David Hollinger (b. April 25, 1941) keeps an office on a hill above the Bay, and the hill matters to the story even now that he has retired from it. Berkeley sits in the line of sight of the whole Pacific world. The historian who spent his life arguing that Americans should widen the circle of the people they count as their own picked a campus that faces the widest ocean and the most foreign shore. He earned his doctorate there in 1970, returned as the Preston Hotchkis Professor in 1992, and stepped down in 2013 with eight books behind him and the title emeritus in front of his name. The books carry the argument of a single life. Postethnic America. Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity. After Cloven Tongues of Fire. Protestants Abroad. Christianity’s American Fate. A reader who lines the spines up on a shelf reads one long sentence about belonging, written across four decades, by a man who wanted the human “we” to grow until it had no edge.
He came to that wish from a pulpit. His father preached. His grandfather preached. His great-grandfather preached. Four generations of Church of the Brethren ministers stood in front of congregations of plain people and told them what a life was for, and the fourth generation produced a son who walked out of the church and into the seminar room and never came back to the faith. He has called himself an atheist for most of his adult life. He wrote a memoir of the family and the leaving of it and gave the book a title taken from a Brethren hymn: When This Mask of Flesh is Broken. That is the detail to hold. The man who left the church narrates his departure from inside the cadence of the church. He reaches for the hymn his ancestors sang over their dead to name the book about no longer believing the hymn. The faith you reject is the one that teaches you what a life story sounds like.
Ernest Becker (1924–1974) gives us the frame to read this. A man, Becker argued, knows he will die and cannot bear the knowing, and so he builds a hero system, a structure of symbols that lets him feel his life counts against oblivion. The hero system tells him what heroism is, what a contribution looks like, how a name outlasts a body. Every culture is such a structure. The Brethren offered one shape of it: a saved soul, a plain life, a congregation that buries you in the assurance of resurrection. Hollinger declined that shape and built another in its place. The pulpit became the lectern. The sermon became the monograph. The congregation became the seminar and then the readership. The soul to be saved became the argument to be advanced, the citation that would carry his name forward into a conversation he hoped had no end. Becker would say the form of heroism stayed while the creed flipped. The Brethren minister and the Berkeley professor are the same animal denying the same death by different doctrines.
The doctrine Hollinger built has a sacred word at its center, and the word is solidarity.
He spent a book on it. He paired it with cosmopolitanism and asked how a man holds both: the reach toward all of humanity and the bond with the few who are his. For Hollinger solidarity means the readiness to share a fate with people you did not choose by blood, the willingness to count strangers as kin because you have reasoned your way to the wider circle rather than inherited the narrow one. His solidarity is voluntary, revisable, postethnic. You affiliate. You can re-affiliate. The “we” you belong to is the one you keep choosing, not the one your grandmother handed you in the cradle. He drew the line from Randolph Bourne (1886–1918), who imagined a trans-national America before the First World War killed him, and from William James (1842–1910), who taught that ideas earn their truth in use. The circle widens by argument and by choice. That is the heaven of the secular cosmopolitan. A future in which the we has grown to hold everyone, and a man’s name attaches to having pushed the edge of it outward.
Hold that meaning of the word steady, and then carry the same word into other rooms, because the trouble Becker exposes is that the word is sacred to people who mean nothing alike by it.
In a shipyard in Gdańsk, solidarity wears a different face. A welder there in the early eighties wore the word on a banner over a strike, and behind the banner stood the Black Madonna and a Polish pope and a nation that had buried its faith and dug it back up under an atheist state. Ask that man what solidarity means and he points to the union card and the rosary in the same gesture. The we is the baptized nation. The bond is descent and faith fused into one thing, and the enemy who taught him the word, the Party, used it to mean the brotherhood of all workers everywhere, the wide circle with no edge. He spat that version out. To the welder the cosmopolitan solidarity is the acid the commissars poured on the nation to dissolve it. “They told us we were brothers with the whole world,” he might say, wiping his hands, “so that we would forget we were Poles.” His solidarity needs an edge. It is solid because it stops somewhere.
Cross to a storefront church in Memphis on a Sunday, and a Pentecostal grandmother in a white usher’s gown uses the word and means the blood. The we is the household of the saints, washed in the blood of the Lamb, and the bond runs through the Spirit and the church family that will sit with her when she is sick and bury her right when she dies. Solidarity for her is deliverance shared. It has a temperature and a sound, the organ and the shout, and it asks God for His mercy by His name. Tell her the circle should widen until it holds the welder’s commissar and the Berkeley atheist on equal terms with the saints, and she hears the dissolving of the one thing that will carry her through the grave. Her solidarity buries its dead with certainty. That is its test and its proof.
