Ernest Becker (1924-1974) argued that every culture hands its members a plan for mattering. The plan tells a man what counts as a life well spent, what raises him above the worm and the dirt, what lets him believe his death will not erase him. Becker called the plan a hero system. Inside it, a handful of words turn sacred. They name the tokens a man trades for significance. Honor. Purity. Freedom. Service. The words look universal. They are not. Each one means what its system needs it to mean, and a man raised in one system can hear the same word spoken in another and feel nothing at all, or feel disgust.
Ruth Wisse (b. 1936) spent a career on this recognition before she fought a single political fight over it.
Her first book, The Schlemiel as a Modern Hero (1971), took the luckless fool of Yiddish letters and read him as the central figure of the modern Jewish imagination. The schlemiel loses. He spills the soup, marries the wrong woman, misses the train, trusts the man who robs him. The world breaks him and he keeps his sweetness. In the breaking, Wisse found a claim. The fool’s defeat indicts the world that defeats him. He cannot win, so he turns losing into the proof of his soul. He has no army and no court that will hear him, so he keeps his wit and his wound and makes them a sign that he stands higher than the men who crush him.
The schlemiel offers a hero system. It hands the powerless a way to matter. You own no land you can hold and no force that answers to you, and you survive by converting that condition into a verdict against power as such. Strength becomes the marker of the brute. Weakness becomes the marker of the just. A man dies poor and beaten and the system tells him he died right.
Wisse the scholar loved this figure. Wisse the political writer spent forty years warning that a people might die of him.
Jews and Power (2007) is the warning set down in full. She read the long exile as a school that taught Jews to treat weakness as wisdom, accommodation as ethics, the refusal of force as a higher law. The lesson worked for centuries. A people without a state learned to bend, to pay, to flatter the prince, to survive by never holding the sword. Then, in the middle of the twentieth century, the strategy failed in the worst way a strategy can fail a people, and no amount of moral elevation answered the trains. Zionism, in her reading, recovered the thing exile had taught Jews to despise. Power. Not a sin to confess but the price of staying alive.
So the figure that anchors her scholarship becomes the alarm of her politics. The schlemiel on the page is a treasure. The schlemiel running a foreign ministry is a death sentence.
Power is her sacred word, and she uses it against the grain of almost everyone around her. To see how strange her usage runs, set it beside the others.
Walk into a Friends meeting house on a cold morning. The benches face inward. Nobody speaks until the Spirit moves him, and when a man rises he speaks of the light, not of force. Here power is the thing the righteous lay down. The Quaker earns his place in the order of the saved by renunciation. To hold a weapon, to command, to compel, all of it stains. A man matters in this room by how much he refuses. Tell him that a people has a duty to seize power and you have described to him a fall from grace. He hears in Wisse the voice of the world he left.
Down the corridor from Wisse’s own department sits the seminar where power means the opposite again. The graduate students there breathe a theory that owes its temper to Michel Foucault (1926-1984). Power is the air. It runs through every clinic and classroom and bedroom, capillary, total, hidden in the things that look most innocent. The hero of this system is the one who unmasks it. He earns significance by exposure, by naming the domination others cannot see. To want power, to call for it openly as a good, marks a man as the villain the seminar exists to catch. Wisse walks in asking Jews to gather strength and take it, and the room hears the enemy speaking without shame.
Cross the ocean to a hill town where an older man holds court at a back table. For him power and respect are one word. A man is what other men dare not do to him. To be strong is to be safe and to be safe is to be a man, and the one without strength gets eaten and deserves the eating. This patriarch would understand Wisse’s politics in his marrow. He has never needed a book to tell him that the weak are prey. Hand him The Schlemiel as a Modern Hero and he would not finish the first chapter. The fool who turns his beating into a halo strikes him as the lowest thing alive, a man who licks the boot and calls the taste honey.
Sit a fourth man on a cushion in a monastery in the hills above a valley in Sri Lanka. He has shaved his head and given away his name. For him the only power worth the word is power over the self, and a man wins it by emptying the self until there is nothing left to defend. Worldly power is the heaviest chain. The prince and the general drag more weight toward the next life than the beggar does. To this monk, Wisse’s nation under arms is a vast and clever cage, a people that has mistaken the lock for the key. He would grieve for her the way one grieves for the diligent.
Four rooms, one word, four salvations that cannot share a house. The Quaker is saved by laying power down. The theorist by exposing it. The patriarch by holding it. The monk by escaping it. Wisse stands apart from all of them. She says a people is saved by taking power and keeping it and refusing to apologize for the taking, and she says this knowing the company it puts her in, because she has read every argument the other rooms can make and judged them luxuries of men who were never marched anywhere.
The same split runs through her other sacred words. Free As A Jew (2021), her memoir, carries the subtitle A Personal Memoir of National Self-Liberation, and the phrase tells you that freedom for Wisse is a thing a people wins together or not at all. The founder who prizes the unencumbered self hears freedom as escape from the group, from the family, from the inherited claim. Wisse hears it as the group grown strong enough that escape stops being the only safety a man can find. To her the lone free individual standing outside any people is a man who has not yet met the morning when the people he disowned would have been the only thing between him and the dark.
