Podhoretz

Late 2025 has witnessed too many great Americans dying. Rob Reiner. Joe Ely. Steve Cropper. But things balance out and sometimes, the Earth purges one of its bad people too. And that leads us to Norman Podhoretz, who leaves the Earth mourned by no good humans.

Podhoretz represented one of the saddest and most unfortunate tendencies of mid to late twentieth century intellectuals, which was to turn a reasonable position against the excesses of communism into a full-throated embrace of conservatism, racism, and militarism that influences the Republican Party today. Any discussion of Podhoretz should be a cautionary tale of what happens when you lose all perspective about the world around you.

Podhoretz was born in New York in 1930 to Jewish immigrants. His parents were socialists and so was young Norman. He grew up around leftists and did very well for himself, getting scholarships to the best schools. He graduated from the prestigious Boys High School in Bedford-Stuyvesant in 1946 and then went to Columbia. He was mentored by Lionel Trilling and was seen as a rising star of the intellectual left, a great tradition of Jewish New York. After graduating, he received another BA from Cambridge, served in the military for a couple of years, and considered becoming a rabbi. Too bad he didn’t.

Instead, Podhoretz became editor of Commentary in 1960. He would serve in that role for the next 35 years, moving from an important player on the left to a powerful neoconservative influencing tremendously horrendous policies enacted on the world by terrible human beings. At first, he was hiring James Baldwin. But that sort of thing didn’t last long. As early as 1963, Podhoretz was publishing terrible material, such as his famed essay “My Negro Problem—And Ours,” where he talked about the oppression he felt from African-Americans as a child and the need for a color-blind society. He wrote it to come to terms with “the hatred I still feel for Negroes,” without any real self-reflection. In this, he talked up miscegenation but opposed integration. It was completely out of touch with basically everyone in society. Well, except for Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a man who suffered from the white family pathology of racism and who became close to Podhoretz during these years. As Podhoretz was already walking in elite circles, this was largely an exercise in white privilege, even granting the very real anti-Semitism in this country and the long-standing tensions between black and Jewish communities in this era.

Like a number of old-time leftists, Podhoretz turned to the right over his hatred of the New Left. That movement, with its admitted excesses, but also with its harsh and largely correct criticism of American foreign policy, emphasis on personal freedom, and identity politics such as feminism and Black Power, really turned off a generation of older, largely Jewish intellectuals who had defined themselves as the left in the 1950s and early 1960s. This became the intellectual root of the neoconservatives.

My own take on these people is that it all shows how shallow their leftism was to begin with, as they largely over the years didn’t just turn on the parts of the New Left they didn’t like, but they also turned upon the parts of the Old Left that they supposedly were once attracted to, including on economics. It’s not just that Podhoretz grew up in a socialist family, it’s that well into adulthood, he continued espousing at least some of those views. And then they were all gone, even the most basic and fundamental of them. By the time of Earth Day in 1970, Podhoretz was writing in Commentary that environmentalists were motivated only by “the desire to govern the rest of us.” For a former socialist to say this is laughable, for it to be over people who only wanted a livable planet is just sad. But mostly it is just the spewing of a weak mind who fell into the clichés and ranting the moment he was challenged by anyone he didn’t like.

Of course, the entire New York quasi-left scene around Commentary and other publications was, by many accounts, essentially people yelling at each other all time, engaging in loud, obnoxious political debates that were far away from the world of real-life organizing. It sounds awful to me. These fights only grew more harsh as Podhoretz became a right-winger. His 1967 book Making It was a key moment in his turn, not because the New Left had really developed yet, but because it was so badly received by his friends in the New York intellectual set. The whole point of this book is to talk about how awesome Norman Podhoretz was, how he was ambitious and proud of it, how he had nothing to apologize for, and how he should be a model for others. I’m not sure if he had a section in there on his own integrity and modesty.

