I think there's an argument to be made that what you're calling Left-Straussianism is awfully close to something that I think has a really different genealogy and intent, which is a sort of Habermasian understanding of what a public sphere ought to be. E.g., that an intellectual ought to try and operate within a democratic public sphere where there are boundaries of what is and is not acceptable to say. (With that public sphere not being the same as all *culture* or artistic work, where those boundaries might not apply.) There's also something in the mix that's about the "linguistic turn" typically ascribed to the influence of poststructuralist and postmodernist thought, which is not so much about policing the plebs as it is about believing that speech and representation are constitutive of social practice and social structure generally, and that an intellectual ought to be more conscious of and instrumentally deliberate about how they participate in that process. (A view that is at odds with the Habermasian idea of an ideal public sphere as a site of formal conversations between peers that ultimately constitute the substance of democratic life.)
While I agree with you that I dislike people feeling they have to apologize for attention to--or republishing of--odious figures, I feel as if you're edging here into implying that it's wrong to really dump on an odious figure, which older Podhoretz unquestionably is. I don't think anything that Moser says substantively about Podhoretz' sociopolitical views in his maturity is wrong in that sense. And if that's a fine and worthy thing to say, then the interesting problem is one that often comes into thinking about the lives of intellectuals and artists who seem to have been interesting people at one moment but who became monsters of one kind or another later on. And I think that problem admits to many different kinds of workings, including a sense that later monstrosity forces a new reading of what came before it. That is hardly a new quandry that afflicts contemporary leftists in a new way: it's a very old moral dilemma with deep roots in Western thought, and "Left Straussians" are hardly the first group of thinkers or leaders to believe that trying to separate the innocent seedling from the monstrous tree is a dangerous exercise that might make future monsters.
I think you're right that it's difficult and important work, and for that matter I don't disagree with Moser's criticism of Podhoretz's mature political views at all! I hear you about the linguistic turn, although I think perhaps it could be argued that those sort of interventions wind up clerking the plebs anyway! Left-Straussianism was just the term I borrowed from Baskin and Berg, I don't think it 100% holds in the mold of right Straussianism. Thanks for reading!
I had never heard of Left Straussianism before! That is sort of what those nerds believe in though isn't it? I've never particularly understood why we can't simply trust people to make up their own minds and act in their own self-interest. And on a practical level, the ability of the center-left to brainwash people seems very limited--they mostly seem to persist in thinking things we don't want them too!
I didn't know that Podhorrors was so bad. When I read MAKING IT, I had no sense of him as being worse than Robert Novak or Will Safire or William B Fuckley or Charles Krauthammer or any of those other nerds who used to take up space on the Washington Post's op-ed page. In a world where Donald Trump was president, was it really such a big deal to 'platform' a relatively typical neo-con?
That was kind of the crux of my puzzlement at that article – Podhoretz is particularly homophobic even by the standards of that (already pretty homophobic) milieu, but Moser must’ve known that going in. It just felt very archetypal of the kind of silliness a lot of people (myself included) talked ourselves into in the Trump era.
What a crazy time that was. Wonder what the second trump term will be like! Will we reboot the nuttiness? Or will we all be too scared. Hard to say! Thanks for linking to my favorite insane articles in both tablet and compact by the way!
Great essay, put into words a lot of things I had been feeling. I was always uncomfortable when this mindlessly assumed role of Officer-Guardianism came up, particularly as, exacerbated by Covid, it leaked into nice liberal friends and family members and not just mandarins writing in N+1 or wherever.
One of the best reading experiences I had when I was younger was having to read Barry Goldwater for a class - having been raised in a thoroughly lib milieu it was the first time I really felt more certain of what I believed, because I had something to actively think through, consider, and reject instead of a formless miasma of what were basically just bad vibes around Bush's gaffes or Trump's vulgarity.
Maybe this is a delusion of people who would read this substack and are naturally attracted to learning things but whatever my politics are will always have to include the belief that people can generally be trusted with ideas and, crucially, that knowledge is a good in itself.
Thank you! I'm always torn myself between an attraction to certain basically aristocratic worldviews and a deep-seated sense that culture should be for and available to everyone! There should be a cultural-aspirational ideal I think. I totally agree with your third paragraph!
"Crucially, it ignores the current broadcasting playbook that is used to make some facet of cultural or historical life palatable to a modern audience. This demands that you take your thing — Dante’s Inferno or the Salem witch trials or what-have-you — and then you explain that this thing is interesting for reasons including but not limited to the following: it is related to the presenter’s relationship with their parents; it is related to the presenter’s mental health; it is related to the listener’s mental health; it is non-specifically but entirely ‘radical’; it is non-specifically but entirely feminist; it explains whatever crisis American democracy is facing that week; it explains who will win the next election; it has provided the presenter with an excuse to undertake a figurative ‘journey’ that relates to their aforementioned mental health or parents; it has provided the presenter with an excuse to undertake a literal journey, ideally to Italy or Spain. Perhaps it is simply that while the thing was thought to be ‘of its time’, it has since been discovered to march in cheerful lockstep with our own.
