Latest / The Nation Podcasts / The Living Legacy of Norman Podhoretz w/ David Klion and Ronnie Grinberg | The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer

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The Living Legacy of Norman Podhoretz w/ David Klion and Ronnie Grinberg | The Time of Monsters with Jeet Heer · The Nation Podcasts

0:01
[SPEAKER_00]: The old world is dying, the new world struggles to be born, now is the time of monsters.
0:06
[SPEAKER_00]: With those words, roughly paraphrase from Gromsheet, I welcome you to the time of monsters podcast.
0:12
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Geet here of the nation magazine, which is the sponsor of this podcast.
0:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Today, I want to talk about someone who I think can be regarded as one of the major monsters of the last century, but a fascinating monster, a monster of this intrigued many people and whose life story is truly the stuff of legend, I'm talking about the late Norman Padrots.
0:35
[SPEAKER_00]: who died at a venerable age of 95 earlier this week and who's storied career starting off as a young literary critic at the site full of the Great Lionel Trilling and a member of the famed New York intellectuals and then becoming himself the editor of commentary
0:54
[SPEAKER_00]: and taking the magazine in the late 60s and early 70s sharply to the right and forming the powerful ideology of neoconservativeism.
1:02
[SPEAKER_00]: This is like a story that's often told, often told by potters himself.
1:06
[SPEAKER_00]: It wasn't in rhetoric, right, or of them, wars.
1:09
[SPEAKER_00]: But it is a story that still has a lasting meaning.
1:13
[SPEAKER_00]: And to talk about it, I'm very grateful to have on to friends of the pod, to have really delve deeply into the career of Norman potters and the world he made.
1:24
[SPEAKER_00]: One is Ronnie Grimberg, who's the author of a book called Right Like a Man, which is about the New Archintellectuals and masculinity, to subjects that are very tied to potterits.
1:35
[SPEAKER_00]: And the other is David Clion, who's working on a history of neoconservativeism, and who are in the victory of Norman Potterits for the nation.
1:43
[SPEAKER_00]: So first of all, thanks for being on the program.
1:45
[SPEAKER_02]: always great to be here.
1:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for having us.
1:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so maybe like just a, I think many listeners will know who never thought it is, but I just wanted to, and I've given a brief kind of sketch, but like Ronnie, like if you have like, you know, we're in an elevator or someone who said like, I heard Norman Father's side who the hell was he, what, what would be your, your quick description that you could get on before the elevator door opens.
2:11
[SPEAKER_01]: All right, Norman Podharts was one of the youngest of the New York intellectuals.
2:15
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm seeing people refer to his death, the sort of the last of the New York intellectuals are finally gone.
2:21
[SPEAKER_01]: He was born in 1930, I believe.
2:23
[SPEAKER_01]: He goes to Columbia University after World War II, studies with Lionel Trilling.
2:27
[SPEAKER_01]: He sort of first part of that generation where schools are opening up, though there was still a quota, but schools are opening up to Jews.
2:34
[SPEAKER_01]: And there he becomes familiar with the New York intellectuals and it becomes sort of his goal to be part of that.
2:40
[SPEAKER_01]: group, they weren't then known as the New York intellectuals, they were kind of known as the partisan review crowd, and he goes and studies in England, he serves in Germany during the Korean War, comes back, works at commentary, as an assistant editor, there's a protracted battle in 1959 after the editor of commentary, Eliya Cohen dies for who becomes editor, and it's actually interesting, it's with Clement Greenberg, I think, or Martin Greenberg,
3:08
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, and well, no, the two, the two groups were kind of like an inner alliance against father.
3:14
[SPEAKER_01]: They were, they were, and Norman ends up emerging victorious, and by age 30, he is the editor of commentary, and according to his version of events.
3:24
[SPEAKER_01]: He brings, he pushes the magazine leftwards, embracing kind of the zeitgeist of the new left.
3:30
[SPEAKER_01]: I think somewhere in his writing, he even refers to him as like the forefather of the new left, which we can talk about that, which is absurd.
3:38
[SPEAKER_01]: But he publishes Paul Goodman as like the to the opening group, an excerpt from growing up absurd, which like announces this new commentary that's no longer tied to kind of the old Cold War liberalism, our hard communism of the
3:52
[SPEAKER_01]: commentary of the 50s.
3:54
[SPEAKER_01]: And then, according to his narrative, it's in the late 60s and response to what he sees as the anti-Americanism of the new left, the violence they associated with black power, feminism, though he says less about feminism than his wife mid-dector.
4:08
[SPEAKER_01]: He moves the magazine right words and embraces what becomes Neo Conservatism.
4:13
[SPEAKER_01]: I always tell my students, NeoCon, you know, it refers to new Conservatives, meaning they
4:19
[SPEAKER_01]: or liberal and shifted right words.
4:23
[SPEAKER_01]: And then he becomes kind of in constant the Reagan victory in 1980 and part of the conservative establishment.
4:30
[SPEAKER_01]: And he was always anti-communist.
4:33
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's part of the politics, but at least according to kind of the traditional narrative, his conservatism and is initially a reaction to domestic politics, though Israel is central.
4:42
[SPEAKER_01]: So this happens after the 1967 war, and maybe that's the early history.
4:49
[SPEAKER_01]: David can talk more about the later history and kind of the neocons of foreign policy in the Iraq war.
4:55
[SPEAKER_01]: I have a lot more to say but you said brief elevator pitch and I heard he probably might be on that.
5:00
[SPEAKER_02]: That was a long elevator
5:03
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not a journalist.
5:05
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm an academic, you know, yeah, I don't know.
5:09
[SPEAKER_00]: That's for me.
5:10
[SPEAKER_00]: That gives us a great grounding into who he was.
5:13
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a few points I want to pick up, which I think David might feel to clarify.
5:17
[SPEAKER_00]: What is this little old self presentation that he had?
5:19
[SPEAKER_00]: that you, as you said, he played to be the father of the new lab and had this leftist period.
5:24
[SPEAKER_00]: And I got to say this real, always been reasons to be skeptical about how new lab commentary ever was.
5:32
[SPEAKER_00]: There was a great review of his first memoir, making it by the writer Willford
5:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Father, it's what it describes himself as a liberal or maybe even a leftist and and sheet basically says in that review that his leftism is all talk and talk is cheap and that if you actually look at the basic attitudes that powder it has, he's no different than an Anne Rand.
5:58
[SPEAKER_00]: And I thought that was very significant because, you know, that's coming at a period where pirates and people around them saw him as being part of the liberal establishment.
