A milk truck moves through Brownsville before light. The horse knows the route, and Julius Podhoretz lets it lead. Above the streets the boy sleeps in rooms the family treats as a way station, not a verdict. The neighborhood is Jewish and Black and poor. The boy is small, quick, and certain he is meant for somewhere else. He does not yet have a word for the certainty. He will spend sixty years building the word, losing it, and building a harder one in its place.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) gives us the frame. In The Denial of Death and in Escape from Evil, he argues that every culture is a hero system. A man knows he will die. He cannot live inside that knowledge, so he enlists in a project larger than his body, and his culture hands him the roles by which he earns a significance that outlasts the grave. Money, art, nation, seed, God: each is a route out of anonymity, a way of refusing to become food for worms. The hero system works only while a man forgets it is one. Name it, and you commit a kind of sacrilege.
Norman Podhoretz committed that sacrilege once, in print, and paid for it the rest of his life. The story of his hero system is the story of a man who saw the machinery, said so, lost his place, and then went looking for a cosmic significance that no rival could revise.
Start with the scholarship boy. A teacher at Boys High takes him up. She corrects his clothes and his accent. She means to turn the loud Brownsville kid into a presentable young gentleman, and he lets her, and he hates her for it, and he obeys. He learns the first law of his world early: the way out runs through the favor of people who look down on where he comes from. Lionel Trilling (1905-1975) waits at Columbia. F.R. Leavis (1895-1978) waits at Cambridge on a fellowship. The boy reads, and the reading saves him, and he learns that a sentence built right is a passport. The literary hero system takes him in. To write well is to count. To write badly is to die before you die.
He returns to New York and joins the Family. The journalist Murray Kempton (1917-1997) gave the New York intellectuals that name, and it fit. Lionel and Diana Trilling (1905-1996), Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), Saul Bellow (1915-2005), Irving Howe (1920-1993), Norman Mailer (1923-2007): a clan that argues at parties until the argument turns physical. They debate Marx and the modern novel and one another’s reputations, and the stakes feel cosmic because, in Becker’s terms, they are. Each man at the table earns his immortality by the quality of his mind under fire. The combat confers the significance. A good thrust lands like grace.
In 1960, at thirty, Podhoretz takes over Commentary. The American Jewish Committee owns it. He runs Marcuse and Paul Goodman and the young Philip Roth. He is a man of the left who has arrived early, and arrival is the thing he understands better than anyone in the room.
Then he writes the book.
Making It appears in 1967. Podhoretz argues that the lust for success, for money and power and fame, runs as hot in the American intellectual as the lust for sex once ran under Victorian denial. He calls the appetite the dirty little secret of his class. He confesses his own. He says the men who pose as servants of disinterested Truth want, under the pose, exactly what a starlet wants. He names the immortality project as an immortality project.
The Family turns on him. The book that was meant to crown his ascent nearly ends it. Mailer files a long review that buries an old friend. The dinner invitations stop. Podhoretz spends years afterward as a heavy drinker, working on a study of the Beats he privately calls know-nothing bohemians, driving drunk between Manhattan and a Pennsylvania farmhouse.
Becker explains the punishment better than the participants could. A hero system survives by not being seen as one. The members must believe their devotion to Art and Truth is what they say it is, or the route to symbolic immortality closes. Podhoretz walked into the temple and announced that the gods were a coping device against death. The priesthood does not debate such a man. It excommunicates him. The savagery of the response measured how close he had come to the nerve.
Here the comparative work begins, because the word at the center of his life, success, fractures the moment you carry it across the border into another hero system.
Set Podhoretz beside a Trappist under vow. For the monk, success is to vanish, to wear down the self until God fills the space the ego held. The whole architecture of his immortality runs in the opposite direction from Brownsville. To make a name is to lose the soul. Set him beside the old Protestant gentry of the Hudson Valley, three generations into money, for whom the arrival happened so long ago that wanting it now is the single unforgivable vulgarity. Their mark of standing is the studied air of a man who never had to try. Set him beside a founder in Menlo Park, for whom success is scale, the exit, the dent in the species. Each of these men uses the word. None of them means what Podhoretz means. His success carries a specific charge none of theirs can carry: the milk truck refuted, the teacher’s contempt converted into the teacher’s pride, the poor Jewish boy seated at the table that was built to keep him out. The monk would call that vanity. The patrician would call it pushing. The founder would not understand the smallness of the prize. For Podhoretz it is salvation, and he says so, and the saying is the sin.