Cross again to a kollel in Jerusalem, where a young man bent over a folio of Talmud means Klal Yisrael when he says the word, the peoplehood of Israel, a covenant and a descent and a Torah braided into a single rope that runs back to Sinai and forward past his own death through the sons he will have. His solidarity is the most bounded of all and the most ancient. It will not widen, because the boundary is the point, the boundary is what God drew. To him the postethnic dream is the assimilationist’s solvent in a new bottle, the thing that emptied the Reform temples and that he has organized his entire life to refuse. He would tell you, without heat, that a we you can re-choose every morning is no we at all. The covenant chose him. He did not affiliate. He was born inside the rope.
Now put a software engineer in a glass building south of Hollinger’s hill, an effective altruist who tithes a third of his salary to malaria nets and writes spreadsheets that weigh the suffering of strangers ten thousand miles off against the suffering of his own neighbors and finds the neighbors carry no extra weight. He uses the word solidarity and means the impartial concern of one mind for all sentient things, the widening circle taken to its mathematical limit and past the human edge entirely, out to the animals and the unborn and the machines that might one day feel. Of all these people his version sits closest to Hollinger’s, and the two would still quarrel, because the engineer has run the cosmopolitan logic so far that it erases the particular faces Hollinger wanted to keep. The welder and the grandmother and the yeshiva student are rounding errors in his model. He has the widest circle anyone has yet drawn, and it is so wide it holds no one in particular, which is the danger that lives at the bottom of the wide circle and that Hollinger spent a career trying to outrun.
And then the Marine, twenty years old, who would find this whole catalogue of meanings ridiculous. Ask him about solidarity and he names the two men to his left and his right and tells you he will die for them and not for an idea, not for the circle, not for the species, not for the flag past a certain point, for them, by name, because they would do it for him. His we has three members and a fourth if you count the one who died last month. He has the smallest circle in the room and the one most willing to pay in blood, and the size and the cost run in exactly that direction, the narrow we paying the most and the wide we paying the least, which is the pattern Hollinger knows better than anyone alive and which sits at the heart of his own quiet tragedy.
Here the essay turns, because the strange thing about David Hollinger is that he is a connoisseur of hero systems. He did not need Becker. He spent the back half of his career building, on his own and out of the archive, an account of which faiths keep their young and which faiths bleed them out, and the account reads like a Becker case study written by a man who would never use the word.
His finding goes like this. The ecumenical Protestants, the liberal mainline, the Methodists and Presbyterians and Congregationalists who ran the seminaries and the foreign missions and the magazines, won the moral argument of the twentieth century. They came to tolerance. They came to science. They blessed the wider circle, repented of the missionary’s arrogance, opened their arms to other faiths and no faith, and dissolved the boundary between the saved and the rest. In After Cloven Tongues of Fire he names the cost in the title. Pentecost in the Book of Acts comes as tongues of fire that let the disciples speak every language at once, the boundary of nation burned away by the Spirit. The ecumenists had their own Pentecost, their own burning away of the boundary, and after the fire there was no church left to speak in. They won the argument and emptied the pews. Their children walked into the wider culture, into the universities and the professions and the secular cosmopolitan world, and never came back, because a faith that has dissolved its own edge gives a child no reason to stay inside it. Meanwhile the evangelicals, who lost the argument in every seminary that counted, kept the boundary, kept the enemy, kept the certainty, and filled the parking lots. The boundary-keepers persist. The boundary-dissolvers diffuse.
Becker might put it harder than Hollinger will. A hero system that promises a man significance through the dissolution of every particular bond cannot bury him. It has no funeral. It has no kin who must come. It has no name on a wall and no enemy whose defeat would mean his triumph. The widest circle is the thinnest, and the thinnest circle starves the very death-anxiety that drove a man to build a circle at all. Universal solidarity asks you to share a fate with everyone, and a fate shared with everyone is a fate shared with no one in the hour you need a hand on your shoulder. The grave wants descent. It wants the rope back to Sinai, the blood of the Lamb, the nation under the Black Madonna, the two men to your left and right. It does not want an affiliation you might revise next year.