6:07
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think some of them were discerning people already knew.
6:10
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that David, this is where I think you can come in, especially with your upcoming book.
6:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Because I think one of the things about the neoconservatives is that this mythology of the move of left to right occludes the fact that many of them were on older generation that had been
6:26
[SPEAKER_00]: that have been involved with the anti-stoundal stuff and the battles over Trotsky and Stalin, but that the younger Neo Conservatives or the younger New York intellectuals really came out of the world of Cold War liberalism.
6:38
[SPEAKER_00]: And that potterist, if you were to define his ideological trajectory, for my point of view, he was, you know, started as a Cold War liberal and that there were a lot of aspects of Cold War liberalism that were already very conservative, especially on issues of gender.
6:54
[SPEAKER_00]: But I wanted to get the David to come in on this.
6:57
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so I agree with that basic characterization.
7:00
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that Pardharch should be understood.
7:03
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, his really his closest contemporary of the sort of canonical partisan review New York intellectuals was Susan Sontag, who obviously went in a very different direction politically.
7:14
[SPEAKER_02]: though they did know each other, but yeah, little in joke there for a very small circle of people, but you know, they were both, I think, too young to have really cared about the major fights that partisan review was born out of, which were the fights over Stalin.
7:32
[SPEAKER_02]: verse trotsky in the thirties.
7:33
[SPEAKER_02]: You know the partisan review had been founded originally as a communist party affiliated journal and then the two founders William Phillips and Philip Rav broke away from from the John Reed clubs and took it in the new direction two years later embracing the the avant guard and and basically becoming a trotskyist.
7:55
[SPEAKER_02]: semi-trotskyist publication, and they gradually evolved by the post-war years into something more recognizable as Cold War liberalism.
8:03
[SPEAKER_02]: But the other foundational figures in what's thought of his neoconservatism, a few decades later, and above all, or Vincristol, who is usually mentioned alongside Norman Pethor, it says that as the sort of crucial foundational neoconservative,
8:24
[SPEAKER_02]: what really distinguishes them from other people who got called neoconservatives like Daniel Bell or Daniel Patrick Moynihan at the time was that they said, yeah, we're neoconservative, sure.
8:33
[SPEAKER_02]: Everyone else was like, no, we're liberals who were abandoned by the left.
8:37
[SPEAKER_02]: Don't call us conservatives, you know, Bell kept voting for Democrats.
8:41
[SPEAKER_02]: But Crystal and Pettahart said, sure, we're conservatives now.
8:44
[SPEAKER_02]: But there's a really interesting contrast between those two anyway, if we accept them as the canonical founders of neoconservatism.
8:54
[SPEAKER_02]: and he was a young trot skist, at least briefly, recruited by none other than Irving Howe.
9:00
[SPEAKER_01]: Sidney Hook, Irving Howe, Irving Howe, Irving Howe, Irving Howe, I'm getting close.
9:03
[SPEAKER_02]: Irving Howe, recruited him to, yep, so I think.
9:07
[SPEAKER_01]: That's right, I was confusing with Lionel Trilling.
9:10
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, but certainly how is is obviously in the picture too, and he went to city college famously, you know, the whole story about the feuding out of one that was that was Trotsky a Stanti Stalinist and the large rock of two that was Stalinist.
9:25
[SPEAKER_02]: and the intellectual fights that Ronnie portrays so well in her book, none of that has anything to do with Norman Petharitz.
9:32
[SPEAKER_02]: And if you watch the wonderful documentary arguing the world, which covers the trajectory of four of the city college boys, including her being crystal and her being how.
9:41
[SPEAKER_02]: Put hard, it appears once briefly.
9:43
[SPEAKER_02]: He is not one of the main subjects.
9:45
[SPEAKER_02]: He's 10 years younger, he goes directly to Columbia, and while there were other Jews at Columbia, as Ronnie says at the time, it was for the Gentile and Daniel Bell's recollection.
9:55
[SPEAKER_02]: He went to City College, but he would teach their later at Columbia.
9:59
[SPEAKER_02]: But Horowitz was this kind of glaring exception.
10:01
[SPEAKER_02]: He wasn't the only Jew at Columbia, but he was in the mid-40s.
10:07
[SPEAKER_02]: But he was one of the only ones who was like a kind of Yiddish slump child in his own, he wasn't one of these uptown Germans or one of these more derasinated middle-class second-generation Jews in the mold of a Lionel or Diana Trilling.
10:23
[SPEAKER_02]: He wasn't like that.
10:24
[SPEAKER_01]: And he studied a JTS, too, right, of Jill?
10:26
[SPEAKER_02]: He also studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary at his Galician immigrant father's insistence.
10:32
[SPEAKER_02]: He knew he grew.
10:33
[SPEAKER_02]: So he was a real fish out of water, but Lionel Trilling mentored him and kind of brought him into this world of the New York intellectuals.
10:42
[SPEAKER_02]: And this is all to say that his ideological grounding, I think was always very shallow.
10:48
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that when you read making it, the best first and most,
10:54
[SPEAKER_02]: in hindsight, interesting of his memoirs, you know, this was not a guy who ever cared about doctrinal debates.
11:00
[SPEAKER_02]: He wasn't part of any kind of organized left politics in the way that Crystal and his cohort and Delaware.
11:05
[SPEAKER_02]: He basically fell into the partisan review scene because he was this smart, ambitious kid and Trilling was his gateway into it, and he wanted to impress people with his big brains and his literary prestige.
11:18
[SPEAKER_02]: and he had this trip on his shoulder about where he came from.
11:21
[SPEAKER_02]: And everything with Norman, I think, is best understood in these kind of visceral terms.
11:27
[SPEAKER_02]: This is kind of like he's a personality and a self-mathologizer first and foremost.
11:33
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, he making it is this kind of
11:39
[SPEAKER_02]: gloriously, interestingly failed attempt in 1967, his first real book to turn himself into this kind of like her issue, I'll sure figure, but in the process reveal the kind of dirty, unspoken truths of the New York intellectual scene he's broken into.
11:55
[SPEAKER_02]: He has this wonderful metaphor in it that still holds up in today's New York literary scene I think about, you know, the kind of invisible stock market that keeps track of everyone's reputations in that world and, you know, you're up a point if you were at this dinner party and down a point if you weren't invited to that one.
12:12
[SPEAKER_02]: And that was how he saw the world.
