Podhoretz about Trump

CRB: Let’s start by talking about Donald Trump and you. In the first sentence of the first chapter of your book Making It, recently republished by the New York Review of Books Press, of all people—

NP: Hell froze over!

CRB: —you write famously, “One of the longest journeys in the world is the journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan….” How does your journey compare to Trump’s journey from Queens to Manhattan?

NP: Well, of course that’s very dated now. Nobody can afford to live in Brooklyn anymore. Escaping from Brooklyn was the great thing in my young life, but I have grandchildren who would like nothing better than to have an apartment there.

Trump’s move from Queens to Manhattan was, as I understand the real estate business, a quite daring move. Maybe that was the longest journey in the world because the Manhattan real estate world is a world unto its own. The competition is very fierce, you’re dealing with many, many clever people. I think it was Tom Klingenstein who said he always thought Trump was Jewish because he fit in so well with the real-estatenicks in Manhattan, most of whom were, and are, Jewish.

CRB: What does that comparison mean?

NP: I take it as an affectionate remark. He had the qualities that all those guys had in common, and you might have thought, other things being equal, that he was one of them. And in a certain sense he was, but not entirely. I know a few of those guys and they’re actually very impressive. You have to get permits, and you have to deal with the mob, and you have to know how to handle workers who are very recalcitrant, many of whom are thuggish. You’re in a battlefield there, so you have to know how to operate politically as well as in a managerial capacity, and how to sweet talk and also how to curse. It’s not an easy field to master.

CRB: Some people say that Trump has a blue collar sensibility. Do you see that?

NP: I do see it and even before Trump—long before Trump—actually going back to when I was in the army in the 1950s, I got to know blue-collar Americans. I’m “blue collar” myself, I suppose. I’m from the working class—my father was a milk man. But in the army I got to know people from all over the country and I fell in love with Americans—they were just great! These guys were unlike anybody I had ever met in New York or in England or France. They were mostly blue-collar kids and I think Trump has, in that sense, the common touch. That’s one of the things—it may be the main thing—that explains his political success. It doesn’t explain his success in general, but his political success, yes. Also—I often explain this to people—when I was a kid, you would rather be beaten up than back away from a fight. The worst thing in the world you could be called was a sissy. And I was beaten up many times. Trump fights back. The people who say: “Oh, he shouldn’t lower himself,” “He should ignore this,” and “Why is he demeaning himself by arguing with some dopey reporter?” I think on the contrary—if you hit him, he hits back; and he is an equal opportunity counter puncher. It doesn’t matter who you are. And actually Obama, oddly enough, made the same statement: “He pulls a knife, you pull a gun.”

CRB: “The Chicago way.”

NP: As time went on, and I looked around me, however, I began to be bothered by the hatred that was building up against Trump from my soon to be new set of ex-friends. It really disgusted me. I just thought it had no objective correlative. You could think that he was unfit for office—I could understand that—but my ex-friends’ revulsion was always accompanied by attacks on the people who supported him. They called them dishonorable, or opportunists, or cowards—and this was done by people like Bret Stephens, Bill Kristol, and various others. And I took offense at that. So that inclined me to what I then became: anti-anti-Trump. By the time he finally won the nomination, I was sliding into a pro-Trump position, which has grown stronger and more passionate as time has gone on.

On the question of his isolationism, he doesn’t seem to give a damn. He hires John Bolton and Mike Pompeo who, from my point of view, as a neoconservative (I call myself a “paleo-neoconservative” because I’ve been one for so long), couldn’t be better. And that’s true of many of his other cabinet appointments. He has a much better cabinet than Ronald Reagan had, and Reagan is the sacred figure in Republican hagiography. Trump is able to do that because, not only is he not dogmatic, he doesn’t operate on the basis of fixed principles. Now some people can think that’s a defect—I don’t think it’s a defect in a politician at a high level. I remember thinking to myself once on the issue of his embrace of tariffs, and some of my friends were very angry. I said to myself for the first time, “Was thou shalt not have tariffs inscribed on the tablets that Moses brought down from Sinai? Maybe Trump has something on this issue, in this particular”—and then I discovered to my total amazement that there are a hundred tariffs (I think that’s right) against America from all over the world. So the idea that we’re living in a free trade paradise was itself wrong, and in any case, there was no reason to latch onto it as a sacred dogma.