If I Am Not For Myself (1992) takes its title from Hillel and aims it at the liberal conscience. The liberal earns significance by transcending his tribe, by caring for the stranger first and the cousin second, by treating loyalty to his own as a smallness he has outgrown. Wisse charges that a conscience built to erase your own people is a betrayal wearing the robes of ethics. The word universalism, sacred in one room as the proof of a large soul, reads in hers as the schlemiel’s old trick in a professor’s vocabulary, the powerless flattering himself that his powerlessness is moral height.
She returned to the comedy at the end. No Joke (2013) studies Jewish humor with love and with fear in equal measure. The joke lets the powerless feel superior to the man with the whip. It also lets him stay under the whip and laugh. The same instrument saves and sedates. The schlemiel’s wit is his blade and his bed, and Wisse spent her late career trying to wake the man who had grown comfortable lying in it.
Her refusal to soften made her a figure of controversy long before the campus turned against her. She once described Palestinians as people who breed and bleed and advertise their misery, and the line followed her for decades, quoted by every critic who wanted to show the cost of her hardness. She did not retract it. In her system the cruelty of plain speech ranks below the cruelty of comforting lies, and a sentence that makes an enemy of the squeamish is a sentence doing its work.
The clearest scene came at Harvard in the fall of 2010. Wisse held the Martin Peretz Professorship of Yiddish Literature, a chair named for the editor and patron Martin Peretz (b. 1938), no relation to the Yiddish master I.L. Peretz (1852-1915) whose reader she edited. The university moved to cancel an event honoring the man whose name she carried, after he wrote a line dismissing Muslim life. Wisse defended him and called the campus reaction groupthink. She argued that asking Muslims to condemn the violence among them counted as liberality rather than bigotry. The room she stood in by then ran on the theorist’s creed, where her defense sounded like the villain confessing, and she made it anyway, holding a chair named for the accused, an old woman telling a faculty that had stopped listening to her exactly what she thought.
Here the essay has to face the thing that makes Wisse rare among the subjects of a hero system reading. She is a scholar of hero systems. The Schlemiel as a Modern Hero is a study of one. She knows the frame from the inside, names the powerless their own form of nobility, and then turns and chooses against it. The question she leaves behind is whether she escaped the schlemiel or only built his opposite.
Becker would say no man escapes. There is no standing outside every system, no view from nowhere that lets you keep significance without a story that confers it. There is only the choice of which story, and whether you know you are inside one. Wisse’s counter-hero, the armed and sovereign Jew who apologizes to no one, is a hero system in its own right. It has its sacred tokens, power and sovereignty and national honor, and its own denials, and it can curdle into the patriarch at the back table who mistakes contempt for strength. She knew this. The knowing is the honest part of her. She did not pretend the sovereign Jew floated free of the conditions that made him. She named the schlemiel a hero system, weighed it, and rejected it with open eyes, on the ground that a beautiful answer to powerlessness is still an answer to powerlessness, and a people that loves the answer too long forgets to fix the condition.
What she could not promise, and did not, was that the cure keeps its memory. The schlemiel knew something true about the men who hold the whip, because he had spent two thousand years on the wrong end of it. The sovereign Jew commands the whip now. Wisse spent her life arguing he had to. She left open the harder question, the one Becker would have pressed, of whether a people can hold power and still hold what the powerless understood, or whether each hero system buys its courage by forgetting the wisdom of the one it replaced.
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 provides an emphatic confirmation of the central cultural and political theories of Ruth Wisse
Wisse has spent decades analyzing the intersection of literature, politics, and Jewish survival. In foundational books like If I Am Not for Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews (1992) and Jews and Power (2007), she mounts a relentless critique of modern liberal universalism. She argues that the Jewish people’s historical vulnerability stems from an over-reliance on moral suasion, international law, and the goodwill of others, which blinds them to the hard reality of political hostility. Wisse champions a robust, clear-eyed appreciation for national particularism and the legitimate exercise of political power.
Mearsheimer’s realism intersects with Wisse’s framework across several key concepts.
Wisse’s central polemic is that liberalism is dangerous for minority groups because it downplays the permanent reality of collective hatred and group competition. She argues that Jews who adopt a universalist, liberal worldview mistakenly believe that if they champion abstract human rights, the rest of the world will treat them as atomistic individuals rather than as members of a distinct tribe. Mearsheimer’s The Great Delusion validates Wisse’s core thesis. Liberalism’s fundamental error is its treatment of people as lone choosers rather than as social animals embedded in competing groups. When Wisse observes that universalist liberal illusions leave a society unprotected against aggressive, cohesive neighbors, she is describing exactly what Mearsheimer’s anthropology predicts.
As a preeminent scholar of Yiddish literature, Wisse treats the works of Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer not merely as aesthetic monuments, but as psychological maps of a people navigating stateless vulnerability. In The Modern Jewish Canon (2000), she tracks how literature serves to sustain collective consciousness, preserve memory, and reinforce internal cohesion without the protective framework of a state. Mearsheimer’s concept of the “value infusion” explains why this literature possesses such enduring power. The child downloads the group’s stories and moral categories long before his independent critical reason matures. The rich linguistic and narrative heritage Wisse spent her career documenting is the literal tool used to seal group identity, anchoring the individual within the survival vehicle of the culture.