12:14
[SPEAKER_02]: What makes it compelling, I did a whole, know your enemy episode a few years ago about this exact topic with our friend Sam Adler Bell and Matt Sittman, what makes it compelling is that we're all self-aware enough to admit that there was some truth to this, not just in the in the 60s, but today and in probably any
12:32
[SPEAKER_02]: literary or writerly scene that's ever existed or creative scene that's ever existed people are a hungry for status they're hungry for some degree of material success they want to be seen as like the the next exciting thing and this does mode you know they want to be invited to the right parties.
12:49
[SPEAKER_02]: And they're obsessed with gossip about each other and and Norman, I think thought he was saying something really groundbreaking and he kind of was But he but he was but not only did it offend the sensibilities of everyone around him He also and it makes for very entertaining reading throughout cast himself consistently as just like the greatest
13:12
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, boy who's ever lived the smartest student in every class.
13:15
[SPEAKER_02]: He talks about how he wasn't just getting A's at Columbia.
13:18
[SPEAKER_02]: He was getting A pluses and that's that's why everyone hated him and not because he was of noxious which he clearly was and which just kind of like he's he's kind of an unreliable narrator and so the result is like
13:32
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, he, I mean, Daniel Bell and Lionel Trelling and all his other mentors basically told him don't publish this for in the manuscript.
13:39
[SPEAKER_02]: His first publisher, I think Roger Strauss, abandoned debt.
13:42
[SPEAKER_02]: It went to, where did it go?
13:44
[SPEAKER_02]: Penguin Random House, I forget, anyway.
13:47
[SPEAKER_00]: He, he, not Penguin Random House, I just ran to him.
13:50
[SPEAKER_02]: But, ran to him.
13:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, they were separate.
13:52
[SPEAKER_02]: Right, just ran to him, I was sorry, right?
13:54
[SPEAKER_02]: I should know that since being published by a version of that.
14:02
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, he humiliated himself, took to drink, you know, this, this almost, it's hard to prove, but it almost certainly accelerated this right word trajectory reacting.
14:12
[SPEAKER_02]: It's the culture, but I think a huge amount of that wasn't just his racism, misogyny homophobia or anti-Europe sentiment in the wake of the 67 war, all of which was clearly in the mix and none of which I doubt was sincere.
14:26
[SPEAKER_02]: But I think a lot of it was he really believed that he had made it.
14:33
[SPEAKER_02]: He had become this huge hit on the upper west side liberal intellectual scene.
14:38
[SPEAKER_02]: And then they all made fun of him.
14:41
[SPEAKER_02]: And in hindsight, knowing social dynamics, you have to assume they all always kind of thought he was a vulgarian and always thought he was a little too big for his bridges.
14:50
[SPEAKER_02]: And making it was just like he was giving them permission to finally say what they really thought.
14:56
[SPEAKER_02]: In contemporary terms, first of all, just as a fascinating figure that, like, reader after reader discovers and, you know, without politically agreeing with him at all, just becomes totally taken with, you know, Ben Moser and lots of, like, everyone who discovers him just gets weirdly obsessed with him.
15:12
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm always telling writers, I know, who have no particular interest in the neocons and the art intellect, full of, they've got to read making it.
15:19
[SPEAKER_02]: To sort of, like, understand these,
15:25
[SPEAKER_02]: But I also think, and this is kind of how I situate him in my obit, I see him as this kind of bridging figure between the much revered, much romanticized and loosely fascinating world of the mid-century New York intellectuals, which clearly was part of and passed through and was
15:52
[SPEAKER_02]: attention-seeking hyperbolic influencers often on the right who, you know, are kind of crude and vulgar and played at the lowest common denominator, and they're kind of train-rec personalities are part of their whole appeal, and we could name dozens of such figures, some of whom are closer to put arts than others, but I really feel like he bridged those two worlds in a singular way that goes to the heart of his persona.
16:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Can I bring one more connection today, which you guys might know better, but when I think of the making fun and how he was laughed at and if we can't prove that that was part of the conservative turn, but he does drink to drinking.
16:28
[SPEAKER_01]: I also think of that moment when Obama made fun of Trump at the White House Correspondence dinner, and we can talk later about Trump, but something about being made fun of the Manhattan Literature, the insiders that you really wanna be a part of that like, this really shaped both of those figures.
16:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, no, I think that's exactly right.
16:48
[SPEAKER_00]: I actually would, I think I'd be less shy than either of you in terms of, like, saying that making it, the reception of making it the scandal around it was the formative event as much as the six day war, like I actually think.
17:03
[SPEAKER_00]: that, you know, like, you know, or the Vietnam War or anything.
17:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, I actually think, just based on that book, he's someone who really cares about his reputation and how he's status in the world.
17:15
[SPEAKER_00]: And the reception is a little bit, to me, it's a very bit interesting because on the one hand, I understand like all the negative reviews it received because the personality that comes through in the book is very abrasive and off-putting.
17:27
[SPEAKER_00]: On the other hand, I was like, I, that I read making it when I was like, yeah, when I was a teenager, like I always loved it, like I was like, this is like, you know, this has the same validity that when gets from the sort of candid memoirs that like where the person really embarrasses themselves.
17:43
[SPEAKER_00]: And really, like, puts their worst personal aspects of their life, the sort of confessional, I'm out compared to the confessional fiction of Philip Roth or the poetry of Robert Lowell or Sylvia Plot.
17:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, you're not supposed to put these things into writing, but what someone does, it's actually like really brave and you're actually entering a truth in the world.
18:07
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I get kind of see, I mean, I love, this is the one where I'm, I think, I love a sympathetic to the number of patterns because like you can see where like he, you know, like he had seen the success of Norman Mailer writing advertising advertisements for myself, like seeing that, you know, that sort of bravardo and like, you know, putting yourself out was being rewarded.
18:27
[SPEAKER_00]: In the case of his very good friend at the time remember in the other and he says, I'm gonna do this a thing and like they all reacted very badly to that I think that's like a huge trauma which also like in very interesting ways it filters how he sees everything else So when the bell curve came out and there's a big reaction Norman father.
18:46
[SPEAKER_00]: It's right You know, I've never seen a book so unfairly treated since making it Which is incredibly Trumpy and move right every everything is immediately about how he was the degree
18:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but the prism of and what Ronnie, I want to think of on Ronnie's Trump thing because they wanted a great profiles of Donald Trump was written by President of the Atlantic by McKay Coppin, talking about Trump was the, you know, the boy from Queens whose family had like made money, but when they went to Manhattan and they met up with these all these old money families, like they were, you know, like couldn't get respect.