NP: In 1924, immigration virtually stopped and the rationale for the new policy was to give newcomers a chance to assimilate—which may or may not have been the main reason—but it probably worked. What has changed my mind about immigration now—even legal immigration—is that our culture has weakened to the point where it’s no longer attractive enough for people to want to assimilate to, and we don’t insist that they do assimilate. When I was a kid, I lived in a neighborhood that had immigrant Jews, immigrant Italians (mainly from Sicily), and immigrant blacks—that is, they had come up from the South recently. It was incidentally one of the things that made me a lifelong skeptic about integration because far from understanding each other and getting to know each other, all we did was fight. In any case, the stuff that went on in the public schools! I had an incident when I went to school at the age of five. Although I was born in Brooklyn, I was bilingual and Yiddish was in a sense my first language, so I came to school with a bit of an accent. And the story was: I was wandering around in the hall, and the teacher said: “Where are you going?” And I said: “I’m goink op de stez.” And they slapped me into a remedial speech class. Now, if anyone did that now, federal marshals would materialize out of the wall and arrest them for cultural genocide. But, of course, they did me an enormous favor. I imagine my life would have been very different if I had not been subjected to that “speech therapy,” as they called it. And parents then did not object—on the contrary, they were very humble. If the teacher thought so, and the school thought so, they must be right. That was the culture of the prewar period. You certainly wanted your children to be Americans—real Americans—even if you wanted them to hold on to their ancestral culture as well. You were free to do that on your own time and your own dime. And it worked. It worked beautifully.

So when I got into the army and I began meeting other kinds of Americans—native Americans—so to speak, I was floored. I didn’t like the army particularly, but I got on very well with the guys I met. Their humor, and their irreverence, and their camaraderie—it was great!

NP: NP: Well it wasn’t a lightbulb, and it wasn’t the road to Damascus revelation. It was that as I watched the appointments he was making even at the beginning, I was astonished. And he couldn’t have been doing this by accident. So that everything he was doing by way of policy as president, belied the impression he had given to me of a Buchananite. He was the opposite of a Buchananite in practice. The fact is he was a new phenomenon. And I still to this day haven’t quite figured out how he reconciled all of this in his own head. Maybe because, as I said earlier, he was not dogmatic about things. He did what he had to do to get things done.

CRB: I think you said he didn’t have principles.

NP: Well, okay, but he had something—he had instincts. And he knew, from my point of view, who the good guys were. Now, he made some mistakes, for example, with Secretary of State Tillerson, but so did Reagan. I used to point out to people that it took Lincoln three years to find the right generals to fight the civil war, so what did you expect from George W. Bush? In Trump’s case, most of his appointments were very good and they’ve gotten better as time’s gone on. And even the thing that I held almost sacred, and still do really, which is the need for American action abroad—interventionism—which he still says he’s against. I mean, he wants to pull out all our troops from Syria and I think it was probably Bolton who talked him out of doing it all in one stroke. Even concerning interventionism, I began to rethink. I found my mind opening to possibilities that hadn’t been there before. And in this case it was a matter of acknowledging changing circumstances rather than philosophical or theoretical changes.

CRB: But many of your new set of ex-friends, as you call them, were with you on Iraq and democratization, which explains partly at least, why they are against Trump. You deviated from them, or they deviated from you.

NP: Well some of them have gone so far as to make me wonder whether they’ve lost their minds altogether. I didn’t object to their opposition to Trump. There was a case to be made, and they made it—okay. Of course, they had no reasonable alternative. A couple of them voted for Hillary, which I think would have been far worse for the country than anything Trump could have done.

But, basically, I think we’re all in a state of confusion as to what’s going on. Tom Klingenstein has made a brilliant effort to explain it, in terms that haven’t really been used before. He says that our domestic politics has erupted into a kind of war between patriotism and multiculturalism, and he draws out the implications of that war very well. I might put it in different terms—love of America versus hatred of America. But it’s the same idea. We find ourselves in a domestic, or civil, war almost.