The drinking ends in 1970. At the farmhouse he tells his biographer Thomas Jeffers years later, he sees a vision in the sky and understands that Judaism is true. Call it what you like. In Becker’s terms a man whose first immortality project has collapsed reaches for an older and harder one. Literary reputation sits at the mercy of the next generation’s revision. The tide that lifted Mailer can strand him in twenty years. A covenant does not work that way. A people that outlasted Babylon and Rome and the Reich offers a kind of permanence no review can take back. The God of his fathers does not die in 1975 to make room for a fresh consensus.
So Podhoretz changes hero systems. He keeps the sentence and the fighting style. He moves the loyalty underneath them from the literary clan to the people and the nation and the faith.
Commentary becomes a fortress. He builds neoconservatism out of it with his friend Irving Kristol (1920-2009), who gives the movement its line about a liberal mugged by reality. The Coalition for a Democratic Majority forms after the 1972 rout. Reagan calls The Present Danger vital. The boy from Brownsville advises a president, watches the Soviet Union fall on schedule, and takes the Presidential Medal of Freedom from a second president in 2004. His wife Midge Decter (1927-2022) fights at his side for forty years. His son edits the magazine after him. His stepson-in-law runs foreign policy for three administrations. The Family cast him out. He built a larger family that could not.
Now reality, the word the movement made its banner, splits the same way success did.
For a refusenik in a Moscow kitchen, reality is the official lie he will not repeat, the gap between the newspaper and the bread line, the cost of saying out loud what everyone knows. For a hospice nurse at the end of a shift, reality is the body that quits on its own schedule no matter how the family prays. For a quant pricing risk, reality is the distribution that does not care about your story. For Podhoretz, reality is the permanence of human wickedness and the menace of the enemy at the gate, first Moscow, later Tehran and the Islamists, the hard fact the soft liberal will not look at. He calls the Iran deal among the worst acts an American president has taken. The refusenik and the nurse and the quant would each nod at the word and mean their own country by it. Podhoretz means: the world is dangerous, men are not improving, and the people who tell you otherwise will get your children killed. The word is a flag for a whole picture of the cosmos, and the picture is the thing the hero system defends.
Loyalty fractures too, and his case carries a paradox worth holding still.
For a Bedouin elder, loyalty is blood and the feud: me against my brother, my brother and I against our cousin, all of us against the stranger. For a Confucian scholar in Seoul, loyalty climbs the hierarchy, son to father, subject to ruler, the living to the ancestors. Podhoretz made a career titled Breaking Ranks, and the title looks like the opposite of loyalty until you see which ranks he kept. He broke with the proximate coalition, the left, the Family, the party of his youth, again and again. He never broke with the deep one. Treason against the near tribe served fidelity to the far tribe, the people and their state. Ex-Friends, the late memoir, lists the friendships he spent and counts them well spent. A man can call that betrayal or call it the highest loyalty, and which word he reaches for tells you which hero system he is standing in. From inside Podhoretz’s, the friends were the cost of the covenant.
And candor, the value of Making It, the thing that nearly ended him. For the Hudson Valley patrician, honesty is discretion, the kindness of the unsaid, the deal closed without a vulgar word about money. For a Sicilian widow, the code is omertà, where to speak is to betray and silence is the proof of honor. Podhoretz built his whole early scandal on the reverse conviction: that candor means dragging the dirty little secret into the light, that the unsaid is the lie, that a man owes the truth even when the truth costs him the table. The patrician hears that and recoils at the bad manners. The widow hears it and sees a man marked for trouble. Podhoretz heard, in the recoil of his own class, the sound of a hero system protecting its denial. He was right about the structure. He underestimated what it would do to the man who exposed it.