19:22
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, like Trump had access to the clubs, but there's something where he's like always an outsider, and he knew his always an outsider, and the sort of driving resentment of Trump, which he's turned into a political movement, came from that sense of, like, you can rise economically
19:40
[SPEAKER_00]: You can even, like, enter into the social space of these worlds, but there is a cultured world that, like, will never fully accept you, that will never assimilate you, and where you're always going to be seen as a bit of an outsider.
19:53
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that that is the sort of, you know, the Queen's boy and the boy from Brownsville, you know, like entering into that Manhattan cultural universe, I think that is the link of Trump's politics with podcasts and politics.
20:08
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, a hundred, I mean, a lot of two things.
20:11
[SPEAKER_01]: One, pod or I mean, you know, and I don't know when the last time pod horror, it's, um, gave an interview David, you might know better.
20:16
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I know there was something in the free press recently.
20:19
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, he wrote it.
20:20
[SPEAKER_01]: I might have been the last one.
20:21
[SPEAKER_02]: He wrote, it wasn't an interview.
20:22
[SPEAKER_02]: It was like, uh, uh, a re-counting of his life.
20:25
[SPEAKER_02]: The, it was a, oh, yeah, bylined, like, mini version of making it at the end of his life physically.
20:31
[SPEAKER_01]: But before that in 2019, he gave an interview with the Claremont Institute, and I don't know what came between 2019 and that 25.
20:38
[SPEAKER_01]: But basically, where he says, you know, I first didn't like Trump, because basically he struck me as like a native visse of Buchananite.
20:45
[SPEAKER_01]: He was critical of the Neocons.
20:47
[SPEAKER_01]: But then I ultimately came to like him because he fights back.
20:50
[SPEAKER_01]: He's not a sissy using his favorite word going back to my Negro problem in ours, which is published in 1963, right, which kind of puts Norman first,
21:00
[SPEAKER_01]: I guess on the map and some, well, he had written stuff before, but that essay makes a big splash.
21:04
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think there is something there, and then the other thing I just want to know with making it too, and that with, you know, pod hordes doesn't write very much between 1960 and 67.
21:14
[SPEAKER_01]: There's the essay for my Negro problem in ours in 63, but aside from that, he's working on the memoir.
21:19
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, you know, there's a bit of an absence in terms of what he's really thinking in the 60s, until 67 and after that are related to this.
21:27
[SPEAKER_01]: But I'm going to pass over to David, I think.
21:29
[SPEAKER_02]: You know him more for his editorial sensibility in this years, although he did write one of the attacks on Honour Honour and that's right.
21:39
[SPEAKER_01]: He did you're right.
21:40
[SPEAKER_02]: He attended their friendship But he had a real another fun thing about Norman is he had a real gift for ending friendships
21:47
[SPEAKER_02]: to the point where his third of his fourth of his four memoirs is called X-Franz, and his him recounting the various friendships he ruined, which would be a funny thing to recount.
21:57
[SPEAKER_02]: If you were anyone, but in Norman's case, these are with like a long list of the most, you know, influential, cultural and intellectual figures of the 20th century, who he's just burned, you know, Alan Ginsberg, Lillian Hellman, the Drillian.
22:10
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm trailing, yeah.
22:11
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
22:11
[SPEAKER_02]: Like James Baldwin, Hannah,
22:14
[SPEAKER_02]: the guy really knew how to burn a bridge, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and which might, you know, partly explain why you've noted G that he seems that the morning of him seems a little bit muted.
22:28
[SPEAKER_02]: We're only about 24 hours into it.
22:34
[SPEAKER_02]: There was a long, polite New York Times editorial that
22:37
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, a bit of a reality that was clearly pre-written and had quotes from Jacob Howebrun, the historian of the Neocons.
22:44
[SPEAKER_02]: There was my piece, which I'm trying to think if anyone else on the left has yet, maybe there isn't, I just haven't seen it yet, has published a kind of critical a bit of him in the last 24 hours.
22:55
[SPEAKER_02]: Probably one will come, but I feel like I kind of got the jump on that.
22:58
[SPEAKER_02]: Bill Christoll did a little remembrance for him in the ballwork, which was interesting.
23:03
[SPEAKER_02]: Bill is, you know,
23:05
[SPEAKER_02]: famously a nice guy who doesn't really hold grudges very much on like the put hearts is, and I mean all of them, I mean Norman, his son, John, and his late wife, midstector, all famous grudge holders, and kind of combative people and the crystals are very different from that, which is something I'll get into in the book.
23:26
[SPEAKER_02]: But Bill, he wrote a kind of nice remembrance of going to pass over sayators or sobout dinners with him or something.
23:32
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, and he kind of stayed away from the ideology because, you know, Bill is very representative of, of, of, of general phenomenon among second generation neocons.
23:43
[SPEAKER_02]: You can also see with Robert Cagan or David from, or, uh, you know, Max Boo, Jennifer Rubin, a lot of other people, where they, when they moved against Trump in 2016 when they became kind of early never trumpers, they really meant it.
24:02
[SPEAKER_02]: some of his foreign policy statements, but, you know, Kagan has written extensively about how he thinks that Trump is a, you know, threat to American democracy, basically, and I don't doubt his sincerity at all, whatever else you might think about Robert Kagan or, you know, things he's done in the past.
24:18
[SPEAKER_02]: Norman really, and then the older generation, you know, erving crest all and everyone are all dead, well before Trump came to power.
24:27
[SPEAKER_02]: But Norman is really distinguished among the canonical early neocons for having come fully around to Trump.
24:34
[SPEAKER_02]: I do think he gave a subsequent interview with the Claremont 1, maybe in the Wall Street Journal or somewhere,
24:39
[SPEAKER_02]: He was full-throated tromper by 2020 and actually after 2021 with January 6 he was like fine with that too.
24:48
[SPEAKER_02]: So he really went over to that side in a way none of these guys did.
24:52
[SPEAKER_02]: And so for Bill to remember him, I mean he's kind of being tactful, not speaking ill of the dead, in noting that for the last roughly
25:01
[SPEAKER_02]: almost decade, he and Norman have really been on opposite sides of American politics, you know, in a really dramatic way.
25:08
[SPEAKER_02]: And you know, maybe you could write that off as well, Norman's old and he hasn't, you know, he hasn't had a job since 1995 and he hasn't written a book since like 2009 or something.
25:20
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, maybe it doesn't matter what he thinks.
25:22
[SPEAKER_02]: He's just given some lucid interviews.
25:24
[SPEAKER_02]: But I think that it's not some wild departure that he ended up supporting Trump.
25:31
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that if you consider his sort of, as I was saying earlier, his kind of ideological and intellectual, not intellectual, he wasn't intellectual, but his ideological chaloneses.
