Word: podhoretzes
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TIME: "You were quoted as having said that you had read Norman Podhoretz's The Present Danger and thought it was a very important book. Is that accurate? Did you admire that book when it came...
Commentary (circ. 50,000). A publication sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, founded in 1945, this intellectual monthly has led at least three lives. It was liberal in the mid-'60s, then radical in the late-'60s. Since 1970, under Editor Norman Podhoretz, Commentary has espoused many conservative ideals such as a stronger defense posture and a permanent American military presence in the Persian Gulf...
...PODHORETZ DROPS NAMES, and not always affectionately. He hates the politically nerveless and the overly cynical, but lands heaviest on the intellectual hypocrites, attacking, for example, Lillian Hellman, whose book Scoundrel Time defended Stalin and his crimes, while disgracefully comparing the plight of Eastern European dissidents to the bogus martyrdom of those who, under congressional questioning, evasively pleaded the fifth...
...While Podhoretz concedes the detachment of the intellectuals from the immediate political arena, he underestimates the extent of their removal from everyday life. This insularity is evidence everywhere, even in the user of the word "Neoconservative." Although lay writers now bandy this word about freely, to intellectuals it bears a specific, non-literal, denotation. Thus, while Podhoretz is considered a Neoconservative by intellectuals, he remains a liberal to the public...
More importantly, Podhoretz' notion of the power of the ideas of intellectuals is illusory. As editor of Commentary, he believes the ideas will determine the political actions of his country by themselves. But ideas only truly take hold in a society if they represent a class or interest. We are not mobilized by ideas alone. The competition between intellectual magazines has little effect on general public opinion. Podhoretz' analysis underplays the spontaneity of political actions. If, as he submits, we act only when gripped by ideas, how can he explain the riots by blacks in Watts in the summer...