Decades passed; people died. But Norman Podhoretz is still alive. Retired from editing and writing, he lives on the Upper East Side with his wife. The last survivor of the New York Intellectuals is an iron advocate for Benjamin Netanyahu and, with him, Donald Trump; though his current age is 88, he may yet live to see another one of his beloved wars against the Muslim world. It is difficult to describe what his role has been over the years: certainly more than a handmaiden, certainly less than a shot-caller. A bellwether, most likely. Whose career exemplifies more clearly the earthly rewards of joining with imperial power, and whose desiccated mind more thoroughly demonstrates its intellectual cost? But then a bleak, suspicious corollary necessarily emerges—how many other blasted minds, on the lower frequencies, might he continue to speak for?
IV. The Intellectual Vitiation
Fascinating and repellent as it is, the tale of Norman Podhoretz and his ill-fated memoir of success would not deserve to be retold in this economy were there not powerful evidence that, in the half-century between its publication and republication, in spite of Podhoretz sequestering himself and his magazine within the frosty panic rooms of neoconservatism, the essential social processes and cultural logic of the world of liberal literary intellectuals outlined in Making It have churned on. As their original socialism yielded to the liberal hegemony of the quarter-century following 1945, the Family ascended into the American establishment: in turning away from the left, they had moved up. For their inheritors, making their way in a post-sixties conjuncture dominated by Nixon and Reagan, the equation still held, albeit on a different stretch of the ideological spectrum. Now safely ensconced within official citadels, they could prolong their rise by adjusting their policy prescriptions toward the right, or they could, by maintaining their liberal ideals, establish an opposition wing within the establishment.
In either case, their voices would carry. The New York Intellectuals may have been bought out in the Fifties and early Sixties, but they had hardly sold themselves cheaply. If the moderation of their politics had made the bargain possible, the prestige they had amassed over the course of an uncompromising campaign for superior intelligence and taste ensured that the reward for surrender would be colossal. Along with Edmund Wilson, they would become the founding fathers and mothers of a bright new world of national belles lettres: their writings and their legends would become the touchstones of America’s establishment of modern culture, a lavishly financed complex of foundations, publications, awards committees and humanities departments capable of maintaining, for the first time in history, equal standing with its venerable counterparts in Western Europe. Podhoretz arrived too late for this founding, but he got there early all the same: he was not an architect, but the first to marvel at the finished building—and the first to worry about the blueprint’s implications for himself.