25:43
[SPEAKER_02]: and how his real commitments were in this kind of like permanently aggrieved, outer borough, grudge holding a fronted masculinity thing he was doing.
25:54
[SPEAKER_02]: And you sort of see everything through that lens, it makes perfect sense he would end up as a trumper.
25:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I don't know, I think that's right.
26:02
[SPEAKER_00]: There's two things I went on under at a score there.
26:04
[SPEAKER_00]: One of which is that, and this goes to speaks to how he was not quite an intellectual in the way that his mentors like Lionel Trilling were, or even the way that someone like Gricur Himo far was, that he was much more partisan in his politics and that he and mid-ductor of all the mealkons and their son-in-law, Elliott Abrams, they really joined their Republican party and they really integrated into the conservative movement
26:28
[SPEAKER_00]: that was aligned with the Republican Party.
26:31
[SPEAKER_00]: And I don't think that's quite true of like all the other Neocons who I think have like sort of intellectual and political commitments, and we're willing to shift from Republican to Democrat depending on where they stood.
26:43
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think the partisanship is one aspect of this.
26:47
[SPEAKER_00]: But the other thing is something to pick up on something Roni had said earlier, the idea of like fighting back, not being a sissy.
26:55
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is I think a crucial part of the
26:57
[SPEAKER_00]: You'll considerism of Norman Potter and his late-life mid-dector that I think doesn't get enough attention which I think Ronnie's work in particular is very good at highlighting, which is the gender politics.
27:09
[SPEAKER_00]: That is sort of, you know, these are people who came of age in the post-war period in late-40s, early-50s.
27:16
[SPEAKER_00]: When there really was a gender backlash against the achievements that women had made in the workplace during World War II, and there was a real push for a return to domesticity women in the home place, and that was something that was shared broadly in the culture.
27:31
[SPEAKER_00]: You see it not just in sort of like, you know, conservatives, religious evangelicals, but among like liberals, like you can see this in the writings of an Arthur slushinger.
27:40
[SPEAKER_00]: And you certainly see it in like the sort of Cold War Liberals, like Norman Potters and Midgetekter.
27:46
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that their turn to the right had many different causes.
27:50
[SPEAKER_00]: But one was a real anger at the sort of new wave of feminism that emerged in the 60s.
27:57
[SPEAKER_00]: And then also the rise of gay liberation, the broader.
28:01
[SPEAKER_00]: challenges to heteroinormative politics.
28:05
[SPEAKER_00]: And for someone like Potter, it's in particular the idea of like being that there's distinct sexual dichotomy between men and women that men have a particular sexuality, a particular role is very important and that he's like great was greatly affronted.
28:20
[SPEAKER_00]: by the gay rights movement, most scandalously, like writing during the AIDS crisis that, you know, he was opposed to spending money to find a cure for AIDS because this would only allow gay men to keep buggering each other with impunity.
28:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Those are his words.
28:34
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think that, I think this is a crucial part of the serve-deccare products, all things, but I don't want to like get Ronnie thoughts on this, like the role of gender and gender conservatism.
28:45
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I mean, clearly it's a central thread in my book.
28:48
[SPEAKER_01]: So thanks for the shout out.
28:50
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that if you read pot horror, it's end-dector in tandem.
28:54
[SPEAKER_01]: You see that dector actually merges as this protector of what becomes a family value politics before that term even emerges.
29:01
[SPEAKER_01]: and this defense of kind of a heterosexual nuclear family.
29:06
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, of course, like Phyllis Schlaffley and other conservatives, Dr. herself didn't fit into the confines of the ideal that she in some ways wrote so much to
29:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Defend, you know, she was a divorcee.
29:18
[SPEAKER_01]: She divorced Moshe dector before she marries Norman in 1952.
29:23
[SPEAKER_01]: She worked her entire career.
29:25
[SPEAKER_01]: She's actually a college dropout.
29:26
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, she's a very gifted writer.
29:27
[SPEAKER_01]: So she's this like, you know, and Phyllis Loughley was a similar type of thing.
29:32
[SPEAKER_01]: Critical feminists, yet in many ways, you could look at them and be like, you are quintessential feminists in terms of how you are in the public sphere.
29:39
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, this is what feminists are fighting for.
29:41
[SPEAKER_01]: So,
29:41
[SPEAKER_01]: But, Dr. has, you know, that interesting strain, you know, that goes all the way through and so I say one family values emerges and some of the members of the paleocons or traditionalist conservatives are kind of who might carry an anti-Semitic strain are kind of skeptical of these these former New Deal liberal Jews.
30:00
[SPEAKER_01]: who are becoming conservative, dectors writings help kind of a swage that because she's been sort of saying what they were saying all along, except coming, I, you know, I make the argument in the book that her ideas are shaped by kind of revisionist or neo-froydianism, whereas the family values discourse of the new writers more based on evangelical Christianity or what have you.
30:21
[SPEAKER_01]: But Podhord's too, he's obsessed with gender from the very beginning of his career.
30:27
[SPEAKER_01]: And you know, when you read my Negro problem and ours,
30:30
[SPEAKER_01]: which is supposed to come at the high tide of his supposed shift, you know, left words with commentary.
30:37
[SPEAKER_01]: There's this anxiety, specifically about Jewish masculinity, about being called a sissy.
30:42
[SPEAKER_01]: That's the language he uses.
30:44
[SPEAKER_01]: And he says, you know, when I was growing up in Brownsville, the blacks had it better, because they were actually masculine.
30:49
[SPEAKER_01]: They were beautiful, enviable tough.
30:51
[SPEAKER_01]: right and then in making it to its filled with gender I mean when I read at the line that I you know you know he compares writing to having an erection and being able to get it up and you know I mean that's I'm not I'm not exaggerating that's the exact language as I recall it says that masturbation is the is the cure for writers block that's right exactly
31:13
[SPEAKER_01]: And I, you know, I make an argument in my book that, you know, that, um, for that, for this group of intellectuals, you know, writing was how they express their masculinity and there's all sorts of roots for that, it comes from their, you know, Jewish backgrounds and, but it emerges with other things in the United States and put her it's a sort of a key example.
31:29
[SPEAKER_01]: And now I don't know if I answered your question, but that I think that the gender, oh,
31:32
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, all right, and then when we think about the cold, you know, like you were saying, people like Arthur Slesinger, Jr., all sorts of cold world liberals are recasting liberalism in the early 50s as kind of like a manly ideology, capable of taking on the Soviet Union.
31:47
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think, you know,
31:48
[SPEAKER_01]: Tough liberalism, right, this heart and soft dichotomy, right?
