A few months ago, I was charmed by an exchange via column and letters to the editor by libertarian Post columnist George Jonas and classical liberal Alan Borovoy, General Counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association—both men “of a certain age.”
Their argument revolved around the exact wording of a 1970s-era conversation they had concerning human-rights tribunals (then a novel institution). Tellingly, the conversation took place at Toronto’s “Coffee Mill,” a reminder that leisurely social discourse between sparring partners was once considered a desirable—and apparently memorable—element of intellectual life. The spirit of earnest playfulness the exchange evoked, alas, is not what springs to mind in conjunction with the noun “intellectual” today.
Intellectual friendships nowadays—alliances really—now flourish or wither strictly on the basis of shared ideological convictions. Today, one would more likely describe social relations between the ideologically opposed as frostily non-existent. And hell hath no greater fury than an ideologue whose erstwhile comrade embraces an idea they both once scorned.
The curious slide from respectful collegiality to brittle contempt between two warring camps was eloquently explored in Norman Podhoretz’s 2000 book, Ex-Friends. Podhoretz, former editor (now emeritus) of neo-conservative bell-wether Commentary Magazine, has been considered a high-powered opinion-maker in the United States for 50 years. He began on the left, but moved steadily rightwards in recoil from the social and political ravages of 60s radicalism.
Fleshed out with explanatory backdrops of America’s countercultural upheavals and the Cold War, Ex-Friends chronicles Podhoretz’s break-up with six famous influences on American culture: Allen Ginsburg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt and Norman Mailer. All were brilliant aesthetes—poet, critics, playwright, novelist, philosopher. And although the incidents and expressed opinions that inspired the ruptures are lost in the mists of time, the driving forces behind them are still being played out amongst today’s intellectuals.
The relationships didn’t founder on academic or aesthetic lines, but on a more profound dichotomy. Podhoretz feels that in their combined ideological misdirection, his American-born ex-friends—German-born philosopher Hannah Arendt was a special case—appropriated the word “liberal,” which he considered himself to be, and subverted its meaning into PC codes and moral relativism. In his eyes, the counterculturalists and their ideological heirs in academia today have drained America of faith in itself, undermining national unity at home and hamstringing its ability to counter evil abroad.
Their fundamental crime was to express political dissatisfaction by sympathizing with America’s enemies (first Communists, now all anti-Americans), instead of attempting to reform “Amerika” from within. “Even when I was at my most radical,” writes Podhoretz, “I still loved America, and my own utopian aspirations were directed at perfecting, not destroying it … whereas in their hatred of America they yearned for us to be defeated and humiliated.” The finest cappuccino in the world couldn’t bridge that chasm.
Podhoretz’s quarrel with Arendt, who alone amongst his ex-friends began on the right (she meandered to the left in her old age), arose from his anger over her de-demonization of Holocaust perpetrators (her famous phrase being “the banality of evil”). In portraying captured Final Solution manager Adolf Eichmann in her New Yorker trial coverage as an unthreatening cipher, she seemed to Podhoretz almost to be exonerating him from guilt.
Arendt’s writings, along with those of the anti-Israel New Left, forced him to address his own Jewishness and clarify his unexamined relationship with Israel. Outrage over the world’s double standard made him Israel’s champion: “I wonder why it is that Israel must always be asked to act more nobly than other nations,” he writes. “Isn’t this demand a way of telling Jews that they must justify their existence instead of taking it for granted that they have a simple right to exist and therefore to be ‘merely’ human?”
The question is more relevant today than ever. Podhoretz’s compelling 2004 Commentary essay, World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why we Have to Win, has become a shibboleth amongst those in the West who believe that America is the last bastion of healthy purpose in a world mired in global pathology, and that Israel is the front line against the gathered storm of Islamofascism.
His admirers see Podhoretz as a leonine icon of moral clarity. His detractors see him as the incarnation of Bushite and Likkudnik fascism. Will history prove him right? That depends: If Israel achieves peace with honour, and if respect revives for our common enlightenment heritage—the very basis for intellectual civility and affable coffee house debates everywhere—Podhoretz’s prescription for the world’s ills will have prevailed.
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