In every instance two assumptions are being made. The first is that culture is a straw through which people slurp up the lives and ideas they already have. The second is that people are incurious and stupid. Both of these assumptions are wrong."
Sep 12, 2023·edited Sep 12, 2023Liked by Gnocchic Apocryphon
It's fascinating how much difference even a year or two makes in the particular constellation of pressures on one's writing. My book with a chapter on Podhoretz came out in early 2016, and though I got some criticisms there was literally no one complaining that I was platforming Podhoretz (or David Horowitz, who I also devoted a chapter to and who is equally as anathema to the left). And it never occurred to me that anyone would. That wasn't a thing, that as a writer you shouldn't be interested in people whose opinions were "bad."
All sorts of reasons for why i didn't get dinged in that way, including that I'm much lower profile than Moser, but I also think the election of Trump was such a tipping point for a certain kind of circling of the wagons tendency.
I've heard through the grapevine that Podhoretz read and hated my chapter on him. David Horowitz, on the other hand, kind of loved my chapter on him, even though I'd say both were roughly in the same curious-but-not-uncritical stance vis a vis their subjects.
I haven't gotten to the Horowitz chapter yet! It was interesting reading through your Podhoretz section like "ok he cites that, I read that, ooh there's something I missed, etc" historian stuff. For whatever reason when I was writing about him I couldn't find a source for the diagram in the sky vision that I was satisfied with, but then I somehow missed out on your book as well! Those reactions to the sections somehow seem entirely appropriate to what I know about their respective personalities.
the great missing source in my chapter was his unpublished manuscript on the 60s (it included a chapter on "the blacks" that is surely fascinating), which is in his papers I think at the Library of Congress. Were you able to look at that.
He was surprisingly affable and even rather introspective seeming when I interviewed him, but maybe that shouldn't surprise me.
I don't remember where I read the diagram in the sky bit. Is it in one of later books maybe?
I was not, there are so many things I'd do over about what I wrote-I covered most of the primary and secondary sources, but the whole thing was thrown together very quickly and written *far* too much on the fly-I was proud of it at the time but I shake my head at it now. Part of the problem admittedly was when I was writing, after 2016 but before covid- I had a sense that the early neocons were important to us today, but nothing more specific then "this led to DJT eventually." Whereas now I think I have a definite thought about what all this means that I'm inevitably going to wind up writing about one of these days.
“To the extent that there are Podhoretzian political journeys happening in our time, they are surely exacerbated by this tendency on the left” is almost, I fear, an understatement. Reflecting today on how 9/11 probably made Obama-era change-without-change possible, I wonder if the neoconservative embrace of surveillance-state spank made a countervailing left-liberal PMC authoritarianism more viscerally satisfying in, sort of, revenge.
I sometimes wonder that myself, although I also don’t have the best idea of the timeline there- I was a little politically out of touch in the first Obama term so there’s a lacuna in my perception between the end of the GWB era and 2013 or so. I partly wonder as well if the left-liberal pmc authoritarianism was as much a reaction to Obama’s legislative impotence/obstruction by R’s-I know some of the initial cancel culture stuff came out of a similar sense of frustration, like “hurt who you can reach” and that sort of logic.
I think that’s probably true (the left-liberal frustration with Obama’s ineffectualness, to a degree, and the sense of “charity/cancellation” begins at home) but I wonder how many folks under 30 have a real sense of the inchoate rage and flailing of the anti-war left under Bush. The New York Times endorsed the war! There were all sorts of major and minor defections from presumably staunch left-ish figures. I think it did a real mind-job on whatever the youngest of the Boomers and all of Gen X were in influential media positions (or later to be).
Weirdly I think the most visible legacy of the Bush era left is the small but vocal Obama 08,12 Trump 16,20 faction of those guys who I assume got radicalized by the Iraq war, further radicalized by Obama’s failure to end those wars, and threw their lot in with Trump to own the establishment that they’d single-issue focused themselves into thinking was just a unitary monster swapping masks.
Yeah. I honestly think that cohort (and more) was being subtly conditioned for the irreality of Trump by the Bush years, from the whole "reality-based community" jibe, to the heady, Manichean agit prop of Michael Moore's documentaries, stuff that did more to insinuate than elucidate (less sunlight between those and average Alex Jones than I think people are willing to remember).