31:52
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you, I mean, scholars have done really good work on kind of, when you think about gender, you see gender everywhere.
31:58
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think for the neocons, they, you know, they become the hardest of the anti-communist.
32:02
[SPEAKER_01]: And then when the cold war ends, that kind of toughness, that's masculinized stretches to the war on terror for sure.
32:09
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, Podhord's links the domestic, sorry, and the international, and a really fascinating article that appears in,
32:15
[SPEAKER_01]: Harper's, and I think 79, the culture of appeasement, which is about how the United of the Foreign Policy liberal establishment has failed and is appeasing, but he goes back and sort of finds roots in homosexual writers.
32:29
[SPEAKER_01]: As the downfall of like American civilization in foreign policy, and he makes these like bizarre comparisons to the inner war period and British homosexual writers, and David might be able to add more because
32:40
[SPEAKER_01]: But, you know, so this like gender thing is that that links the domestic and the foreign and it also like puts the homophobia front and center which I've never really been able to sort of fully explain the extent of their like what, I have like, you know, theories that I probably won't share because they're not, they're not proven or anything, but where the home, the deep homophobia that Mitch and Norman share, where that actually comes from.
33:05
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I have, I have one, I think.
33:09
[SPEAKER_02]: like not in polite theory for where it comes from, which is that like, you know, this is from a somewhat earlier era, but like if you read the book, gay New York, which I did many years ago.
33:20
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, yeah, it's George Shonsi.
33:21
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, great book.
33:23
[SPEAKER_02]: And as I recall, one of the central arguments of it is that homosexuality,
33:30
[SPEAKER_02]: though, you know, rarely acknowledged as such, kind of flourished at both the top and the bottom of the social spectrum.
33:37
[SPEAKER_02]: It was like, there was, there was a lot of, it was mostly talking about gay male sexuality, but there was a sort of confirmed bachelor culture among the upper crust, you know, that the sort of uptown, like old money scene.
33:52
[SPEAKER_02]: And then there was, in the kind of downtown Bowery scene or in Harlem, there were,
33:59
[SPEAKER_02]: black or white ethnic queer cultures.
34:02
[SPEAKER_02]: And there was sometimes cross-pollination between those two worlds, if someone uptown went slumming down town or in Harlem.
34:09
[SPEAKER_02]: But the, what turned homophobia into a kind of like organized political backlash was the emergence of a kind of solid middle class, which wanted, you know, respectable bourgeois norms.
34:22
[SPEAKER_02]: And he's talking more in like the late 19th or early 20th century.
34:27
[SPEAKER_02]: that the neocons in some ways, Harkin' back to that, I mean, on the crystal, Himmelfarb's side, you know, Gertred Himmelfarb, Irving Crystal's wife, was a historian of Victorian England and its morality and wrote book after book in her lighter career, kind of promulgating Victorian morality, and you can see those themes running through her husband and her son Bills earlier work, and just kind of his general worldview, a world of kind of,
34:56
[SPEAKER_02]: like civilized bourgeois propriety.
34:58
[SPEAKER_02]: It's why they hate Trump so much.
35:00
[SPEAKER_02]: But you can see it.
35:01
[SPEAKER_02]: I think in, you know, Norman also had his encounter with with Britain, although there's a lot to say about that that I don't think we have time for, but it is messier than it might seem at first.
35:11
[SPEAKER_02]: But I think that, you know, he and Mitch both become these kind of defenders of like what's wrong with the average American middle class, you know, that the barbarians of the new left who are often portrayed is kind of like
35:25
[SPEAKER_02]: privilege, trust funders, you know, want to destroy.
35:27
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think homosexuality is very tied up in that, you know, with, with Mitch's fear of like the boys on the beach.
35:34
[SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, as a casting gay man is kind of like perpetual adolescence who can't grow up and take responsibility and get married and have kids.
35:43
[SPEAKER_02]: There's, yeah, it's the ideological commitment they made.
35:48
[SPEAKER_02]: And say what you will about the punk hordes is they, they certainly were devoted to their rather large family,
35:54
[SPEAKER_02]: Mitch and Norman have two kids, but Norman essentially adopted Mitch's two daughters from a previous marriage, and they have many grandkids between them.
36:04
[SPEAKER_02]: It was, I think, one of them.
36:05
[SPEAKER_00]: I huge number of whom work for commentary magazine.
36:09
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, yeah, I think I think the one of the older daughters that isn't actually Norman's biological daughter is the one who married Elliot Abrams.
36:17
[SPEAKER_02]: And on that note,
36:18
[SPEAKER_02]: And on that note, with Elliott Abrams and with another figure, very wise, we've alluded to, I do think while we still have time, I want to talk a little about Norman's legacy.
36:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
36:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, I mean, yeah, because we did mention the, the Wayne Witch's like, the legacy has shrunk to a certain degree, because of the changes in the Republican party and that that older, neoconservative guest talk of the 70s and 80s is not really where the party
36:48
[SPEAKER_00]: himself at least rhetorically disabows things like regime change and whatnot.
36:54
[SPEAKER_00]: But there is a still legacy that potters himself can be directly linked to.
36:59
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think that's where we can talk about very wise and LED Abrams.
37:03
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
37:03
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, so I want to take this from a couple different angles.
37:06
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, on the one hand, there's the foreign policy debate, which you you alluded to, Jade, and here, I mean, there's there's the kind of giant ongoing fight within the Trump administration and the wider Maga media universe and intellectual universe over, I mean, to to to a certain
37:29
[SPEAKER_02]: almost like paleocon wing of the maga coalition, neoconservatism has really just come to mean foreign policy hawkishness and lost for regime change.
37:39
[SPEAKER_02]: Sometimes with a sort of implied Jewish undertone, if you're thinking about Nick Fuentes talking to Tucker Carlson or whatever, but often just on its own terms, the Trump administration is so all over the map on this.
37:52
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, as we speak, you know,
37:56
[SPEAKER_02]: They've done a ton for Israel, they did a strike on Iran that the Neocons have been calling for for like 20 years or more, probably 40 years or more.
38:07
[SPEAKER_02]: And they are currently plotting a regime change campaign in Venezuela as we speak that implicates Marco Rubio who was a pro-Jay of the Neocons.
38:20
[SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, is Trump a neocon or not on his foreign policy?
38:23
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like depends what time of day we're asking.
38:26
[SPEAKER_02]: Basically, you know, he's gonna, he'll say he's gonna like a band in Ukraine and then he doesn't abandon Ukraine and there's just inertia.