In 1969-70, we neocons analyzed the international situation in a similar way, behind a clarifying idea that had a serious impact because it was both simple and sufficiently complex in its implications. I had by then become alienated from my long-term friend Hannah Arendt, whose book The Origins of Totalitarianism had had an enormous effect on me. Although she had become an ex-friend, her book’s argument still inspired me, and I think a lot of other people, to fight. And that argument was that the Soviet Union was an evil, moral and political, comparable to Nazi Germany. As we had fought to defend the West in World War II from the evil coming from, as it were, the Right, so we had to fight it coming from the Left in the Cold War, which I liked to call World War III. (And I’ve tried to say since 9/11, we have to fight an evil coming from the 7th century in what amounts to World War IV—but that name hasn’t caught on.)

But the important point is we offered a wholehearted, full-throated defense of America. Not merely a defense, but a celebration, which is what I thought it deserved, nothing less. It was like rediscovering America—its virtues, its values, and how precious the heritage we had been born to was, and how it was, in effect, worth dying for. And that had a refreshing impact, I think, because that’s how most people felt. But all they had heard—though nothing compared to now—was that America was terrible. It was the greatest danger to peace in the world, it was born in racism, and genocide, and committed every conceivable crime. And then when new crimes were invented like sexism and Islamophobia, we were guilty of those, too.

CRB: You mean the only thing that really inspired us was the external threat?

NP: No, the external threat inspired us, but it also gave rise to a new appreciation of what we were fighting for—not just against. I was a Democrat, you know, by heritage, and in 1972 I helped found a movement called, “The Coalition for a Democratic Majority,” which was an effort to save the Democratic Party from the McGovernites who had taken it over. We knew exactly what was wrong, but it metastasized. The long march through the institutions, as the Maoists called it, was more successful than I would have anticipated. The anti-Americanism became so powerful that there was virtually nothing to stop it.

Even back then I once said, and it’s truer now: this country is like a warrior tribe which sends all its children to a pacifist monk to be educated. And after a while—it took 20 or 40 years—but little by little it turned out that Antonio Gramsci—the Communist theoretician who said that the culture is where the power is, not the economy—turned out to be right; and little by little the anti-Americanism made its way all the way down to kindergarten, practically. And there was no effective counterattack. I’m not sure why. I mean, some of us tried, but we didn’t get very far.

CRB: How do you assess the American Left today?

NP: The crack I make these days is that the Left thinks that the Constitution is unconstitutional. When Barack Obama said, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming this country,” well it wasn’t five days, but he was for once telling the truth. He knew what he was doing. I’ve always said that Obama, from his own point of view, was a very successful president. I wrote a piece about that in the Wall Street Journal which surprised a lot of people. Far from being a failure, within the constraints of what is still the democratic political system, he had done about as much as you possibly could to transform the country into something like a social democracy. The term “social democrat,” however, used to be an honorable one. It designated people on the Left who were anti-Communist, who believed in democracy, but who thought that certain socialist measures could make the world more equitable. Now it’s become a euphemism for something that is hard to distinguish from Communism.

And I would say the same thing about anti-Zionism. I gave a talk to a meeting of the American Jewish Committee, which was then the publisher of Commentary, two years or so after the Six Day War. And I said what’s happened since that war is that anti-Semitism has migrated from the Right, which was its traditional home, to the Left, where it is getting a more and more hospitable reception. And people walked out on the talk, I mean, literally just got up. These were all Jews, you understand. Today, anti-Semitism, under the cover of anti-Zionism, has established itself much more firmly in the Democratic Party than I could ever have predicted, which is beyond appalling. The Democrats were unable to pass a House resolution condemning anti-Semitism, for example, which is confirmation of the Gramscian victory. I think they are anti-American—that’s what I would call them. They’ve become anti-American.

CRB: What are they pro-?

NP: Well, some of them say they’re pro-socialism, but most of them don’t know what they’re talking about. They ought to visit a British hospital or a Canadian hospital once in a while to see what Medicare for All comes down to. They don’t know what they’re for. I mean, the interesting thing about this whole leftist movement that started in the ’60s is how different it is from the Left of the ’30s. The Left of the ’30s had a positive alternative in mind—what they thought was positive—namely, the Soviet Union. So America was bad; Soviet Union, good. Turn America into the Soviet Union and everything is fine. The Left of the ’60s knew that the Soviet Union was flawed because its crimes that had been exposed, so they never had a well-defined alternative. One day it was Castro, the next day Mao, the next day Zimbabwe, I mean, they kept shifting—as long as it wasn’t America. Their real passion was to destroy America and the assumption was that anything that came out of those ruins would be better than the existing evil. That was the mentality—there was never an alternative and there still isn’t. So Bernie Sanders, who honeymooned in the Soviet Union—I mean, I don’t know him personally, but I have relatives who resemble him; I know him in my bones—and he’s an old Stalinist if there ever was one. Things have gone so haywire, he was able to revive the totally discredited idea of socialism, and others were so ignorant that they picked it up.