The last image holds the whole reading. In 2019 he says, of his thirteen grandchildren, that they are hostages to fortune, that he does not have the luxury of not caring what happens after he is gone. Becker would stop the tape there. Strip the politics and you have the oldest immortality project of the species stated flat: the seed that outlasts the body, the line that runs past the grave, the man who refuses to end because he can point to the children of his children and say, these continue. The literary fame he chased at thirty could be revised. The success he confessed at thirty-seven turned the Family against him. The vision at forty gave him a people that does not die. The grandchildren at the end give him the plainest answer of all to the question every hero system exists to answer. He spent his youth proving the milk truck wrong. He spent his old age making sure the route would still be running long after the horse, and the boy, and the man were gone.
He died in Manhattan in December 2025, an observant Jew of his Upper East Side congregation, ninety-five years old, having outlived the magazine’s old enemies and most of his friends, leaving four children and thirteen grandchildren and sixteen great-grandchildren. The boy from Brownsville got the table, lost it, and built one that could seat the dead and the unborn at once. That is what a hero system is for. He saw the machinery more clearly than almost anyone, said so out loud, and then did what men do when the seeing becomes unbearable. He went looking for a god who would keep him.
The Great Delusion
In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:
My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization…
If Mearsheimer is right, his anthropology provides a striking, dual-edged verdict on Norman Podhoretz, the formidable editor of Commentary magazine and a primary architect of neocervatism. Mearsheimer’s thesis directly validates the brutal domestic and foreign realism Podhoretz adopted in his mid-career political evolution, while simultaneously exposing his eventual neoconservative project—the global export of American democracy—as an anthropological impossibility.
Podhoretz’s intellectual trajectory matches Mearsheimer’s realism in its diagnosis of power, but splits violently from it on the malleability of foreign cultures.
In his controversial 1967 memoir, Making It, Podhoretz shocked the New York intelligentsia by stripping away the high-minded ideological pretensions of literary culture, arguing instead that intellectuals are driven by a raw, unquenchable thirst for success, money, status, and power.
Mearsheimer’s anthropology, supplemented by alliance theory, treats Podhoretz’s scandalous insight as a basic fact of the human animal. Ideas, literature, and political creeds do not operate in a detached realm of pure reason; they are tools used by coalitions to manage reputations, signal loyalty, and claim dominance over status rivals. When Podhoretz revealed that the high-minded aesthetic positions of his peers were camouflage for a fierce scramble for career advancement and group prestige, he was describing the social animal operating in its native, evolutionary state. The “dirty little secret” of ambition Podhoretz exposed is the exact structural logic Mearsheimer and Pinsof plant at the center of human motivation.
When Podhoretz broke with the Left in the 1970s, he did so out of a profound conviction that Western liberals were falling into a dangerous illusion, downplaying the existential threat of Soviet power and relying on weak, universalist rhetoric like detente and international law. In works like The Present Danger (1980), he demanded a return to hard-headed power politics, military strength, and national resolve.
This mid-career shift directly aligns with Mearsheimer’s realism. Both men reject the liberal fantasy that international anarchy can be tamed by international institutions or shared legal abstractions. Podhoretz recognized that the state is the primary survival vehicle for its citizens, and that in a competitive, anarchic world, a group that loses its will to project material power will eventually be dominated by its rivals.
The critical fracture between the two thinkers arrives with Podhoretz’s ultimate destination: the neoconservative conviction, reaching its peak after the Cold War and during the War on Terror, that the United States should use its power to remake the Middle East and spread democratic values globally. Podhoretz viewed American universalism not as a parochial luxury, but as a transformative force that could unlock the natural desire for freedom inherent in every individual on earth.
If Mearsheimer is right, this core neoconservative project is a catastrophic error built on a false anthropology. Liberal democracy is not a default setting that emerges the moment a tyrant is removed. Humans do not operate as atomistic choosers waiting for the right institutions; they are born into distinct, cohesive groups that shape their identities through an intense value infusion during a long childhood.
