Norman Podhoretz, the last of the titans of late twentieth-century neoconservatism, passed away yesterday at age 95. I knew him less well personally than the other members of his immediate circle, his wife Midge Decter, and Irving and Bea Kristol, but he powerfully shaped the environment in which I politically matured and the National Association of Scholars (NAS) was born.
I was an avid reader of the publication he long and famously edited, Commentary, which apart from its Jewish concerns, was the flag bearer of anti-totalitarianism in a world whose cognoscenti were reluctant to acknowledge its post-Nazi existence. As such, Commentary was a relentless Cold Warrior and an opponent of what was sometimes referred to as “anti-anti-Communism.” In no place did this last sentiment more flourish than the academy, a symptom of more deep-seated institutional pathologies to whose dangers Commentary helped alert me.
My first literary foray into the culture wars took place in Commentary’s pages when, together with NAS founding chairman Herbert London, I authored the article “The Tenured Left” in the October 1986 issue. It detailed the cosseting of radicals throughout the university world, the increasingly activist redefinition of the scholarly profession, and the overall erosion of academic standards. The article gave me a public profile (Herb already had one) that opened doors to the philanthropies that provided the NAS with its initial financial float. Norman was thus a major benefactor of NAS.
The world is a very different place from the one that Norman and his colleagues intellectually straddled. Communism, seemingly counted out via their efforts, instead luridly transmogrified into a variety of creepy, but equally dangerous, epigones, birthed by that tenured left that Herb and I took on in Commentary and then the NAS. Their political and cultural presence in American domestic life is now far greater than it was in the 1980s and 1990s, but so too is the reaction against it, even if its forms and leaders depart somewhat from the models Norman and his neoconservative brethren (and “sistren”) would have preferred. Well, no one can control the future, only push it down those paths that, by one’s lights, seem best. Norman’s lights were very bright and the push he gave stronger than most. We’re all in a better place as a result. Rest in peace.
Photo by Bernard Gotfryd - https://www.loc.gov/item/2020732594/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=106989770