As for attitudes toward America, I believe that Howard Zinn’s relentlessly anti-American People’s History of the United States sells something like 130,000 copies a year, and it’s a main text for the study of American History in the high schools and in grade schools. So, we have miseducated a whole generation, two generations by now, about almost everything.

CRB: And President Trump offers a path up from ignorance and anti-Americanism?

NP: The only way I know out of this is to fight it intellectually, which sounds weak. But the fact that Trump was elected is a kind of miracle.

CRB: What are his virtues, if you had to enumerate them?

NP: His virtues are the virtues of the street kids of Brooklyn. You don’t back away from a fight and you fight to win. That’s one of the things that the Americans who love him, love him for—that he’s willing to fight, not willing but eager to fight. And that’s the main virtue and all the rest stem from, as Klingenstein says, his love of America. I mean, Trump loves America. He thinks it’s great or could be made great again. Eric Holder, former attorney general, said, “When was it ever great?” And Michelle Obama says that the first time she was ever proud of her country was when Obama won.

CRB: The Never Trumpers agree with you that Trump is an “unworthy vessel” but see nothing whatsoever to redeem his vices.

NP: Mainly they think he’s unfit to be president for all the obvious reasons—that he disgraces the office. I mean, I would say Bill Clinton disgraced the office. I was in England at Cambridge University when Harry Truman was president, and there were Americans there who were ashamed of the fact that somebody like Harry Truman was president.

CRB: A haberdasher.

NP: Right, and no college degree. And, of course, Andrew Jackson encountered some of that animosity. There’s snobbery in it and there’s genuine, you might say, aesthetic revulsion. It’s more than disagreements about policy, because the fact of the matter is they have few grounds for disagreement about policy. I mean, I’ve known Bill Kristol all his life, and I like him. But I must say I’m shocked by his saying that if it comes to the deep state versus Trump, he’ll take the deep state. You know, I was raised to believe that the last thing in the world you defend is your own, and I am proud to have overcome that education. I think the first thing in the world you defend is your own, especially when it’s under siege both from without and within. So the conservative elite has allowed its worst features—its sense of superiority—to overcome its intellectual powers, let’s put it that way. I don’t know how else to explain this.

#10--nice find. LOL.

'I would like to see the group a little less fanatical about posting articles and long excerpts from articles. It's only necessary to post the URL.'

?!!??! I think I agree.

I don't want to see whole long articles but I appreciate the synopsis posted. I don't follow links unless I have some idea that it's something I'm going to want to read first.

ETA: And 'fanatical'? How can posting articles be considered in any sense fanatical? That doesn't even make sense.

Once again, Barney67 posts in other people's words.

I find the basic premises disturbing. America is great, and anyone who disagrees is horrible. He doesn't make any case for it, nor does he imply that a case can be made for it. It's a very fascist way, though other totalitarian societies don't shy away from such nationalist boostery. It seems ill-suited for a democratic country.

Also, it's very violent. "This country is like a warrior tribe which sends all its children to a pacifist monk to be educated" is treated like a bad thing; isn't that a sign that the warrior tribe dreams of better things for their children, that they might live long lives instead of dying young on the battlefield? And "he’s willing to fight, not willing but eager to fight. And that’s the main virtue"; how is that a virtue? To quote a wise American: "you gotta know when to hold them, you gotta know when to fold them, you gotta know when to walk away, and you gotta know when to run".

>13 prosfilaes: your last statement reminds me of something our drill instructor said way back in basic training - The essence of manhood is not the ability to fight. Any damn fool can get into a fight. The essence of manhood is the ability to think. He offered up this bit of advice at the end of a training exercise when our acting platoon leader had not given any thought to the terrain and had launched us into what turned out to be a suicide charge (100 percent casualties). Fortunately it was training and all the bullets were blanks so it became a lesson learned and we lived to fight another day.

