Our Podhoretz Problem- and the Liberal Crisis of Faith in the 2010s

Mugged by left straussians

I’ve been thinking about Norman Podhoretz lately. It’s an unpleasant condition to be sure, but one that I often find myself in when thinking about the right turn of a certain kind of educated literary person in the late 20th century-and in our own time. There’s something so instructive and endlessly curious about the personal odyssey of this 20th century man who made that long journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan-one of the longest in the world, as he told us in 1967-into the good graces of liberal intelligentsia and then out of them into the waiting arms of conservatism. In particular I found myself thinking about what will likely be the last major controversy Podhoretz is involved in.¹

In the mid 2010s Benjamin Moser, the biographer and translator of Clarice Lispector was involved in the 2017 NYRB republication of Podhoretz’s 1967 Memoir Making It, having stumbled upon the book while interviewing Podhoretz for his biography of Susan Sontag. Originally it was intended that Moser would write an introduction for the reissue, but Podhoretz, so the story goes, angrily rejected what had been written, probably because of paragraphs like these:

Unless you inhabit the farthest fringe of the Republican Party, you will have to forget a lot in order to read this book. You will have to forget that its author “would rather have Sarah Palin sitting in the Oval Office than Barack Obama”; that he has “no sympathy—none—for the Palestinians”; and that, even in the wake of the Iraqi calamity, he urged the Bush Administration to extend the campaign to Iran. In other words, you will have to forget everything you think you know about the man Harold Bloom once called Podhorrors.

Actually, don’t. Later, once Podhoretz set up shop as a right-wing eminence, his support of Palin would become a foregone conclusion. But the caricature of the Halloween reactionary is part of what makes this portrait of him as a young man such a revelation. By 37, he had travelled an unimaginable distance: the theme of this book. To remember where the next half-century would take him makes the book more astonishing still. It is hard to imagine that this man would end up supporting Donald Trump.

In summer 2017, following the 2016 presidential election (and very much in its shadow) Moser published the cancelled preface as an article in Jewish Quarterly.² The piece included a lengthy, soul-searching introduction in which Moser notes the presence in his interactions with Podhoretz of an “alcoholic rage” and finally apologizes at some length for having wanted and succeeded in getting the book republished in the first place.

This episode is of some personal interest to me as someone who wrote half a thesis on Norman Podhoretz, but when I was reading it again in the last few weeks I couldn’t help but think to myself- this is so perfect an example of what went wrong amongst left liberals in the 2010s. The confident certainty that some ideas are so damaging, so contaminating that they cannot be allowed to circulate to a wider public, the elitist view that we educated, literary people are the final arbiters who determine what the inert masses read, think, do- is so typical of an attitude that afflicted many of us in the second half of the decade.

It was arrogance that made me write those words. It was a belief that my class had so unquestionably triumphed that I could entertain myself by reading, and by encouraging others to read, about the silly contortions of the also-rans.

I thought I should be polite.

I thought I should listen.

I shouldn’t have.

I have read Making It several times. It is many things, but it is not a book that sways you to Norman Podhoretz’s conservative politics, because when it was written he didn’t have them! There are germs to be sure, but they are only that, and they are germs that I imagine could be found in the bloodstream of almost anyone who made the journey from poverty to prosperity that Podhoretz made. Nor is he really a persuasive thinker in what I would consider the essential meaning of the term. His memoirs are novelistic, but the Norman Podhoretz-as-narrator presented within them is compelling mostly in the sense that he’s a good writer who was in the thick of it during vital moments in American history. I have never found Podhoretz to be someone who convinces you to join him in his political transformation, and I don’t believe that’s simply the result of ideological obstinance on my part either.

When Moser committed his sin and “platformed” those contaminating, unhygienic ideas Norman Podhoretz was eighty-seven years old and firmly ensconced in the world of conservatism. In March of 2017 he was profiled in the New York Times. This was not some obscure figure elevated out of obscurity by the benevolence of Benjamin Moser, this is a man who studied with Lionel Trilling and F.R. Leavis and was friends with Norman Mailer, who publicly quarreled with Gore Vidal, whose writing is to be found in libraries, bookstores, and the archives of major publications.³ I doubt very strongly that anyone became a neoconservative because the NYRB rereleased Making It.

Moser’s denunciation looks from a certain angle like an individual overreaction of the sort that many of us on the left-of-center experienced after the 2016 presidential election as we realized that social and material progress and the victory of our causes is not so inevitable as we had supposed. There is also the matter of Moser being gay and Podhoretz being a notoriously vicious homophobe- an understandable thing to be concerned about, although one wonders why this would matter to Moser only later and not while he was helping to put Making It back out there. In another respect however Moser’s apology/autocancellation for having platformed Norman feels like an excellent example of a distinctly elitist turn in liberal thinking that took place over the 2010s.

In 2019 in The Point John Baskin and Anastasia Berg denounced a tendency in contemporary writing which they called “Left Straussianism.” Primarily aimed at the predilection for public self-censorship within the left, the article charges leftist thinkers who temper their rhetoric for a mass audience-or insist that others do so- with using an exoteric-esoteric technique especially popularized by the German-American philosopher Leo Strauss, particularly pointing to then-recent controversies around Andrea Long Chu and Angela Nagle saying the quiet part loud as it were, about gender transition and left-wing politics on immigration.⁴

the left intellectual becomes the left Straussian when they decide that, in addition to sometimes filtering their own public speech to advance an ideological agenda, they’re additionally responsible for “protecting” the public from being exposed to conversations not disciplined by political strategy. To the extent that their own ideas are not already disciplined by such a strategy, they limit discussion of them to close friends and sympathetic colleagues.