Hollinger knows this. That is the part that lifts him out of the ordinary run of secular professors and makes him worth the close attention. He documented the death of his own side. He showed, in book after book, that the people who widened the circle lost the institutions and the children, and that the people who policed the edge kept both. He drew the curve and he read it correctly and he stayed on the losing half of it on purpose. The cosmopolitan, in his hands, becomes the man who has read the anthropology of his own faith, who knows the survival odds of the wide we, who can see that his solidarity will probably win the argument and lose the people, and who keeps the faith anyway because for him the truth of the wide circle outranks its odds of lasting. He chooses the meaning that cannot save him. By Becker’s own lights that might be the most heroic move available to a man, to look straight at the death of your hero system and serve it without the consolation that it will outlive you.
The descent-consent quarrel sits under all of it, and Hollinger took the terms from Werner Sollors (b. 1943), who split American identity into the line you inherit by blood and the line you choose by will. Descent against consent. Hollinger is the great American champion of consent, of the we you build by argument and affiliation, and Sollors’s own scholarship carries the warning Hollinger has spent his life trying to disprove. Consent communities are easy to leave. You can divorce one. You cannot divorce your blood. When the night comes and the diagnosis is bad, the consent community sends a thoughtful card and the descent community sends a casserole and a minyan and stays until morning. Hollinger wants the casserole to come from the chosen we, and the welder and the grandmother and the yeshiva student all tell him, in their different rooms and their incompatible accents, that it will not, that the casserole comes from the rope you were born inside, and that a man who cuts every rope in the name of the species will find the species busy elsewhere on the night he dies.
So we come back to the hymn. When This Mask of Flesh is Broken. A man raised by four generations of preachers leaves the faith, builds a hero system out of the secular cosmopolitan dream, proves by his own scholarship that the dream cannot keep its children, and reaches at the end for the hymn his great-grandfather sang to name the book about all of it. The mask of flesh breaks for the atheist as surely as for the saint. The question Becker leaves on the table, and the question Hollinger’s whole shelf circles without quite landing on, is which we shows up when it breaks. The widest one promises the most and arrives the least. The narrowest one promises the least and arrives with the casserole. Hollinger bet his life on the wide circle with his eyes open. A man can do worse than serve a faith he knows will not bury him. He cannot, though, pretend the narrow faiths do not know something about the grave that the wide one has forgotten, and to his credit, across eight books, Hollinger never quite pretends. He keeps the hymn. He keeps the word. He hands both forward and lets the reader decide how wide to draw the we, which is the most a cosmopolitan can honestly offer, and more than most of them admit.
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 John J. Mearsheimer is right, his anthropology subverts the intellectual project of David Hollinger.
Hollinger is celebrated for proposing a “postethnic” vision for American society. He distinguishes between rigid, prescriptive multiculturalism, which locks individuals into their ethnic groups of origin, and a cosmopolitan postethnicism, which promotes voluntary, multiple affiliations. He argues that individuals can use their reason to choose and switch their cultural alignments, creating a more fluid, civic, and inclusive American democracy.
Mearsheimer’s realism undercuts Hollinger’s framework in several ways.
The core of Hollinger’s postethnic model is the shift from “descent” to “consent.” He argues that modern citizens should be free to choose which communities they affiliate with, rather than being defined permanently by their biological or ethnic ancestry.
If Mearsheimer is right, this capacity for conscious, fluid consent is an anthropological fiction. Human beings are born into a long, vulnerable childhood, requiring intense socialization within an existing group to survive. During this prolonged period, the family and local community impose a totalizing value infusion onto the child’s mind. By the time an individual develops the capacity for abstract reasoning, his foundational attachments, survival instincts, and primal loyalties are already sealed. Hollinger’s voluntary postethnic identity is a luxury concept that can only occur to a highly secure, wealthy academic elite; for the vast majority of the species, group identity is an inescapable inheritance that cannot be swapped like an affiliation badge.
In Protestants Abroad, Hollinger traces how American ecumenical missionaries returned from encounters with foreign cultures and helped dismantle domestic ethnocentrism, paving the way for a more cosmopolitan, inclusive nation. He views cosmopolitanism as a genuine intellectual escape from tribal provincialism.
Mearsheimer’s anthropology, paired with David Pinsof’s alliance theory, strips away this liberal optimism. Cosmopolitanism is the ideological standard of a highly sophisticated, dominant tribe. The ecumenical elites Hollinger chronicles did not transcend group logic. They formed a new, powerful, and secularized intellectual coalition that used the language of universal inclusion to claim moral authority and institutional dominance over more provincial, traditional, and nationalistic rival factions within American life. Their cosmopolitanism serves as a tool for status maintenance and reputation management, not a post-political sanctuary.
