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Neoconservatism and Nepotism: John Podhoretz at Commentary

Prof. Nicholas Stix - 4/8/2009

In the history of the Jews in America, January 1, 2009 is a day which will live in infamy. For that was the day on which John Podhoretz took the reins as editor-in-chief of Commentary magazine.

When my Hungarian-born Nana, Fanny Frank Simpkins (1893?-1976) was alive, had anyone told her that one could sensibly modify the phrase “Jewish intellectual” with “mediocre,” she would have written him off as either an imbecile or a madman. Thank God, she is gone; were she alive to see what Commentary has come to, it would kill her.

According to E.B. White in This is New York, 60 years ago, New York City had 2,000,000 Jews. And from circa 1890-1950, it was as if New York’s factories were mass-producing brilliant Jews. Alas, the genius factories have all shut down.

The brothers Gershwin. Rodgers. Copland. Kern. Hart. Hammerstein. Sondheim. Where do we find their like today?

Back then, many of the greatest Jews had attended the Asphalt League City College of New York—CCNY—which circa 1915-1965 had the most rigorous admissions and graduation requirements of any American college, private or public. Others never made it to CCNY, but instead graduated from “UCLA: The university at the corner of Lenox Ave.” Today’s mediocrities have invariably graduated smugness cum laude from Overpriced Private Universities (OPUs) in the Ivy League or their OPU cousins (e.g., the University of Chicago, NYU).

In matters of intellect, most of the greatest Jewish intellectuals of yore—even when, as was often the case, they were socialists—including those who caused Commentary to once be considered in many quarters America’s leading intellectual journal, stood for excellence, and for meritocracy as the political principle that best fosters excellence. Indeed, Commentary could just as well have been called Meritocracy magazine, since that was its guiding political principle, and the guiding principle of the neoconservative movement, whose flagship journal it was. Nepotism is the corrupt enemy of the merit principle, and the bulwark of mediocrity.

Commentary has now made a 180-degree turn, and embraced nepotism and mediocrity.

In 1963, in “My Negro Problem—and Ours,” Norman Podhoretz, then a leading liberal, showed great courage in confronting, in Commentary’s pages, the black racism that he had known all his life. Over forty years later, with black racial terror having long since been institutionalized, his son’s response to anyone speaking honestly—even with restraint—on the subject of race, is to denounce him as “bigoted, racist scum.”

Today, when black-on-white violence is much more common than it was then, many white readers could easily top those stories with worse. And yet even today few of them would be willing to speak truthfully in public about their entirely rational fear of black violence and black crime. Telling the truth about blacks remains dangerous to one’s reputation: to use that now famous phrase I once appropriated from D.H. Lawrence in talking about ambition, the fear of blacks has become the dirty little secret of our political culture. And since a dirty little secret breeds hypocrisy and cant in those who harbor it, I suppose it can still be said that most whites are sick and twisted in their feelings about blacks, albeit in a very different sense that they were in 1963.