There is another dimension to Strauss (or perhaps there isn’t, and one reads esoteric meaning where there is none) however. It is sometimes claimed that Strauss goes beyond a simple mistrust of modernity and counsel of caution for the philosopher to argue in his esoteric way against democracy, agreeing with Plato that the masses cannot be trusted to make their own decisions. This is the infamous noble lie, bandied about so much in the aughts as an explanation for the pretexts offered for the George W. Bush administration’s disastrous invasion of Iraq and then seemingly mostly forgotten in the following years.⁵ Baskin and Berg do their best to dismiss this specter, while conceding all the same that “a much broader tendency toward public infantilization” exists on the left.

Over the course of the long, messy decade that was the 2010s, many left-liberal literary-media-culture people seem to have arrived-some quickly, some slowly-at the belief that they, like Plato’s guardians or Philip Rieff’s officer class have some duty to steer the culture of the unworthy masses, to restrict their information, perhaps even to tell them noble lies.⁶ As Moser writes of his post-2016 epiphany concerning his dishonest essay about Norman Podhoretz’s fifty-year old memoir:

So there must be an end to understanding. I needed to learn how to say that Norman Podhoretz was a cruel and disgusting person who fully deserved his ex-friends’ contempt. I should have said that his education and sophistication did not make the support he lends to Republican causes “interesting.” Rather, his intelligence aggravates the offense, and reveals his essential vulgarity. I needed to learn from the great critics who saw their task as hygienic, preventing the infiltration of bad ideas into society: what T. S. Eliot called “the correction of taste”. I should never have become involved with publishing—with “normalising”—Norman Podhoretz. I should have taken ideas seriously enough not to present his with a sardonic smile.

Here we observe the left-liberal officer-guardian, awakened to his responsibilities, castigating himself for his failure to maintain the moral-culture hygiene of the polis, for not recognizing contamination when he saw it, for allowing the minds of the mob to be polluted by the repugnancy of this man and his memoir.

I shouldn’t be too hard on Moser.⁷ This was a common condition of a certain kind of left-leaning person of culture in the Trump era, and he did eventually come out against government censorship in the post-Covid era. For a certain type (I am myself of this sort) the temptation to see oneself as an Officer-Guardian is strong, especially when we are periodically reminded that those in whose interests we presume to act may not actually want our interventions.⁸ I am willing to entertain the thought that there may be times when something like a left-straussianism or a center-straussianism is necessary on the bloody stage of national politics, but as intellectual activity it’s a low, dishonest enterprise that we should be wary of. To the extent that there are Podhoretzian political journeys happening in our time, they are surely exacerbated by this tendency on the left.⁹ Exacerbated by our refusal to acknowledge what Lionel Trilling described in The Liberal Imagination:

Some paradox of our nature leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go in to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.

I believe that part of the liberal duty of caution should be taking care not to be over-cautious-Emancipation, the New Deal, and the Voting and Civil Rights Acts were all perceived as coercion by groups within the polity-but we should be aware of what we are arguing for and honest with ourselves about what it means. If we are to imagine that we believe in our liberal democracy, we should be able to have confidence in the critical judgement of our peers and their ability to not be swayed by any old argument that blows between their ears. If not, what’s this all for?

1. I should be careful here-at the time of writing Podhoretz is still with us, although his age and the lack of many other peers to fulminate at would seem to militate against it.

2. At some point in the following years it was then seemingly removed, and I thus direct you to the wayback machine!

3. To really ram this point home, he had last been profiled in the NYT in 2009 for the release of his book Why are the Jews Liberals? a 2010 biography was reviewed by that paper, and he was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal in 2021

4. If you’ve read me for any length of time you know that I have my own gripes with Chu, most notably voiced here.

5. I remember there being what seemed like a vast corpus of literature in the aughts and early tens declaring Straussianism the source of all evil on the American right, at times almost denouncing it as a branch of fascism, most of which appears to have vanished down the memoryhole at some point over the last decade. This is in some respects curious given the turn one of the branches of Straussianism took in the 2010s, but you know what they say about cultural memory…

6. Without wanting to wade into the maelstrom that is Covid Discourse, I’m not sure what else to call the lie told about masks at the very beginning of the pandemic, supposedly in order to safeguard supplies of N95 masks. Granted these were career bureaucrats rather than trendy thirtysomething magazine people, but the tacit endorsement of said behavior by said coterie would seem to paint a picture.

7. His Sontag bio has attracted some pretty serious criticism, and he’s been semi-cancelled in the world of Clarice Lispector for allegations of plagiarism and misbehavior during the translation of her books, and while none of these accusations seem to have particularly stuck, I’m not sure I particularly want to be twisting the knife here.

8. I’m glossing something that I’m sure is a Trilling quote, but for the life of me I can’t find it in any of his books that I own!

9. If you want to see such journeys, and arguably the birth of a “second neoconservatism” more generally, read the culture pages of Tablet and to a lesser extent Compact, where writing of a caliber that would have been published in a more left-liberal magazine as recently as a decade ago coexists with gender critical writing about “synthetic sexual identities” and Chris Rufo discussing the desirability of illiberal cultural authoritarianism to establish permanent conservative dominance.