Hollinger argues that a postethnic nation can maintain its cohesion through a shared commitment to democratic processes, constitutional principles, and civic engagement, rather than relying on common blood or restrictive soil.
In Protestants Abroad and After Cloven Tongues of Fire, Hollinger tracks the mid-twentieth-century decline of mainstream, ecumenical Protestantism and the subsequent rise of a secularized, multicultural American intelligentsia. He analyzes this shift as a victory for intellectual transformation, arguing that ecumenical leaders chose to cede cultural territory because their encounters abroad made them too open-minded to maintain rigid, parochial dogmas.
Mearsheimer’s realism strips this narrative of its intellectual idealism, explaining it through the logic of coalition displacement. One elite group did not simply change its mind and hand over the keys to American culture. Rather, the traditional ecumenical establishment lost its material and institutional dominance because it failed to maintain its internal cohesion. It was outmaneuvered by a more aggressive, tightly bound coalition of secular, universalist intellectuals who used the language of cosmopolitanism to claim moral authority. The decline Hollinger documents is a classic example of group competition for institutional dominance, not a peaceful evolution toward a more enlightened, post-dogmatic consciousness.
A pillar of Hollinger’s postethnic vision is that individuals do not have to belong to just one group; they can maintain multiple, overlapping, and voluntary affiliations—such as being simultaneously loyal to an ethnic heritage, a professional guild, a civic nation, and a global humanitarian cause. He views this multi-layered identity as a buffer against tribal conflict.
Mearsheimer’s hierarchy of human preferences reveals the fragility of this setup. While an individual can maintain multiple affiliations during times of peace and material abundance, these identities are not equal in weight. Humans are social animals whose primary driver is group survival under conditions of structural anarchy. When a crisis occurs, the overlapping layers dissolve. A person cannot maintain equal loyalty to a global humanitarian cause and the specific group that secures his immediate survival. In any real conflict over resources, status, or security, the primary, unreflective value infusion received in childhood overrides all voluntary, secondary affiliations. Hollinger’s model functions only when the baseline security of the state is so total that the existential stakes of group membership are temporarily forgotten.
Hollinger views the ongoing American “culture wars” as an ideological and philosophical debate between provincial, defensive ethno-nationalists on one side and forward-looking, inclusive cosmopolitans on the other. He treats this divide as an intellectual problem that can be resolved by refining the civic promises of American democracy.
Mearsheimer’s anthropology reveals that the culture wars are not an intellectual disagreement, but a raw conflict between competing domestic tribes fighting for state control. The cosmopolitan language of inclusion and the provincial language of nationalism are the respective ideological standards used by these rival coalitions to mobilize their followers, police their boundaries, and manage their reputations. The conflict cannot be negotiated away through better civic theory because it is driven by the immutable logic of group competition. Each side is fighting to control the state machinery because the state is the ultimate vehicle for group preservation and status dominance.
Mearsheimer’s realism rejects the idea that abstract ideas can bind a large population when conditions deteriorate. Reason and text-based civic principles arrive late and rank last among human motivations. The primary environment of the social animal is the protective vehicle of the tribe, which offers security under conditions of structural anarchy and resource scarcity. Hollinger’s civic circle remains stable only as long as the state possesses overwhelming material power and faces no existential threats. The moment a systemic crisis or real scarcity hits, the thin, rational bonds of postethnic consensus are dropped. Individuals instantly fall back on the unreflective, exclusionary group identities that actually preserve life.
If David Pinsof is right, Hollinger’s optimistic cosmopolitan blueprint is an elegant masking operation. His historical frameworks treat group friction as a problem of bad ideas, when it is actually a competition for power.
In Postethnic America, Hollinger proposed that society should move beyond traditional multiculturalism—which traps individuals in fixed racial or ethnic boxes—toward a “postethnic” perspective. This model encourages flexible, voluntary affiliations and civic solidarity. He framed the fierce cultural wars over identity as a conceptual tangle that a more sophisticated, civic-minded framework could resolve. Pinsof might say that ethnic and racial groupings are not administrative misunderstandings or outdated concepts that people accidentally cling to. They are highly efficient, evolved coalitions used to compete for resources, status, and control over the state.