Dunces don't know how to distinguish between something that's done once in a while and something that's done all day every day. Dunces vote Democrat.

But I guess it's a compliment that my posts are memorable. Use them for something other than playing gotcha and you might learn something.

>13 prosfilaes: I've been using my own words for ten years, Pops. So stuff it. Save your lies for someone else.

To repeat, dunces don't know how to distinguish between something that's done once in a while and something that's done all day every day.

#15--you got caught out with your pants hanging down. You could acknowledge and move on but instead it looks like your going to be pissed. It's all up to you--you know.

>17 lriley: I didn't get caught doing anything, Pops. You wish, because I'm always slamming down everything moronic thing you say. I repeat for the third time: dunces don't know how to distinguish between something that's done once in a while and something that's done all day every day.

Maybe your caregiver should confiscate your computer.

#18--listen, son, you did and there's no use denying. It's in black and white with your name all over it. You made a big deal out of it and now you're squirming like a worm and trying to change your own parameters just to suit yourself. 'Oh, it's okay now if it's just once in a while.' Really weak, son. Just saying. You have standards or you don't....and apparently you don't. But it's a good laugh and watching you squirming is making it funnier. If you don't want to go deeper....stop digging.

Almost everyone here thinks Podhoretz should fuck off anyway.

>16 barney67:, >18 barney67: Love the 'Pops', Barn

>19 lriley: Another moronic post by you, pops. Get some sleep. You could learn from Podhoretz, but it's your loss. Too bad.

#21--you do seem a little edgy there son. I would suggest a tranquilizer and a nice long nap. Forget about Podhoretz. Putting your hopes in this guy with the weird name, c'mon--I mean Podhoretz? What's that? It ain't like Smith or Jones is it? Good American names, you know where you stand with names like that. We're kind of use to you knowing what's what and keeping clear of all the foreign influences. Ever since Trump and his Russian deal it seems you've lost the thread and let these influences creep in. If I asked you to recite the words to the Star Bangled Banner (let alone God save America) I'm not sure you'd get past the first verse. It's like you don't know up from down. Even better than one tranquilizer--try two. Take a real long nap.

Post 22 is flaggable, so everyone knows. Not for the anti-Semitism or xenophobia. For the insults and personal attacks. But of course it will not be flagged. Only my posts get flagged, right?

#23--I agree--#22 is just awful and should be flagged. Stupid of me to think you'd be able to figure it out anyway.

That said--Podhoretz is a shitbird.

> 23 So I thought, why not flag something Barney thinks should be flagged, but then I read ">19 lriley: lriley: Another moronic post by you, pops. Get some sleep. You could learn from Podhoretz, but it's your loss. Too bad."

Frankly, this thread was over at post #10. Flag everything after that.

>23 barney67: Post 22 is flaggable

Barney, the reason we have flags is so that if you think a post is flaggable you can, er, flag it, instead of writing a new post which says, "Post 22 is flaggable". Saves time and space, and if enough people agree with you that it is flaggable and actually flag it then the offending post is hidden. Writing, "Post 22 is flaggable", on the other hand, does not lead to it being hidden.

>26 John5918: Oh, I see...it's all so clear now...

>26 John5918: How many times I have explained my reasons to you? Seven?

>28 barney67:

How many times have I reminded you that there is a process for flagging and you have still not accepted it?

Seven?

>30 RickHarsch:

If we were being biblical, the answer would be, "Nay, seventy times seven". Not strictly accurate, but it sometimes feels like it.

I note that despite all this arguing about flagging and what-not, the initiator of this thread has not responded to any comments made on what he posted.

>32 prosfilaes: Yes, he has. His comment is that he has been taken to task for doing something he criticized others for doing but the difference is that he is doing it this once, while his main target in this regard, Margd, does it every day.
He has a point. I like margd's posts, but in terms of hypocrisy or not, I think old Barn is in the right in this case.

>33 RickHarsch:

Oh, is that what Barney was talking about when he was speaking about "dunces" doing things over and over again? I had no idea. That one passed me by completely. Too arcane and mysterious.