When Podhoretz championed the invasion of Iraq or the forced democratization of foreign societies, he fell into the exact same universalist trap Mearsheimer critiques in The Great Delusion. He assumed that foreign populations were filled with interchangeable individuals ready to adopt American concepts of rights and governance. Mearsheimer’s anthropology predicts precisely what occurred: individuals abroad remained bound to their older, tribal, and sectarian loyalties. The liberal-democratic institutions Podhoretz wished to export were instantly rejected by populations whose early socialization and survival strategies were tied to their specific religious and national groups.
If Mearsheimer is right, Podhoretz was half-realist and half-delusional. He understood the hard logic of power and ambition when looking at his domestic rivals or the Soviet threat, but he forgot the stubborn, unyielding power of early socialization when he attempted to project American values onto an un-American world.
‘A Big Misunderstanding’
Norman Podhoretz is the rare intellectual who explicitly claimed to have broken free from the misunderstanding myth only to weaponize a new narrative for capturing elite status and state power.
As the long-time editor of Commentary and a founding father of neoconservatism, Podhoretz made his career by staging a spectacular, public defection from the progressive literary establishment.
In 1967, Podhoretz published his scandalous memoir, Making It. In it, he confessed something that perfectly mirrors Pinsof’s premise: the New York literary elite did not care about universal love, peace, or disinterested truth. They cared about success, money, fame, and power. He called this desire for status the “dirty little secret” that intellectuals hid behind their high-minded talk of social justice.
Pinsof might say that Podhoretz thought that by confessing to the dirty secret, he was breaking the mold. Pinsof’s essay reveals that Making It was actually a masterful status maneuver. By exposing the hidden motives of his peers, Podhoretz was not abandoning the status game; he was launching a devastating strike against his rivals.
He effectively told the public: “My fellow intellectuals are hypocrites who claim to care about the poor but actually just want prestige.” This exposure allowed Podhoretz to claim a new, higher form of status: the uniquely honest intellectual who is brave enough to tell the truth. Confessing to the dirty secret became his new ticket to the top.
When Podhoretz swung to the right in the 1970s, he became a fierce critic of the liberal consensus, anti-war activists, and the new left. He argued that the liberal elite suffered from a dangerous, naive misunderstanding about the nature of evil, Soviet expansionism, and the fragility of American civilization. He framed his new neoconservative movement as a hard-headed embrace of reality over utopian illusions.
Pinsof might say that Podhoretz did not abandon the misunderstanding myth; he just inverted it. In his new framework, the problem with the world was still a misunderstanding—it was just that the liberals were the ones who misunderstood how dangerous the world was.
This maneuver was brilliantly strategic. By framing the Cold War and domestic cultural politics as a fight between clear-eyed realism and liberal delusion, Podhoretz positioned himself and his neoconservative allies as the indispensable advisors to the state. They became the brain trust for the Reagan administration. He traded the salon of the New York literary critic for the corridors of political power in Washington, using the exact same logic: “The masses and our political rivals are misguided; they need our ideas to save them.”
Pinsof argues that partisan hatred is a rational response to a zero-sum competition over the coercive apparatus of the state—the thing that puts people in prison or goes to war at gunpoint. Podhoretz’s entire late career is a perfect illustration of this reality. He abandoned pure literary criticism to write books like The Present Danger and World War IV, directly advocating for aggressive military intervention and foreign policy.
Pinsof might say that Podhoretz stopped pretending that literature was about expanding empathy or cultivating aesthetic taste. He recognized that the ultimate stakes were about raw power, national defense, and state force.
But true to his intellectual training, he still had to dress up this struggle for dominance in the language of ideas, ideology, and moral clarity. He demonized his domestic political opponents not because they had a different policy preference, but because they were “un-American” or blind to the civilizational threat. Podhoretz proved Pinsof’s point perfectly: when the stakes are high, you fight dirty, you deny you are doing it, and you use your intellectual apparatus as a weapon to destroy the competition and capture the state.