38:34
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know.
38:34
[SPEAKER_02]: So there's that front, which I feel is its own discussion.
38:38
[SPEAKER_02]: But on the, on the more personnel front and the kind of people who influence conservative politics right now,
38:45
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, the obvious place you would look for Norman's legacy is with his son, his Phil son, John, who after a brief interval of commentary being run by Neil Kozidi, John has run it since I think 2009, and his pretty universally regarded as a
39:03
[SPEAKER_02]: a kind of sad neppo baby who has all of, as I say, all of his patterns, unpleasant qualities and none of the redeeming talent.
39:11
[SPEAKER_02]: And commentary, it's still round, still publishes, still, I think is a load star for a certain kind of Jewish right wing point of view, but it is not
39:22
[SPEAKER_02]: It is not the driving force in right wing politics, and maybe not even in Latter-day Neocon politics.
39:29
[SPEAKER_02]: I would say it's less influential on the one hand than Valkyrstals.
39:33
[SPEAKER_02]: The bull work is this kind of central tendency or the surviving kind of Neoconish central tendencies you can find in the Atlantic or parts of the New York Times
39:45
[SPEAKER_01]: Does it come out still as a magazine or just online?
39:47
[SPEAKER_01]: I come as a magazine.
39:48
[SPEAKER_01]: There's still a brand.
39:50
[SPEAKER_02]: It is apparently very money-loosing, though.
39:53
[SPEAKER_02]: There was an interesting report online.
39:55
[SPEAKER_02]: Somebody did a few years ago to this effect.
39:57
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know if it's still up to date.
39:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think they were able to raise somebody to deal with some of those issues with the idea.
40:02
[SPEAKER_02]: It's hard because John Podhardt pays himself way, way, way too much.
40:06
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think gee, when we first spoke about Mitch, that was definitely in the news, that particular story.
40:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but I, but I mean, but the other place where, well, I mean, I just can mention that to add on to your list, but this might segue to what you're about to say, the other place where the new conservative ideology exists, and I think is more influential than commentary is tablet.
40:28
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, God.
40:29
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, yes.
40:30
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, tablet is niche, but it's a very interesting niche.
40:33
[SPEAKER_02]: And if tablet has, I mean, I'm fascinated by tablet, which, um,
40:37
[SPEAKER_02]: which has gone in a kind of illiberal fascist direction with some neoconist tones to it.
40:44
[SPEAKER_02]: But tablets, biggest claim to relevance and not just being a kind of strange niche publication, some of us are sick as for, is that tablet was a major,
40:54
[SPEAKER_02]: I guess mentor, the tablets, leaders, the married couple on a new house, and David Samuels were, and I think still are mentors for the person, I think is kind of the ultimate Neocon media figure right now, Barry Weiss, who, you know, I've been fixated on and written about for years, but is, and went to college with a long time ago, but is currently the editor-in-chief CPS news,
41:19
[SPEAKER_02]: her basically neo-connish website, the free press was acquired for $150 million from the Ellis and family a few months ago.
41:28
[SPEAKER_02]: She is objectively one of the most important influential in famous people in media now.
41:33
[SPEAKER_02]: And in monetary and status terms, I think easily the most successful member of media of my generation were both about 41.
41:43
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, now I don't think anyone comes close, and she's widely reviled on the left and increasingly the center liberals, even though she's always kind of presented herself as a centrist.
41:55
[SPEAKER_02]: But I think a lot of her trajectory, I mean, both she comes directly out of the Neocontradition, you know, her bit, Brett Stevens was a mentor of hers, Tablet, she's close with the
42:11
[SPEAKER_02]: she's I can say from her college days been fixated on the city college guys too since she was very young um you can see it all there in her in her background and her evolution and at the same time I think
42:26
[SPEAKER_02]: she is so in the Norman tradition as a kind of like an and mid tradition as a kind of like provocateur attention, grabber or sort of ideological chameleon weaponizer of grievances.
42:40
[SPEAKER_02]: That is she is she is not in the Daniel Bell tradition.
42:46
[SPEAKER_02]: She it makes perfect sense that that's where Norman ended up and then the other big one who we
42:53
[SPEAKER_02]: who, you know, has a storied and horrifying career in US foreign policy, but is, I think, less noted for what he's up to these days, he is the chair of the tick-va foundation, which is one of the biggest sort of right-wing Zionist organizations in America, probably the biggest, I mean, unless you kind of pay back, I guess.
43:14
[SPEAKER_02]: They just got on his watch a $10 million grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities,
43:23
[SPEAKER_01]: Which took away grants from other scholars who were many of them working in Jewish studies on Jewish studies projects in addition to lots of other projects.
43:31
[SPEAKER_02]: Right, and so you can see, and I don't know how this money relates to actually Brett Stevens's side gig.
43:38
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, he's still in New York Times column this, but he's also in his spare time.
43:41
[SPEAKER_02]: running a small Jewish publication called Sapir.
43:46
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's like there's this new right-wing Jewish intellectual and media space being built out with a lot of money behind it, featuring figures who I think are straight out of neoconservatism, and who are, if not, all outright pro-Trump, certainly more amenable to Trump than like the bill crystal wing is.
44:07
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think,
44:08
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that is a living legacy of Norman Pettoritz, I think that Norman Pettoritz profoundly shaped all of these people, directly and, by example, and also is just kind of like a kind of pressure for runner of what they all stand for.
44:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, I think that's right.
44:28
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think, I mean, the one proposal I'll say is that someone like very wise precisely because it's in our public interest to present yourself as a centrist will moderate on some of the sort of social issues, you know, like more than a father's woulder was ever willing to do.
44:45
[SPEAKER_00]: I really think I've certainly gay rights leaving with the exception of the past issues.
44:50
[SPEAKER_00]: She's married to a woman.
44:51
[SPEAKER_00]: She is a married woman, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that in some ways I think the trans issue has become what the gay issue was, yes, in the sort of 60s and say, yeah, I mean, thousand percent.
45:06
[SPEAKER_01]: When I interviewed mid-dector in 2011, so before trans was there, but she was just basically like, you know, we lost the gay issue.
45:14
[SPEAKER_01]: It just is what it is, you know, we lost the, like that's, it's sort of, like, you know, just reconciled to that.
45:20
[SPEAKER_01]: And that was, but I think you're absolutely right that trans has become what gay rights was.
45:25
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
45:26
[SPEAKER_02]: In part because it's been a very effective wedge, I think there are, I would spoken gay conservatives often,
45:34
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, Barry, but also like Jamie Kerchick, for instance, who I think of is very much part of the neocontradition.