In Jews and Power, Wisse argues that the return to sovereignty in the State of Israel required an agonizing psychological shift away from the traditional diasporic strategy of accommodation toward the hard management of military power. She views anti-Zionism not as an intellectual disagreement, but as an expression of the permanent, structural opposition that small, cohesive groups face from rival coalitions in the international arena. Mearsheimer’s structural realism confirms Wisse’s diagnosis: under conditions of international anarchy, any group that refuses to maximize its material power and defend its sovereignty will eventually be dominated by its neighbors. Wisse’s historical critique of Jewish political dependency is a literary expression of Mearsheimer’s hard realist architecture.
Wisse has consistently criticized Western intellectuals who seek a post-national, cosmopolitan world order, viewing their campaigns for global governance or universal human rights as a dangerous evasion of the primary duties owed to one’s own people. Mearsheimer, bolstered by alliance theory, agrees that the cosmopolitan is a tribesman in universal language. The belief that humanity can transcend its tribal baseline through shared liberal institutions is an anthropological fantasy. Wisse identifies this universalism as a targeted threat to her group’s survival; Mearsheimer identifies it as a structural delusion that inevitably shatters against the permanent reality of human nature and collective competition.
Ruth Wisse’s intellectual brand is built on explicitly exposing and mocking the progressive “misunderstandings myth.”
As the longtime Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature at Harvard and a fierce polemicist for Commentary, Wisse spent her career arguing that Western liberals suffer from a delusional, suicidal misunderstanding about the nature of politics and antisemitism.
If Pinsof is right, Wisse’s fierce anti-liberal realism is not an escape from the intellectual status game. It is a highly sophisticated, conservative variant of it.
In her landmark 1992 book, If I Am Not for Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews, Wisse argued that Jewish liberals suffer from a pathology of universalism. She claimed they foolishly believe that if they are nice, progressive, and demonstrate universal empathy, the rest of the world will stop hating them. She framed this as a devastating cognitive and historical error.
Wisse is using the language of delusion to weaponize her own intellectual position. By framing liberal universalism as a naive “whoopsie” or a mental defect, she avoids recognizing that progressive Jewish intellectuals are actually rational actors playing a different coalitional strategy.
For a progressive academic in a secular university, championing universalism and civil rights is a highly effective way to forge alliances with other elite factions and secure status within the institution. Wisse does not admit that this is a rational turf strategy; she calls it a “betrayal” and a delusion. This allows her to position her circle—the neoconservative, nationalist intelligentsia—as the only adult in the room who truly understands reality.
Wisse’s literary scholarship, from The Schlemiel as Modern Hero (1971) to Jews and Power (2007), argues that because Jews lacked a state and control over a military apparatus for two millennia, they developed a brilliant but dangerous literary culture that sublimated weakness into moral superiority. The “schlemiel” (the classic comic underdog) wins arguments by being a moral victim, completely helpless against raw force. Wisse warned that this literary habit crippled the Jewish ability to understand and wield hard state power.
Wisse’s critique of the “moral underdog” is a direct strike against a rival currency. The intellectual class excels at transforming material weakness into moral authority; it is their primary tool to make the strong feel guilty and cede control.By declaring that the celebration of helplessness is a dangerous cultural malfunction, Wisse attempts to devalue the currency of the universalist literary elite. She is engaged in a zero-sum turf war over what kind of intellectual gets to advise the state. She wants to replace the soft, empathetic literary critic with the hard-headed, strategic intellectual who understands that politics is about drawing borders, identifying enemies, and using the coercive apparatus of the state at gunpoint.
Wisse pioneered the academic study of Yiddish literature, culminating in The Modern Jewish Canon (2000). She did not want Yiddish studied merely as a nostalgic, dead dialect of secular socialists. She curated the canon to highlight writers who wrestled with national survival, theological rigor, and the harsh realities of political power.
Pisnof might say that the creation of The Modern Jewish Canon was a flawless exercise in elite resource acquisition and institutional control. In the late twentieth-century university, the old WASP literary monopoly was breaking down. New ethnic studies departments were popping up, usually dominated by the progressive left.
Wisse did not fight this trend by defending the old order; she launched a counter-takeover.
By institutionalizing Yiddish at Harvard under her specific, national-conservative framework, she carved out an independent fiefdom. She ensured that you could not study this massive repository of European Jewish culture without using her textbooks, her anthologies, and her political framing.
Wisse demonstrates Pinsof’s ultimate point. The world functions exactly as natural selection designed it to: rival coalitions fighting for dominance, territory, and institutional real estate. Wisse mocks the progressive intellectuals for thinking they can save the world through soft, empathetic reading lists. But her solution is identical: a hard, nationalist reading list that establishes her as the high priestess of the canon, collecting elite credentials from Harvard while expertly managing the view from her own corner of the hole.
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.