The Hero System of Norman Podhoretz
A milk truck moves through Brownsville before light. The horse knows the route, and Julius Podhoretz lets it lead. Above the streets the boy sleeps in rooms the family treats as a way station, not a verdict. The neighborhood is Jewish and Black and poor. The boy is small, quick, and certain he is meant for somewhere else. He does not yet have a word for the certainty. He will spend sixty years building the word, losing it, and building a harder one in its place.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) gives us the frame. In The Denial of Death and in Escape from Evil, he argues that every culture is a hero system. A man knows he will die. He cannot live inside that knowledge, so he enlists in a project larger than his body, and his culture hands him the roles by which he earns a significance that outlasts the grave. Money, art, nation, seed, God: each is a route out of anonymity, a way of refusing to become food for worms. The hero system works only while a man forgets it is one. Name it, and you commit a kind of sacrilege.
Norman Podhoretz committed that sacrilege once, in print, and paid for it the rest of his life. The story of his hero system is the story of a man who saw the machinery, said so, lost his place, and then went looking for a cosmic significance that no rival could revise.
Start with the scholarship boy. A teacher at Boys High takes him up. She corrects his clothes and his accent. She means to turn the loud Brownsville kid into a presentable young gentleman, and he lets her, and he hates her for it, and he obeys. He learns the first law of his world early: the way out runs through the favor of people who look down on where he comes from. Lionel Trilling (1905-1975) waits at Columbia. F.R. Leavis (1895-1978) waits at Cambridge on a fellowship. The boy reads, and the reading saves him, and he learns that a sentence built right is a passport. The literary hero system takes him in. To write well is to count. To write badly is to die before you die.
He returns to New York and joins the Family. The journalist Murray Kempton (1917-1997) gave the New York intellectuals that name, and it fit. Lionel and Diana Trilling (1905-1996), Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), Saul Bellow (1915-2005), Irving Howe (1920-1993), Norman Mailer (1923-2007): a clan that argues at parties until the argument turns physical. They debate Marx and the modern novel and one another’s reputations, and the stakes feel cosmic because, in Becker’s terms, they are. Each man at the table earns his immortality by the quality of his mind under fire. The combat confers the significance. A good thrust lands like grace.
In 1960, at thirty, Podhoretz takes over Commentary. The American Jewish Committee owns it. He runs Marcuse and Paul Goodman and the young Philip Roth. He is a man of the left who has arrived early, and arrival is the thing he understands better than anyone in the room.
Then he writes the book.
Making It appears in 1967. Podhoretz argues that the lust for success, for money and power and fame, runs as hot in the American intellectual as the lust for sex once ran under Victorian denial. He calls the appetite the dirty little secret of his class. He confesses his own. He says the men who pose as servants of disinterested Truth want, under the pose, exactly what a starlet wants. He names the immortality project as an immortality project.
The Family turns on him. The book that was meant to crown his ascent nearly ends it. Mailer files a long review that buries an old friend. The dinner invitations stop. Podhoretz spends years afterward as a heavy drinker, working on a study of the Beats he privately calls know-nothing bohemians, driving drunk between Manhattan and a Pennsylvania farmhouse.
Becker explains the punishment better than the participants could. A hero system survives by not being seen as one. The members must believe their devotion to Art and Truth is what they say it is, or the route to symbolic immortality closes. Podhoretz walked into the temple and announced that the gods were a coping device against death. The priesthood does not debate such a man. It excommunicates him. The savagery of the response measured how close he had come to the nerve.
Here the comparative work begins, because the word at the center of his life, success, fractures the moment you carry it across the border into another hero system.
Set Podhoretz beside a Trappist under vow. For the monk, success is to vanish, to wear down the self until God fills the space the ego held. The whole architecture of his immortality runs in the opposite direction from Brownsville. To make a name is to lose the soul. Set him beside the old Protestant gentry of the Hudson Valley, three generations into money, for whom the arrival happened so long ago that wanting it now is the single unforgivable vulgarity. Their mark of standing is the studied air of a man who never had to try. Set him beside a founder in Menlo Park, for whom success is scale, the exit, the dent in the species. Each of these men uses the word. None of them means what Podhoretz means. His success carries a specific charge none of theirs can carry: the milk truck refuted, the teacher’s contempt converted into the teacher’s pride, the poor Jewish boy seated at the table that was built to keep him out. The monk would call that vanity. The patrician would call it pushing. The founder would not understand the smallness of the prize. For Podhoretz it is salvation, and he says so, and the saying is the sin.