The book was widely panned and the publisher wouldn’t even promote it. Many of his friends were so disgusted by it, they broke off relations with him, in part because he was saying all sorts of things about them by name! Podhoretz never understood why people didn’t like the book. He thought he lived the ideal life. Shouldn’t others think so too? His ego as strong as ever, Podhoretz wrote two more memoirs, Breaking Ranks, from 1979, and Ex-Friends in 1999. In both of these, he spent a whole bunch of time continuing to be confounded by the reaction to Making It. And just in case he wasn’t enough of a drunk in normal times, as those New York intellectual parties were more awash in booze than any New Left freakshow they hated could have imagined, when the book was panned, he started downing a fifth of Jack at home every day. Good times.

And while, yes, Podhoretz and other neocons were horrified by the New Left, one can also trace Podhoretz’s move to the right to the reception of Making It. Turning on his former friends was as much about revenge as principle, which of course it was because so much of that New York scene was just unhinged ego. In 1970, one of Podhoretz’s remaining friends told him to clean up. He did so and claimed to have a vision that revealed to him the wonderful nature of Judaism. Whatever really happened, at this point, Podhoretz stopped drinking and became a confirmed right-winger. Commentary quickly transformed itself from a leading rag of the left to something very different from that. He embraced Israel’s aggressive foreign policy for the first time. He supported Nixon in 1972 and fell in love with Ronald Reagan by 1980, using his usual modesty to claim that he won that year over Carter because of Commentary’s support.

As he aged, Podhoretz became ever more devoted to supporting Israeli interests. His discussions of Muslims became ever more disturbing at the same time. By the 1970s, Podhoretz also became concerned that the U.S. was cozying up to the Soviets, not showing them the toughness that he demanded. Of course, you might expect him to make that claim of Carter, even though it was obviously unfounded. In fact, he typically responded to Carter’s foreign policy by claiming “The parallels with England in 1937 are here, and this revival of the culture of appeasement ought to be troubling our sleep.” Boilerplate for a warmonger like ol’Norm.

But it’s worth remembering as well how furious the right was with Reagan when he began meeting with Gorbachev and developing a relationship with him that significantly thawed the relationship between the two nations and helped move toward the end of the Cold War. As this is one of the only things I don’t hate about Reagan, naturally for someone such as Podhoretz, this was a huge betrayal. Toughness and the threat of the war, that was all that mattered in his foreign policy. For Podhoretz, a confirmed homophobe, any sign of a weakness also probably meant you were gay. In The Present Danger, not only did he write that the U.S. should have seized oil fields in the Middle East during the 1973 war (gee, what could have gone wrong!), but also there was a “prominence of homosexuals in the literary world” that I guess threatened American power. OK Norm. Sure.

In 1997, Podhoretz was one of the signees on the Project for a New American Century, the thinktank founded by Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan that advocated Americans bombing brown nations whenever possible. Its impact was felt very strongly on the administration of George W. Bush. In fact, that whole era of foreign policy disasters can be traced back to the perfidious influence of people such as Podhoretz and Kristol. Podhoretz argued strongly for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, saying that Saddam Hussein was a huge threat to the United States and, like so many neoconservatives, claiming that action toward nations such as Iraq and Iran that was short of bombing was “appeasement.” In neo-con land, every day is betraying the Czechs. Or perhaps more accurately, the South Vietnamese.

Podhoretz always held that American withdrawal from Vietnam was a tremendously shameful episode. Of course, he never articulated how the nation could win that war or what an acceptable cost of American lives propping up the corrupt and ineffective South Vietnamese government would have been, but the reality of dead and maimed American soldiers was never a concern to neoconservatives such as Podhoretz. That was for sissies and liberals to worry about. Moreover, his views became ever more extreme on this, such as this 1976 Commentary essay where he accused Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger of “making the world safe for communism.” Again, he said this of Henry Kissinger. Why was this man taken seriously for so long?