Hollinger’s cosmopolitan, “postethnic” ideal is not a neutral solution for the masses; it is a luxury belief tailored for the secular academic elite. For professors at Berkeley, voluntary, fluid identities work beautifully because their status is secured by their university credentials and cultural capital. For lower-status groups, fixed ethnic and coalitional loyalty is a vital shield and a tool to demand resources from the state. By advocating for a “postethnic” civic harmony, Hollinger is subtly asking groups to disarm their most potent political weapons, leaving the credentialed intelligentsia to manage the state unhindered.
In his 2022 book, Christianity’s American Fate: How Religion Became More Conservative and Society More Secular, Hollinger argued that ecumenical (liberal) Protestants successfully integrated Enlightenment values and opened America up to diversity, but in doing so, they lost ground to evangelical Protestants who weaponized a narrow, insular tribalism. He framed the rise of the religious right as a tragic distortion of Christian history and a failure of the public to appreciate liberal religious values.
Pinsof might say that the split between liberal secularism and evangelical conservatism is a zero-sum turf war over who gets to dictate the moral direction of the nation. The liberal Protestants Hollinger champions did not lose ground because of a strategic whoopsie or a lack of good marketing. They lost ground because they aligned themselves with the secular university elite and the administrative state.
The evangelicals are acting completely rationally: they built a rival coalition to protect their own status, family structures, and local authority from the coercive apparatus of a secular state guided by university professors. Hollinger frames this as a tragedy of religious regression, but it is actually a standard Darwinian counter-attack against a hostile elite
Hollinger, along with Charles Capper (1948-2021), edited The American Intellectual Tradition, one of the most widely used sourcebooks in college history courses. The textbook traces the evolution of American thought, operating on the implicit premise that understanding our intellectual history expands public perception and clarifies our democratic commitments.
Pinsof might say that a massive history textbook is an alliance-building device and a sorting tool. By deciding which essays and thinkers constitute the “authentic” American tradition, the historian establishes a professional monopoly over the national mind.
Hollinger did not compile these texts out of a disinterested love for the past. He built an apparatus that requires university professors to interpret. If the public can understand their country through raw political rallies or local traditions, the intellectual is redundant. But if understanding America requires mastering a dense canon of pragmatism, secularism, and cosmopolitanism, then Hollinger and his peers remain the indispensable gatekeepers of elite status, collecting credentials while supervising the view from the top of the academic hierarchy.
Eager to Fight: The Hero System of John Podhoretz
In the weeks after his father dies, John Podhoretz (b. 1961) sits at a keyboard and defends the graves.
Norman Podhoretz (1930-2025) goes in December. Within the month a fight breaks out over what the old man stood for. Kevin Roberts (b. 1974), who runs the Heritage Foundation, defends Tucker Carlson (b. 1969) for handing a friendly hour to Nick Fuentes (b. 1998), a man who traffics in Jew-hatred. John answers. He reminds Roberts that his mother, Midge Decter (1927-2022), sat on the Heritage board for forty years. He tells Roberts that Decter would have known him for the fraud he is.
Read that as a son in grief, and it scans one way. Read it through Ernest Becker (1924-1974), and it opens.
Becker says a man builds a hero system to hold off the knowledge that he dies. The system gives him a stage and a script. Play the part well and you earn the feeling that you will not be erased, that something carries your name past the body. A soldier earns it under fire. A mother earns it in the child. A scholar earns it in the footnote that outlives him. The terror is annihilation. The cure is significance, and the culture hands out significance on its own terms.
John inherits a stage already built. His father raised it. The magazine is his father’s. The friends are his father’s, and so are the ex-friends, a category his father turned into a book. The enemies are inherited the way a family business inherits its debts. When John tells Kevin Roberts that his dead mother would have seen through him, he fights two fights at once. He defends Israel and the West, the cause. He defends the parents in the ground, the line. In his hero system these are the same fight.
Start with the cause, because John names it himself and the naming is precise. He says the magazine he runs carries a four-part charge. Defend the West and its institutions. Defend Israel. Stand as a wall against Jew-hatred. Hold up, in the pages, the best that has been thought and said, the phrase he borrows from Matthew Arnold (1822-1888). Then he undercuts the grandeur with a shrug. It comes down to twenty items an issue, every month.