The drinking ends in 1970. At the farmhouse he tells his biographer Thomas Jeffers years later, he sees a vision in the sky and understands that Judaism is true. Call it what you like. In Becker’s terms a man whose first immortality project has collapsed reaches for an older and harder one. Literary reputation sits at the mercy of the next generation’s revision. The tide that lifted Mailer can strand him in twenty years. A covenant does not work that way. A people that outlasted Babylon and Rome and the Reich offers a kind of permanence no review can take back. The God of his fathers does not die in 1975 to make room for a fresh consensus.
So Podhoretz changes hero systems. He keeps the sentence and the fighting style. He moves the loyalty underneath them from the literary clan to the people and the nation and the faith.
Commentary becomes a fortress. He builds neoconservatism out of it with his friend Irving Kristol (1920-2009), who gives the movement its line about a liberal mugged by reality. The Coalition for a Democratic Majority forms after the 1972 rout. Reagan calls The Present Danger vital. The boy from Brownsville advises a president, watches the Soviet Union fall on schedule, and takes the Presidential Medal of Freedom from a second president in 2004. His wife Midge Decter (1927-2022) fights at his side for forty years. His son edits the magazine after him. His stepson-in-law runs foreign policy for three administrations. The Family cast him out. He built a larger family that could not.
Now reality, the word the movement made its banner, splits the same way success did.
For a refusenik in a Moscow kitchen, reality is the official lie he will not repeat, the gap between the newspaper and the bread line, the cost of saying out loud what everyone knows. For a hospice nurse at the end of a shift, reality is the body that quits on its own schedule no matter how the family prays. For a quant pricing risk, reality is the distribution that does not care about your story. For Podhoretz, reality is the permanence of human wickedness and the menace of the enemy at the gate, first Moscow, later Tehran and the Islamists, the hard fact the soft liberal will not look at. He calls the Iran deal among the worst acts an American president has taken. The refusenik and the nurse and the quant would each nod at the word and mean their own country by it. Podhoretz means: the world is dangerous, men are not improving, and the people who tell you otherwise will get your children killed. The word is a flag for a whole picture of the cosmos, and the picture is the thing the hero system defends.
Loyalty fractures too, and his case carries a paradox worth holding still.
For a Bedouin elder, loyalty is blood and the feud: me against my brother, my brother and I against our cousin, all of us against the stranger. For a Confucian scholar in Seoul, loyalty climbs the hierarchy, son to father, subject to ruler, the living to the ancestors. Podhoretz made a career titled Breaking Ranks, and the title looks like the opposite of loyalty until you see which ranks he kept. He broke with the proximate coalition, the left, the Family, the party of his youth, again and again. He never broke with the deep one. Treason against the near tribe served fidelity to the far tribe, the people and their state. Ex-Friends, the late memoir, lists the friendships he spent and counts them well spent. A man can call that betrayal or call it the highest loyalty, and which word he reaches for tells you which hero system he is standing in. From inside Podhoretz’s, the friends were the cost of the covenant.
And candor, the value of Making It, the thing that nearly ended him. For the Hudson Valley patrician, honesty is discretion, the kindness of the unsaid, the deal closed without a vulgar word about money. For a Sicilian widow, the code is omertà, where to speak is to betray and silence is the proof of honor. Podhoretz built his whole early scandal on the reverse conviction: that candor means dragging the dirty little secret into the light, that the unsaid is the lie, that a man owes the truth even when the truth costs him the table. The patrician hears that and recoils at the bad manners. The widow hears it and sees a man marked for trouble. Podhoretz heard, in the recoil of his own class, the sound of a hero system protecting its denial. He was right about the structure. He underestimated what it would do to the man who exposed it.