I think there's an argument to be made that what you're calling Left-Straussianism is awfully close to something that I think has a really different genealogy and intent, which is a sort of Habermasian understanding of what a public sphere ought to be. E.g., that an intellectual ought to try and operate within a democratic public sphere where there are boundaries of what is and is not acceptable to say. (With that public sphere not being the same as all *culture* or artistic work, where those boundaries might not apply.) There's also something in the mix that's about the "linguistic turn" typically ascribed to the influence of poststructuralist and postmodernist thought, which is not so much about policing the plebs as it is about believing that speech and representation are constitutive of social practice and social structure generally, and that an intellectual ought to be more conscious of and instrumentally deliberate about how they participate in that process. (A view that is at odds with the Habermasian idea of an ideal public sphere as a site of formal conversations between peers that ultimately constitute the substance of democratic life.)
While I agree with you that I dislike people feeling they have to apologize for attention to--or republishing of--odious figures, I feel as if you're edging here into implying that it's wrong to really dump on an odious figure, which older Podhoretz unquestionably is. I don't think anything that Moser says substantively about Podhoretz' sociopolitical views in his maturity is wrong in that sense. And if that's a fine and worthy thing to say, then the interesting problem is one that often comes into thinking about the lives of intellectuals and artists who seem to have been interesting people at one moment but who became monsters of one kind or another later on. And I think that problem admits to many different kinds of workings, including a sense that later monstrosity forces a new reading of what came before it. That is hardly a new quandry that afflicts contemporary leftists in a new way: it's a very old moral dilemma with deep roots in Western thought, and "Left Straussians" are hardly the first group of thinkers or leaders to believe that trying to separate the innocent seedling from the monstrous tree is a dangerous exercise that might make future monsters.
I think you're right that it's difficult and important work, and for that matter I don't disagree with Moser's criticism of Podhoretz's mature political views at all! I hear you about the linguistic turn, although I think perhaps it could be argued that those sort of interventions wind up clerking the plebs anyway! Left-Straussianism was just the term I borrowed from Baskin and Berg, I don't think it 100% holds in the mold of right Straussianism. Thanks for reading!
I had never heard of Left Straussianism before! That is sort of what those nerds believe in though isn't it? I've never particularly understood why we can't simply trust people to make up their own minds and act in their own self-interest. And on a practical level, the ability of the center-left to brainwash people seems very limited--they mostly seem to persist in thinking things we don't want them too!
I didn't know that Podhorrors was so bad. When I read MAKING IT, I had no sense of him as being worse than Robert Novak or Will Safire or William B Fuckley or Charles Krauthammer or any of those other nerds who used to take up space on the Washington Post's op-ed page. In a world where Donald Trump was president, was it really such a big deal to 'platform' a relatively typical neo-con?
Excellent post, as always!
That was kind of the crux of my puzzlement at that article – Podhoretz is particularly homophobic even by the standards of that (already pretty homophobic) milieu, but Moser must’ve known that going in. It just felt very archetypal of the kind of silliness a lot of people (myself included) talked ourselves into in the Trump era.
What a crazy time that was. Wonder what the second trump term will be like! Will we reboot the nuttiness? Or will we all be too scared. Hard to say! Thanks for linking to my favorite insane articles in both tablet and compact by the way!
Yes, I do wonder about if that comes to pass- I can’t imagine *nothing* happens but I can’t imagine a return to 2018 either!
Great essay, put into words a lot of things I had been feeling. I was always uncomfortable when this mindlessly assumed role of Officer-Guardianism came up, particularly as, exacerbated by Covid, it leaked into nice liberal friends and family members and not just mandarins writing in N+1 or wherever.
One of the best reading experiences I had when I was younger was having to read Barry Goldwater for a class - having been raised in a thoroughly lib milieu it was the first time I really felt more certain of what I believed, because I had something to actively think through, consider, and reject instead of a formless miasma of what were basically just bad vibes around Bush's gaffes or Trump's vulgarity.
Maybe this is a delusion of people who would read this substack and are naturally attracted to learning things but whatever my politics are will always have to include the belief that people can generally be trusted with ideas and, crucially, that knowledge is a good in itself.
Thank you! I'm always torn myself between an attraction to certain basically aristocratic worldviews and a deep-seated sense that culture should be for and available to everyone! There should be a cultural-aspirational ideal I think. I totally agree with your third paragraph!
