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movements-in the name of humanity and progress. Only overedu–
cated fools or left-wing propagandists deny these things. But this is
not all that Podhoretz is arguing. On the contrary, despite all his
professions of liberalism, he has swung so far
to
the right that many
of his views and those of
Commentary
are indistinguishable from
those of the
National Review.
One cannot recognize the young
Podhoretz, the exuberant, fun-loving, quizzical, dissident, wildly
curious, adventurous , skeptical Podhoretz in his earnest advocacy of
the staples of the American myth: the family, marriage, middle-class
mores, ambition, success, business, the average American, and, above
all, the system, the best of all possible systems. It is true that it is
fashionable in some circles to deride the family, marriage, the work
ethic, or the moral imperatives that hold society together. But the
piety with which Podhoretz recites the virtues or the ideals of
American life adds little to our sense of its complexities and its
problems, and sounds sometimes like the middle-class sermons in the
newspaper columns advising people how to live and love. To round
out his position, Podhoretz is against alienation, the Beats, Bohemi–
ans, hippies, affirmative action, the w;)men's movement, homosexu–
als, abortion. To be sure, there is no lack of nonsense on the political
and cultural left, but idealizing the norms of respectability is scarcely
an attractive or viable alternative-or one that solves anything.
So rosy is Podhoretz's picture of America, that one would never
suspect there is a considerable loss of vitality and ability
to
cope with
the problems of modern existence. That our system is an arena of
savagely competing interests is not evident in Podhoretz's scheme of
things . Nor that we have no coherent foreign policy; that urban life is
out of control; that our economy is running away from us; that the
country is enveloped in a combination of patriotism and fear that
American power is on the wane. One of the troubles with conservative
ideologies is that they do not recognize political reality. They simply
try to overpower it with rhetoric about our political and military
might.
Such is Podhoretz's credo at present. But even that could be
respected as an honest difference of opinion about the state of the
world if his account of his political development were less self–
righteous and more balanced. Thus he seems always to have been
right, always "ahead of his time." When he was a radical, it was
because of the failings of American society. As for Vietnam, he was
against it from the beginning. Unlike those bandwagon intellectuals
who rode the tides of opinion, he claims his opposition on political