The last image holds the whole reading. In 2019 he says, of his thirteen grandchildren, that they are hostages to fortune, that he does not have the luxury of not caring what happens after he is gone. Becker would stop the tape there. Strip the politics and you have the oldest immortality project of the species stated flat: the seed that outlasts the body, the line that runs past the grave, the man who refuses to end because he can point to the children of his children and say, these continue. The literary fame he chased at thirty could be revised. The success he confessed at thirty-seven turned the Family against him. The vision at forty gave him a people that does not die. The grandchildren at the end give him the plainest answer of all to the question every hero system exists to answer. He spent his youth proving the milk truck wrong. He spent his old age making sure the route would still be running long after the horse, and the boy, and the man were gone.
He died in Manhattan in December 2025, an observant Jew of his Upper East Side congregation, ninety-five years old, having outlived the magazine’s old enemies and most of his friends, leaving four children and thirteen grandchildren and sixteen great-grandchildren. The boy from Brownsville got the table, lost it, and built one that could seat the dead and the unborn at once. That is what a hero system is for. He saw the machinery more clearly than almost anyone, said so out loud, and then did what men do when the seeing becomes unbearable. He went looking for a god who would keep him.
The Great Delusion
In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:
If Mearsheimer is right, his anthropology provides a striking, dual-edged verdict on Norman Podhoretz, the formidable editor of Commentary magazine and a primary architect of neocervatism. Mearsheimer’s thesis directly validates the brutal domestic and foreign realism Podhoretz adopted in his mid-career political evolution, while simultaneously exposing his eventual neoconservative project—the global export of American democracy—as an anthropological impossibility.
Podhoretz’s intellectual trajectory matches Mearsheimer’s realism in its diagnosis of power, but splits violently from it on the malleability of foreign cultures.
In his controversial 1967 memoir, Making It, Podhoretz shocked the New York intelligentsia by stripping away the high-minded ideological pretensions of literary culture, arguing instead that intellectuals are driven by a raw, unquenchable thirst for success, money, status, and power.
Mearsheimer’s anthropology, supplemented by alliance theory, treats Podhoretz’s scandalous insight as a basic fact of the human animal. Ideas, literature, and political creeds do not operate in a detached realm of pure reason; they are tools used by coalitions to manage reputations, signal loyalty, and claim dominance over status rivals. When Podhoretz revealed that the high-minded aesthetic positions of his peers were camouflage for a fierce scramble for career advancement and group prestige, he was describing the social animal operating in its native, evolutionary state. The “dirty little secret” of ambition Podhoretz exposed is the exact structural logic Mearsheimer and Pinsof plant at the center of human motivation.
When Podhoretz broke with the Left in the 1970s, he did so out of a profound conviction that Western liberals were falling into a dangerous illusion, downplaying the existential threat of Soviet power and relying on weak, universalist rhetoric like detente and international law. In works like The Present Danger (1980), he demanded a return to hard-headed power politics, military strength, and national resolve.
This mid-career shift directly aligns with Mearsheimer’s realism. Both men reject the liberal fantasy that international anarchy can be tamed by international institutions or shared legal abstractions. Podhoretz recognized that the state is the primary survival vehicle for its citizens, and that in a competitive, anarchic world, a group that loses its will to project material power will eventually be dominated by its rivals.
The critical fracture between the two thinkers arrives with Podhoretz’s ultimate destination: the neoconservative conviction, reaching its peak after the Cold War and during the War on Terror, that the United States should use its power to remake the Middle East and spread democratic values globally. Podhoretz viewed American universalism not as a parochial luxury, but as a transformative force that could unlock the natural desire for freedom inherent in every individual on earth.
If Mearsheimer is right, this core neoconservative project is a catastrophic error built on a false anthropology. Liberal democracy is not a default setting that emerges the moment a tyrant is removed. Humans do not operate as atomistic choosers waiting for the right institutions; they are born into distinct, cohesive groups that shape their identities through an intense value infusion during a long childhood.