That shrug is the tell. The grand mission and the twenty items are the same object seen from two distances. The mission is the immortality. The twenty items are the labor that earns it. Commentary turns eighty with four editors across its life. Elliot Cohen founds it and dies. Norman holds it thirty-five years. Neal Kozodoy holds it thirteen. John takes the chair in January 2009. The magazine outlives its editors by design. A man who edits it joins a chain that runs past his own death. That is the deal Becker describes, struck in print and renewed monthly.
So the sacred word in this hero system is not loyalty, though loyalty rides close. The sacred word is courage. Norman praised Donald Trump for one virtue above the rest, the willingness to fight, and corrected himself to say eagerness. Not willing. Eager. The whole house turns on that correction. In the Podhoretz cosmos a man earns his place by fighting, and he forfeits it by deserting under fire. To go quiet when the enemy speaks is not prudence. It is a small death, a downpayment on the larger erasure the system exists to refuse.
Watch John live it. At midnight he is on the feed, swinging. Colleagues at the old Weekly Standard, which he helped found, said his self-regard had an effect people could not credit. A profile once said he took his father’s literary narcissism without the ideological vigor. He read it. He kept fighting. The fight does not close because the enemy does not sleep, and the enemy is plural: the campus, the chic anti-Zionist, the podcaster with the swastika in his back pocket, the conservative who decides Israel costs too much. Each one threatens the same thing, the erasure of the team, and the team for John runs from the State of Israel to the family name to the magazine to his dead.
The history sits under the courage and explains its heat. John’s grandparents come out of Galicia. The 1924 immigration law shuts the American door, and Jews who might have walked through it instead stay in Europe for what comes. Norman said he could not back a closed border because of what 1924 did to his people. For this family annihilation is not an abstraction a philosopher names. It is the family arithmetic, the cousins who are not born. So when Iran builds toward a bomb, the Podhoretz mind does not file it under foreign policy. It files it under 1938, under appeasement, under the door that closes. Courage means refusing the closed door. Cowardice means narischkeit, the Yiddish word for foolishness John reaches for when men dither over what he reads as plain. The man who weighs both sides of the bomb is not careful. He is the 1924 senator in a new suit.
Here the Becker frame earns its keep, because the same word he builds his life on means nothing he recognizes in the next hero system over. Courage does not travel. Each system mints its own, and the coins do not exchange.
Consider the Carthusian in his cell at the Grande Chartreuse. He keeps silence as a rule of life. He answers no insult. He builds no byline. He thins the self toward nothing so that God fills the space the self leaves. His courage is the daily refusal to assert. Set him beside John and the two men cancel. What the monk calls the high act, the swallowing of the retort, John calls the desertion. What John calls the high act, the answer fired back at midnight, the monk calls the noise that keeps God out. They use one word. They mean opposite worlds.
Consider the test pilot Tom Wolfe (1930-2018) chased through The Right Stuff. His courage is nerve held in the cockpit and never spoken of. The code forbids the naming. A man who announces his own bravery has none; he has shown the seam where the fear gets in. John’s courage demands the opposite. It must be performed, posted, printed, witnessed, because the witness is the point. An unfought fight earns no place in the chain. The pilot earns his immortality by saying nothing. The editor earns his by twenty items a month. Same virtue. Reversed grammar.
Consider the masmid in the Jerusalem study hall, bent eighteen hours over a folio. His courage is to ignore the news. Empires rise and the headline screams and he does not look up, because the page in front of him outranks the century. He treats the urgent as the trivial on principle. Now hand him Commentary, a magazine that lives on the now, twenty items about this month’s threat. To him the magazine is the distraction, the world pulling at the sleeve. To John the masmid’s serenity is a man asleep while the door closes. Each sees the other forfeiting the only thing worth holding.
Consider the hospice nurse at the bedside at four in the morning. Her courage is to stop fighting. She calls the fight off, takes the hand, sits while the breath goes shallow. Her whole training points her away from the swing John cannot stop taking. In her hero system the brave act is surrender done well, the dying made gentle. Speak the word appeasement to her and she will not flinch, because in her cosmos the refusal to fight is the mercy. In John’s cosmos that same refusal is the sin of 1938.
Consider the Pashtun greybeard under the old code, who shares more with John than the monk or the nurse and still cannot be read straight across. His courage braids with badal, the debt of revenge, and John honors revenge; the ex-friend stays an ex-friend. But the code binds the greybeard to melmastia too, shelter owed even to the man who wronged him, the enemy fed and housed under the roof for three days because the roof demands it. John shelters no one who has crossed the line. The line, once crossed, is permanent, which is what the word ex-friend means. The two men would recognize the feud. Neither could sit at the other’s table.
