Norman Podhoretz. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Norman Podhoretz. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
4,057 words
Nous laisserons le monde aussi sot et aussi méchant que nous l’avons trouvé.
We will leave this world as stupid and nasty as we found it when we came into it.
Voltaire, “Letter to Madame la Comtesse de Lutzelburg”
There was a recent post on The Unz Review by Jose Alberto Nino, End of an Era: Norman Podhoretz and the Much-to-be-Hoped-For Decline of Neoconservative Power.
Indeed, for the “much-to-be-hoped-for” part! Podhoretz, who died this past December at the age of 95, is widely acknowledged as the godfather of Neoconservatism. In his post, Nino makes note of Podhoretz’s “journey from the working class streets of Brooklyn to the commanding heights of American intellectual life [that] mirrored the broader fracturing of the American Left during the Cold War, when former progressives (including many Jewish Trotskyists, e.g. David Horowitz) found themselves “mugged by reality” and remade themselves as champions of military interventionism and unflinching support for Israel. (more…)