Word: podhoretzes
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...Norman Podhoretz calls it, with pardonable license, the "terror." No guillotine was set up in Greenwich Village, literary heads did not roll, but there were plenty of verbal executions in the late 1960s and early '70s when radical thought held sway in New York City and many other parts of the country as well. As the editor of Commentary and a leader of centrist opinion, Podhoretz was a prime target of the Manhattan Jacobins. In a book recapturing the impassioned polemics of the era in sometimes powerful and sometimes sluggish prose, he tells how he survived the literary pummeling...
...Podhoretz's retreat from radicalism takes the form of a letter to his son John...
Increasingly arrogant and authoritarian, they wanted to make over America in their image-or else. "I simply could not recognize the country I lived in," writes Podhoretz. "At their worst, they sounded like people writing about a place they themselves had never actually seen or at least hardly knew." Beneath the surface of these fulminations, he adds, "there flowed a steady current of moral smugness and self-satisfaction ... Everything was simplified into slogans for shouting and chanting." At the height of the demonstrations at Berkeley in 1964, Podhoretz realized he must make a choice between "loyalty to radicalism as against...
Still, fielding darts from captious intellectuals was not quite the equivalent of facing bullets or a mugger's knife. Why then, ponders Podhoretz, did so many liberals let themselves be intimidated? He devotes much of his book to searching for an explanation and concludes that intellectuals suffered a failure of nerve. When confronted, they would not fight for their beliefs, especially if the opposition came from the left, which was supposed to be on the side of justice and humanity. They would not defend the integrity of thought against crude up-against-the-wall sloganeering...
...Podhoretz refused to yield. He enlisted his Commentary contributors fo an all-out crusade: among them, Nathan Glazer, Pat Moynihan, Michael Novak, Dorothy Rabinowitz, Samuel McCracken, James Q. Wilson, Bayard Rustin, Joseph W. Bishop and Podhoretz's wife Midge Decter. With sharp logic and biting wit, they drew considerable blood as they assailed radicalism on all fronts: its elitism, coercive utopianism, contempt for the common American, penchant for Government intervention, tolerance of Communist totalitarianism and its fatuous call for revolution. Intellectually at any rate, they soon had their adversaries on the run; many of the most voluble leftists...