Five men. Five courages. None converts. Becker’s point, carried past where he left it: a hero system is not a set of opinions a man could trade for better ones. It is the apparatus that lets him feel he will not vanish, and you cannot argue a man out of the thing standing between him and the void. John cannot grant the monk’s silence the name courage without conceding that his own midnight fight might be vanity. The monk cannot grant John’s fight the name courage without conceding that his silence might be a hiding place. So the word holds, and the worlds slide past each other, and each man calls the others, in his private grammar, cowards.
The heir carries a second weight the founder never did, and this is where John parts from his father and where the frame turns fresh.
Norman built his hero system from nothing, the Brownsville boy who climbed into the room and then wrote a book about the climbing. He authored himself, or told himself he did, which Becker says is the deepest wish a man carries, to be his own father, to owe his existence to no one. John cannot make that wish. He did not build the room. He was born in it. The magazine has his father’s fingerprints on every wall. The fights are heirlooms. So his significance leans on a borrowed footing, and the borrowing is the thing the cruel profile named when it gave him the narcissism and withheld the vigor.
Read his memorial essay on his father and the structure shows. He does not only mourn. He speaks for the dead man. He tells you what Norman would have thought of this month’s news, what would have delighted him, what he would have dismissed as foolishness. The son ventriloquizes the father, and in doing so keeps the father from finishing the act of dying. As long as John can say what Norman would have thought, Norman thinks. The hero system that held off Norman’s death now holds off the part of that death that would otherwise reach John, the closing of the line, the end of the name as a force in the room.
This is why the Kevin Roberts fight runs so hot, hotter than a policy disagreement warrants. Roberts did not only excuse a Jew-hater. By doing it inside an institution Midge Decter helped steer for forty years, he reached into the family ground and disturbed it. John’s answer guards two graves and one cause in a single sentence, and the three are welded. Defend Israel, defend the West, defend the parents, hold the line their lives drew. To let Roberts pass unanswered would be to let the line blur, and a blurred line is a kind of forgetting, and forgetting is the annihilation the whole system stands against.
There is a release valve, and it is worth naming because it completes the man. John reviews movies. He has done it for decades, grades a Pixar feature or a Spielberg picture with the same faculty he turns on a statesman. He does a Yitzhak Rabin impression people remember. He writes jokes. In the dark of the screening room the terror loosens for two hours, and the same axis still runs, the serious against the fraudulent, the real article against the counterfeit, but the stakes drop to where a man can laugh. The comedy is not separate from the fight. It is the fight at rest, the soldier off the line for a night, still a soldier.
Set the frame down and the man stands clear. John Podhoretz runs a hero system that grants immortality through the fight, conducted in print, witnessed by the team, never deserted under fire, and now doubled by the duty of the heir who keeps a dead father speaking. Courage is its sacred word. The word means refuse the closed door, answer the enemy, hold the line your blood drew. To the monk, the pilot, the masmid, the nurse, the greybeard, the same word means five other things, and not one of the five would call John’s midnight swing brave. He would return the favor. That is not a flaw in any of them. It is what a hero system is, the local rule for earning the right not to disappear, written in a language that does not translate.
John fights because the alternative, in his cosmos, is to vanish, and to let his father vanish with him. A man who reads that as mere temper has not yet asked what he himself does at midnight to keep the dark at bay.
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 definitive verdict on John Podhoretz.
Mearsheimer’s thesis treats John Podhoretz’s entire intellectual career as a classic demonstration of family-based value infusion and elite coalition management.
Mearsheimer argues that humans possess a long childhood in which they are exposed to intense socialization before they can reason for themselves. He writes that by the time an individual’s reasoning skills mature, his family has already imposed an enormous value infusion on him, leaving him with limited choice in formulating his worldview.
John Podhoretz is the literal embodiment of this principle. Born to the central power couple of neocervatism, Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter, his path was carved by his inheritance. He attended elite schools, became a Reagan speechwriter, co-founded The Weekly Standard, and eventually succeeded his father as the editor of Commentary. His fierce defense of American exceptionalism, his hawkish foreign policy positions, and his alignment with the neoconservative elite are predictable results of his early environment. Mearsheimer’s anthropology implies that John Podhoretz did not independently survey the political landscape and reason his way to neoconservatism; his brain was wired for it before he ever wrote a word of copy.