When Podhoretz championed the invasion of Iraq or the forced democratization of foreign societies, he fell into the exact same universalist trap Mearsheimer critiques in The Great Delusion. He assumed that foreign populations were filled with interchangeable individuals ready to adopt American concepts of rights and governance. Mearsheimer’s anthropology predicts precisely what occurred: individuals abroad remained bound to their older, tribal, and sectarian loyalties. The liberal-democratic institutions Podhoretz wished to export were instantly rejected by populations whose early socialization and survival strategies were tied to their specific religious and national groups.
If Mearsheimer is right, Podhoretz was half-realist and half-delusional. He understood the hard logic of power and ambition when looking at his domestic rivals or the Soviet threat, but he forgot the stubborn, unyielding power of early socialization when he attempted to project American values onto an un-American world.
‘A Big Misunderstanding’
Norman Podhoretz is the rare intellectual who explicitly claimed to have broken free from the misunderstanding myth only to weaponize a new narrative for capturing elite status and state power.
As the long-time editor of Commentary and a founding father of neoconservatism, Podhoretz made his career by staging a spectacular, public defection from the progressive literary establishment.
In 1967, Podhoretz published his scandalous memoir, Making It. In it, he confessed something that perfectly mirrors Pinsof’s premise: the New York literary elite did not care about universal love, peace, or disinterested truth. They cared about success, money, fame, and power. He called this desire for status the “dirty little secret” that intellectuals hid behind their high-minded talk of social justice.
Pinsof might say that Podhoretz thought that by confessing to the dirty secret, he was breaking the mold. Pinsof’s essay reveals that Making It was actually a masterful status maneuver. By exposing the hidden motives of his peers, Podhoretz was not abandoning the status game; he was launching a devastating strike against his rivals.
He effectively told the public: “My fellow intellectuals are hypocrites who claim to care about the poor but actually just want prestige.” This exposure allowed Podhoretz to claim a new, higher form of status: the uniquely honest intellectual who is brave enough to tell the truth. Confessing to the dirty secret became his new ticket to the top.
When Podhoretz swung to the right in the 1970s, he became a fierce critic of the liberal consensus, anti-war activists, and the new left. He argued that the liberal elite suffered from a dangerous, naive misunderstanding about the nature of evil, Soviet expansionism, and the fragility of American civilization. He framed his new neoconservative movement as a hard-headed embrace of reality over utopian illusions.
Pinsof might say that Podhoretz did not abandon the misunderstanding myth; he just inverted it. In his new framework, the problem with the world was still a misunderstanding—it was just that the liberals were the ones who misunderstood how dangerous the world was.
This maneuver was brilliantly strategic. By framing the Cold War and domestic cultural politics as a fight between clear-eyed realism and liberal delusion, Podhoretz positioned himself and his neoconservative allies as the indispensable advisors to the state. They became the brain trust for the Reagan administration. He traded the salon of the New York literary critic for the corridors of political power in Washington, using the exact same logic: “The masses and our political rivals are misguided; they need our ideas to save them.”
Pinsof argues that partisan hatred is a rational response to a zero-sum competition over the coercive apparatus of the state—the thing that puts people in prison or goes to war at gunpoint. Podhoretz’s entire late career is a perfect illustration of this reality. He abandoned pure literary criticism to write books like The Present Danger and World War IV, directly advocating for aggressive military intervention and foreign policy.
Pinsof might say that Podhoretz stopped pretending that literature was about expanding empathy or cultivating aesthetic taste. He recognized that the ultimate stakes were about raw power, national defense, and state force.
But true to his intellectual training, he still had to dress up this struggle for dominance in the language of ideas, ideology, and moral clarity. He demonized his domestic political opponents not because they had a different policy preference, but because they were “un-American” or blind to the civilizational threat. Podhoretz proved Pinsof’s point perfectly: when the stakes are high, you fight dirty, you deny you are doing it, and you use your intellectual apparatus as a weapon to destroy the competition and capture the state.
About Luke Ford
I teach Alexander Technique in Beverly Hills (Alexander90210.com).