because he held to those values, Podhoretz always managed to keep some distance between himself and those who unreservedly did believe in “all that stuff.” One quick story will help make the point. At a National Book Awards ceremony in 1967, Podhoretz found himself with a group debating the wisdom of using the event to stage a public protest against the American war in Vietnam by ostentatiously walking out when Vice President Humphrey was about to address the gathering. As the debate went on, someone turned to pianist Eugene Istomin to ask him what he intended to do. His reply was immediate: “I’m not going to walk out, I’m all in favor of American policy in Vietnam.”
The debaters were stunned. Podhoretz may have been stunned, or at least surprised, as well. But he also “admired Istomin’s courage in speaking his mind.” More than that, Podhoretz had nothing but disdain and disgust for this “community of dissenters” and their reaction to someone who had dared to dissent “from them.”
Of course, what also helped Podhoretz—and perhaps Istomin as well—was a belief in America. For Podhoretz, that belief was accompanied by an increasingly firm belief that a powerful America truly was a force for good in the world. A neo-conservative he may not have wanted to be called, but a neo-isolationist he most surely was not.
By the same token, Podhoretz believed that a powerful America was crucial to its survival. And that, for him, was always primary. That it could also be crucial to the survival of other countries, including Israel, was clearly important to him as well. But for Norman Podhoretz, their survival was always secondary to that of the United States.
One more Podhoretz belief must be noted as well, because it was also more important than “all that stuff.” For Norman Podhoretz, being intellectually honest with himself was always much more important than being in step with those fellow intellectuals, not to mention more than a few politicians, whose primary desire was to be on the right, meaning the left and, they anticipated, the winning side.
Podhoretz initially defined that desire as a “failure of nerve.” Was he being too kind? Perhaps even he might have thought so, since near the end of this memoir he blasted what he termed an “epidemic of cowardice” that had begun to infect both the intelligentsia and not a few politicians as the 1960s gave way to the 1970s. As he saw it, there had been an “enormous panic” on the part of those who appeared to be desperately trying to get on the “right side” of what looked to be a “triumphant revolution.” Such had also been the case during the 1930s. And clearly that was the case once more in the 1970s. Might it happen again? Throughout the book Podhoretz lets that very concern creep into his story.
All along, he informed son John, there was a “larger story” behind his own story of moving first toward and then away from “all that stuff.” That larger story concerned the “political culture” of the country. It was a story that Norman Podhoretz knew had to be “faced and absorbed if we are ever to recover our health as a nation after the fevers and plagues of the two decades just past.”
Periodically in these pages Podhoretz hints at that story. Now and again he tries to tease a bit of it out. Culture was always crucial to Norman Podhoretz. Its impact on the political culture was especially important, since the heart of that culture had kept—and continued to keep—moving steadily leftward. Which it did, and which it has continued to do.
Recall Podhoretz’s requiem for the Movement of the 1960s: “It died because it won . . . Its ideas and attitudes are now everywhere.” Well, they still are. And with great force and appeal. Could it produce yet another “epidemic of cowardice?”
Surely there is little to no doubt that those who currently believe in “all that stuff” desire to impose it on a country that they do not regard as “our country.” Will they succeed? Who knows? At this historical moment, the one great unknowable is this: What will today’s installment of fellow travelers do? Will they tag along, whether out of a “failure of nerve” or sheer cowardice, all in the hope of being on the winning side of the revolution to come? Or will they not?
And Norman Podhoretz? He may no longer be on hand to warn against what might be brewing, but Breaking Ranks is.
John C. “Chuck” Chalberg writes from Minnesota and once performed as G. K. Chesterton.
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