John Podhoretz’s editorial tenure at Commentary is defined by a fierce commitment to preserving the specific legacy of his parents’ generation, maintaining strict political boundaries, and aggressively policing rivals on the left and right.
Mearsheimer’s model explains this role perfectly. A magazine like Commentary is not a neutral forum for abstract, intellectual debate; it is the institutional flag of a specific, highly cohesive intellectual tribe. John Podhoretz does not operate as a lone-wolf critic. He functions as a tribal trustee whose primary responsibility is to protect the status, prestige, and ideological purity of his coalition. His sharp polemics and media critiques serve to signal loyalty to his group and maintain its defense mechanisms in an anarchic media market.
In his 2004 book, Bush Country, John Podhoretz championed George W. Bush as a great leader, strongly backing the invasion of Iraq and the broader project of democratic transformation in the Middle East. Like his father, he operated on the liberal assumption that human beings are atomistic actors who, once freed from tyrannical governance, will readily adopt Western legal institutions and democratic practices.
Mearsheimer’s thesis reveals that this optimism was an anthropological fantasy. Because individuals abroad receive their value infusions from their own distinct cultures, families, and religious traditions, they remain bound to their primary group loyalties for survival. The institutional engineering John Podhoretz supported in Bush Country misread the creature entirely. The catastrophic friction that followed the Iraq War confirms Mearsheimer’s prediction: you cannot export a parochial Western political structure to a population whose deep socialization and survival needs are anchored in older, tribal, and sectarian realities.
If Mearsheimer is right, John Podhoretz’s career is a double confirmation of the realist thesis. His political activism abroad failed because he ignored the unyielding power of foreign tribal socialization, while his political survival at home succeeded because he obeyed the rules of his own.
‘A Big Misunderstanding’
If David Pinsof is right, John Podhoretz’s entire career is a textbook example of a media elite who uses a conservative version of the misunderstanding myth to run an identical status-and-influence operation.
Podhoretz is a central figure on the Commentary podcast and a frequent guest across conservative digital media. These platforms are framed as spaces for sanity where clear-eyed, rational people can dissect the absurd, biased, and “woke” misunderstandings of the mainstream media and progressive elites.
Pinsof might say that the podcast is not an instrument of public enlightenment; it is an alliance engine and a tool for coalitional warfare. Podhoretz does not talk into a microphone to correct the record out of a disinterested love for accuracy. He does it to signal solidarity with his specific subset of the elite—the anti-populist, neoconservative, and right-of-center intellectual class. By spend hours every week mocking the cognitive biases and “lunacy” of his cultural rivals, he provides his listeners with the vocabulary they need to feel morally and intellectually superior. It is a premium product designed to build a tribe and protect a media market share.
A major theme in Podhoretz’s commentary is the blindness of modern progressives. He argues that left-wing institutions—universities, the New York Times, Hollywood—suffer from a total detachment from reality, driven by ideological bubbles and confirmation bias. He frames his own commentary as a necessary corrective to these elite delusions.
Pinsof might say that Podhoretz uses the language of cognitive bias as a weapon to delegitimize his enemies. By claiming that progressives are blinded by an ideological virus, he avoids having to acknowledge that his opponents are actually rational actors fighting for their own group interests, resources, and control of the state. It is much more advantageous to call your rival “delusional” or “brained-washed” than to admit he is a savvy competitor. Podhoretz plays the exact game Pinsof describes: he frames a raw power struggle as a mental error on the part of his opponents, positioning himself as the sane arbiter who sees the world clearly.
When Donald Trump captured the Republican Party, Podhoretz found himself in a complex position—often critical of Trump’s populist base and manners, yet deeply hostile to the Democratic left. He frequently blamed Trump’s rise on the ignorance of voters or the failure of the media to properly explain the dangers of populism.
Pinsof might say that the horror that old-guard conservative intellectuals felt toward Trumpism was not a high-minded defense of institutional norms. It was a panic over a loss of professional utility. In the pre-Trump GOP, politicians relied on intellectuals like the Podhoretzes to provide the white papers, the ideological justifications, and the moral framing for state power.
Trump bypassed the intellectual class entirely, proving that voters did not care about elite conservative theory; they wanted direct, raw, zero-sum coalitional combat. Podhoretz’s complaints about the “degradation” of the conservative movement were a rational reaction to his class being made redundant. When he laments the “misunderstandings” of populism, he is really lamenting that the masses stopped buying his product, forcing him to spend his career studying and critiquing the very hole his own media ecosystem helped dig.