45:39
[SPEAKER_02]: Obviously, you know, Marty Parrots in hindsight could be seen as a figure in this evolution.
45:46
[SPEAKER_01]: 100%.
45:48
[SPEAKER_02]: These, uh,
45:49
[SPEAKER_02]: This wing of, uh, uh, there are definitely transphobic gay men and lesbians, including prominent ones in this movement, and I think that it's, it's actually become a way as they've gotten civic equality since the early 20 teens, um, to kind of prides a few of them away from the, from the liberal coalition.
46:09
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, I have a question about Elliot Abrams.
46:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, but what he, when he, he worked for the first Trump administration, but then he said after January 6, he told a repub, you know, he, like said, I'm done.
46:19
[SPEAKER_01]: He quit.
46:20
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, Trump wasn't fit to serve.
46:22
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm, where's, where does he fall now on Trump?
46:24
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you know?
46:25
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't question.
46:26
[SPEAKER_02]: I actually don't know what the answer is.
46:30
[SPEAKER_02]: I would suspect that he's not going to be very critical of Trump when Trump is throwing all this money at his organization.
46:43
[SPEAKER_02]: when Trump seemed beaten and January 6th was such an embarrassing moment or such a disgraceful moment.
46:51
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, there were a lot of Republicans in the Senate in house to who very briefly were saying, like, we're done with Trump and then of course they weren't because no one's ever done with Trump.
47:00
[SPEAKER_02]: And because now that, you know, everyone who did it has been part in them, I mean, I think for a lot of these guys,
47:08
[SPEAKER_02]: the fact that they were never Trump back in 2016 had a lot to do with them not thinking he was going to write a political confidence of the future.
47:17
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, they thought that after Hillary Clinton won, they could be like, look, that was a terrible idea to nominate Donald Trump.
47:23
[SPEAKER_02]: Now let's nominate one of our guys, you know, Rubio or Cotton or Jebus, or whoever, Nikki Haley, and then it didn't work out that way, and then on top of that Trump turned out
47:37
[SPEAKER_02]: from their perspective anyway, a real friend to Israel.
47:40
[SPEAKER_02]: And so, at which meant that right wing Jews are, you know, love him.
47:45
[SPEAKER_02]: They're not just comfortable with him.
47:46
[SPEAKER_02]: They generally love him.
47:47
[SPEAKER_02]: And so, you know, it's, which makes it all the more striking that people like Bill Crystal actually did commit fully to, the, he's a threat to democracy, strain, and became more or less central, central Democrats.
48:02
[SPEAKER_00]: No, I think that's, I agree with all that.
48:05
[SPEAKER_00]: The only provider I would say is I do think that there's a sort of faction.
48:08
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think one season in commentary magazine now, which isn't willing to openly embrace Trump, but often takes a sort of stance of anti-anti-Trump.
48:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
48:17
[SPEAKER_00]: So basically say, we don't like Trump, but the Democrats are worse or the left is a disaster for Israel.
48:26
[SPEAKER_00]: And basically being pro-Trump in a negative way.
48:32
[SPEAKER_00]: I think if I were guessing I'd probably say that's where like LED rooms is would be right now and so that's really where commentary magazine.
48:43
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that's right.
48:43
[SPEAKER_02]: That's also largely the poster Barry has maintained for, for the last ever many years.
48:48
[SPEAKER_01]: And Potoritz and Brace that, too.
48:50
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, in that Claremont issue, he said, you know, I slowly became more anti-anti-chomp until then I was like, no, actually, this guy's not a cissy.
48:58
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm really looking at Brace it.
49:00
[SPEAKER_02]: They're willing to emphasize Trump for certain things, but their, their orienting principle is that the left and by the left, they really mean all of liberalism is a threat to Western civilization to America, to Israel, to,
49:13
[SPEAKER_02]: freedom and capitalism that, you know, is radicalizing.
49:19
[SPEAKER_02]: And in this, they are different, I think, from another wing of neocons, like that I think Bill Crystal best represents, who certainly saw the new left as a threat to Western civilization.
49:33
[SPEAKER_02]: But, um,
49:34
[SPEAKER_02]: But looking at the lay of the land now, they find the right, the Trumpian right, more threatening.
49:40
[SPEAKER_02]: And think the new left has been largely defanged, which it largely has.
49:45
[SPEAKER_02]: Though, I still don't think these guys are big enthusiasts for,
49:50
[SPEAKER_02]: wokeness or for Bernie Sanders style socialism.
49:54
[SPEAKER_00]: All that we'll see with Bill I mean we've built up a crystal because it's supported like he said he said he would have voted for him.
50:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah he did.
50:04
[SPEAKER_02]: Bill is Bill I think I said online is the is the literal only person in the world who I think in the same week mourned his friend Dick Cheney and endorsed Zoron Mamdoni from
50:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's a really special place to be, but yeah, no, no, no, but I think more broadly, and this might be the place to end this, what you have both brought up is that there's actually like really a genuine living legacy in Norman Potter it's and yeah, what it looks at the sort of larger trajectory of this guy is a mirror, you know, as you say, David said, like, you know,
50:40
[SPEAKER_00]: a remarkable life story that, you know, whatever one thinks of him politically, like it is a classic American story of, you know, someone can really come out of the Immigrant ghetto and like making his way into like a hostile high culture and becoming one of the most prominent writers in the land, hugely intellectual and driven by his like great intellect,
51:07
[SPEAKER_00]: All of this saga, this amazing journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan, ends up with Donald Trump.
51:16
[SPEAKER_00]: What a finale.
51:18
[SPEAKER_02]: That's the great American now.
51:21
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the great American.
51:23
[SPEAKER_00]: I think 500 times that's he figured, I'll just end this on to probably more than one novel.
51:28
[SPEAKER_00]: One of which I believe is one by Joseph Heller.
51:32
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, good as go.
51:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, good as gold.
51:34
[SPEAKER_02]: Where he caught, which is a scaving portrait of him.
51:36
[SPEAKER_02]: I was just rereading.
51:37
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a scaving portrait, yeah, yeah.
51:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
51:39
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is like, you know, very impudence lived one of the great American lives with a kind of conclusion that might call into question many aspects of American life.
51:53
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.
51:53
[SPEAKER_00]: I wouldn't have thank David and Ronnie for this wonderful discussion.
51:58
[SPEAKER_02]: Total blast.
51:59
[SPEAKER_01]: I was awesome.
52:00
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks so much for having me and it's awesome to do something with both of you.
52:04
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you guys.