Podhoretz never lost his legendary capability to hate anyone he felt had crossed him. He wrote an entire book about this, his 1999 memoir “Ex-Friends: Falling Out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt and Norman Mailer.” And while anyone falling out with a violent blowhard asshole like Norman Mailer is to one’s credit, Podhoretz was just a crank by this time. He didn’t change much over the years. A 2017 New York Times profile begins with Podhoretz talking about how much Saul Bellow hated him until they both decided they hated Alfred Kazin. In the same interview, he claimed that the only reason that Susan Sontag surpassed him as a critic is that people thought she looked good.

For being a right-wing crank of the highest proportions, George W. Bush awarded Podhoretz the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004. What sort of freedom did he espouse? The kind where it made to sense to become an advisor to Rudy Giuliani’s short-lived “Noun, Verb, 9/11” 2008 presidential campaign and to publicly advocate for U.S. military attacks on Iran. He claimed in 2004 that if the next Democrat who took the presidency didn’t continue Bush’s policies, “we will be in danger of the most horrendously imaginable attacks, something infinitely worse than 9/11.” Not surprisingly, that didn’t happen. But then, when was Podhoretz ever right about anything?

As the Tea Party took over the Republicans and a new era of extremism came into power, Podhortetz embraced it. In a 2010 Wall Street Journal op-ed, he talked of the horrors of Barack Obama and had one figure who could fix this nation: Sarah Palin. He longs for the days of Rudy Giuliani’s policing of New York; I guess he saw the murder of Abner Louima as an ideal outcome. He has called Bill DeBlasio a “Sandinista,” which is of course overheated absurd rhetoric for a rather ineffective mayor who governs mildly to the left. But then this was Norman Podhoretz in his normal mode of invective. Maybe the best thing that happened to American culture is that everyone stopped caring what these blowhard New York intellectuals thought. I’m not sure that the idiocy of the contemporary right is any better, but at least there’s not the pretension to intelligence. Norman himself was a Rubio guy in the 2016 primary, but became a self-proclaimed “anti-anti-Trump” person in the aftermath.

But really, he moved well beyond anti-anti-Trump. In 2021, he gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal on his support of Donald Trump. It was revealing. He stated, “I was not crazy about the guy. I had never met him, and still I’ve never met him. But I thought the animosity against him was way out of proportion and, on the right, a big mistake. I went from anti-anti-Trump to pro-Trump. . . . I still think—and it’s been the same fight going on in my lifetime since, I would say, 1965—I still think there’s only one question: Is America good or bad?” Wow, real deep thinker here. I can see why he was seen as a genius for so many decades……..

Moreover, Podhoretz admitted that the only reason he didn’t support Trump in 2016 is because Trump actually told the truth about Bush lying to go to war in Iraq. Podhoretz stated: “And I still get very angry on that whole business. First of all, it’s not true. It’s also crazy. Why would they lie about weapons of mass destruction? If they were lying, they knew they would be exposed a week after our troops got in. So what was the sense of it? Nobody was lying. Seventeen intelligence agencies, something like that, thought Saddam was hiding them.” I wonder if he actually believed this. Finally, what was really important to ol’Norm? “This ‘woke’ business—critical race theory, Black Lives Matter, all of it—is just pure anti-American hatred. And I think [its proponents] would admit that. Which is why I keep saying it’s a war. If you don’t understand that, you don’t know what the hell is going on.” CRITICAL RACE THEORY!!!![1]

Podhoretz’s family is a bunch of real winners too. There is of course his son John, who thanks to being the kind of NeverTrump elite that make Beltway centrists think this is a real constituency has received semi-positive press since 2016 but whose career is one of full-blown racism and right-wing hackery, such as comparing Richard Sherman to Al-Qaeda. Classy. John Podhoretz is a nepotism case so extreme, he makes Adam Bellow look like Cato the Younger. Sometimes the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, especially when that is the tree of racism and privilege. Meanwhile, his daughter Rachel married noted scumbag and war criminal Elliott Abrams.

Probably the best way to describe Podhoretz is simply as a massive, egotistical asshole who raised terrible children and made the world worse for existing. What a legacy!

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/norman-podhoretz-spiritual-war-for-america-conservatism-republican-trump-youngkin-carlson-11639149560?mod=opinion_lead_pos5