Also made me think of this essay on the BBC's In Our Time program (paywalled but archive.is gets you through). https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-in-our-time-remains-the-best-thing-on-radio/
"Crucially, it ignores the current broadcasting playbook that is used to make some facet of cultural or historical life palatable to a modern audience. This demands that you take your thing — Dante’s Inferno or the Salem witch trials or what-have-you — and then you explain that this thing is interesting for reasons including but not limited to the following: it is related to the presenter’s relationship with their parents; it is related to the presenter’s mental health; it is related to the listener’s mental health; it is non-specifically but entirely ‘radical’; it is non-specifically but entirely feminist; it explains whatever crisis American democracy is facing that week; it explains who will win the next election; it has provided the presenter with an excuse to undertake a figurative ‘journey’ that relates to their aforementioned mental health or parents; it has provided the presenter with an excuse to undertake a literal journey, ideally to Italy or Spain. Perhaps it is simply that while the thing was thought to be ‘of its time’, it has since been discovered to march in cheerful lockstep with our own.
In every instance two assumptions are being made. The first is that culture is a straw through which people slurp up the lives and ideas they already have. The second is that people are incurious and stupid. Both of these assumptions are wrong."
It's fascinating how much difference even a year or two makes in the particular constellation of pressures on one's writing. My book with a chapter on Podhoretz came out in early 2016, and though I got some criticisms there was literally no one complaining that I was platforming Podhoretz (or David Horowitz, who I also devoted a chapter to and who is equally as anathema to the left). And it never occurred to me that anyone would. That wasn't a thing, that as a writer you shouldn't be interested in people whose opinions were "bad."
All sorts of reasons for why i didn't get dinged in that way, including that I'm much lower profile than Moser, but I also think the election of Trump was such a tipping point for a certain kind of circling of the wagons tendency.
I've heard through the grapevine that Podhoretz read and hated my chapter on him. David Horowitz, on the other hand, kind of loved my chapter on him, even though I'd say both were roughly in the same curious-but-not-uncritical stance vis a vis their subjects.
I haven't gotten to the Horowitz chapter yet! It was interesting reading through your Podhoretz section like "ok he cites that, I read that, ooh there's something I missed, etc" historian stuff. For whatever reason when I was writing about him I couldn't find a source for the diagram in the sky vision that I was satisfied with, but then I somehow missed out on your book as well! Those reactions to the sections somehow seem entirely appropriate to what I know about their respective personalities.
the great missing source in my chapter was his unpublished manuscript on the 60s (it included a chapter on "the blacks" that is surely fascinating), which is in his papers I think at the Library of Congress. Were you able to look at that.
He was surprisingly affable and even rather introspective seeming when I interviewed him, but maybe that shouldn't surprise me.
I don't remember where I read the diagram in the sky bit. Is it in one of later books maybe?
I was not, there are so many things I'd do over about what I wrote-I covered most of the primary and secondary sources, but the whole thing was thrown together very quickly and written *far* too much on the fly-I was proud of it at the time but I shake my head at it now. Part of the problem admittedly was when I was writing, after 2016 but before covid- I had a sense that the early neocons were important to us today, but nothing more specific then "this led to DJT eventually." Whereas now I think I have a definite thought about what all this means that I'm inevitably going to wind up writing about one of these days.
“To the extent that there are Podhoretzian political journeys happening in our time, they are surely exacerbated by this tendency on the left” is almost, I fear, an understatement. Reflecting today on how 9/11 probably made Obama-era change-without-change possible, I wonder if the neoconservative embrace of surveillance-state spank made a countervailing left-liberal PMC authoritarianism more viscerally satisfying in, sort of, revenge.
I sometimes wonder that myself, although I also don’t have the best idea of the timeline there- I was a little politically out of touch in the first Obama term so there’s a lacuna in my perception between the end of the GWB era and 2013 or so. I partly wonder as well if the left-liberal pmc authoritarianism was as much a reaction to Obama’s legislative impotence/obstruction by R’s-I know some of the initial cancel culture stuff came out of a similar sense of frustration, like “hurt who you can reach” and that sort of logic.
I think that’s probably true (the left-liberal frustration with Obama’s ineffectualness, to a degree, and the sense of “charity/cancellation” begins at home) but I wonder how many folks under 30 have a real sense of the inchoate rage and flailing of the anti-war left under Bush. The New York Times endorsed the war! There were all sorts of major and minor defections from presumably staunch left-ish figures. I think it did a real mind-job on whatever the youngest of the Boomers and all of Gen X were in influential media positions (or later to be).
Weirdly I think the most visible legacy of the Bush era left is the small but vocal Obama 08,12 Trump 16,20 faction of those guys who I assume got radicalized by the Iraq war, further radicalized by Obama’s failure to end those wars, and threw their lot in with Trump to own the establishment that they’d single-issue focused themselves into thinking was just a unitary monster swapping masks.
Yeah. I honestly think that cohort (and more) was being subtly conditioned for the irreality of Trump by the Bush years, from the whole "reality-based community" jibe, to the heady, Manichean agit prop of Michael Moore's documentaries, stuff that did more to insinuate than elucidate (less sunlight between those and average Alex Jones than I think people are willing to remember).