#33--if Barney wanted people to read it he should have just linked it or never posted against the practice of typing out entire articles. margd sometimes does type out articles but she never put herself in the spot of telling others not to. Proximity often types out entire articles too. He and Barney have in the past targeted margd with a lot of unnecessary vitriol as far as I'm concerned because they don't like the tenor of what she posts and IMO they've been very nasty to her at times in their attempts to silence her. Funny that margd handles their antagonism with a lot of aplomb (and keeps on keeping on) than either of them do when they get some of it back. In their case we get finger pointing, shouting and pouting. They could take lessons from margd in not making things personal, keeping on point and not losing their shit. Me---I don't mind making things personal but I like to hold on to my shit.

>33 RickHarsch: What he posted, not how he posted it. He has responded to nothing about the material he has posted.

His comment is that he has been taken to task for doing something he criticized others for doing but the difference is that he is doing it this once, while his main target in this regard, Margd, does it every day.

I criticized him for starting a thread with 15,000 of someone else's words and none of his own. No URL or proper sourcing either. This is not the first time that he's posted someone else's words without sourcing, though at least this wasn't ambiguous as to who was speaking. That has nothing to do with Margd, who generally posts short excerpts with URLs in preexisting threads, which is less annoying and problematic.

>36 prosfilaes: Proper sourcing? It's an interview. What difference does the source make? Are you the sourcing cop? If you want to bust chops about protocol, you have a whole forum of people who regularly break all kinds of rules. A web site full of them. It would be funny if it weren't so funny and pathetic. What's your problem?

>35 lriley: One of your dumbest posts, and that's saying something.

>34 John5918: I like to think of myself as a student of Barney.
>36 prosfilaes: Freud would call your post anal-retentive; I call it picayune.

#38--you're always dependable for an non-creative comeback.

>39 RickHarsch: I like to think of myself as a student of Barney.

Does LT award Honorary PhDs amongst its helper badges? I'd nominate you for one for your dedication to studying this common but under-researched phenomenon.

picayune

I had to look it up, but a good word.

>37 barney67: It lets us see what was said that might have been omitted in the quotation, and verify that the quotation was correct. It gives a date and a context; a person would probably say different things in an interview with Al-Jazeera on 9/10/01 than an interview with Fox News on 9/12/01. From a moral sense, it gives credit where credit is due.

What's your problem?

We each have our own moral bête noires. I'm involved in a lot of groups where the main reward is a little bit of credit, and would rather people were free about offering credit instead of having to demand it.

You complain that things should be solved locally; here I am solving it locally. I'm not calling on the feds to take you in, instead I'm complaining to you and the group directly.

>37 barney67:What difference does the source make?

Just to reiterate what >42 prosfilaes: says - the source is very important. It creates the context and tells us which lens or perspective the issue is being viewed from. It also alerts us to the biases of the speaker and the interviewer, and to significant angles which they might have chosen not to cover. It's also important to guve the link so that we can go and check the original. You might have quoted selectively and omitted parts which you didn't think were relevant but we might. Or the original might have hyperlinks in it which we would like to follow to get more background. We don't know unless you give us the chance to view the source.

>43 John5918: I believe for Barney's purposes what he gave is sufficient. He wanted people to read what Podhoretz had to say. There was no surprise, was there? Like I said before #10 pretty much ended the thread for me. I'm certainly not going to spend my time reading what NP has to say. I haven't read all of Plato yet. I could still fine some youtube videos of Chomsky.

>43 John5918: You don't need to lecture me on the importance of sourcing. I learned how to document sources when I was thirteen, and I did plenty of writing in college and graduate school to demonstrate I know what I'm talking about. The way you state the obvious to me like a I'm nitwit is so offensive. Who do you think you're talking to?

You could have entered "Podhoretz interview" in an internet search if it were that important to you, rather than complain about it. Nonetheless, you should judge the interview (and any article) by its content, not its source. What you want is to avoid thinking by choosing sides. So if the source is The New York Times or The Guardian or The Nation or Mother Jones, you can say "I agree". If it is Fox News or National Review, you will say "I disagree". That's not thinking. That's football. My team is better than your team. Go team go.

In this case source matters less because it's an interview. I agree that some of the questions will differ between interviewers. But the answers won't. This is a good example. The excepts I posted are from the Claremont Review of Books, which can be labeled a conservative source. But a similar interview appeared recently in The New York Times. They were not substantially different. I like the Claremont interview better because it has no commentary to tell you what to think. It's simply Q&A. But some of you can't handle that. So it goes.

It's the kind of thing Podhoretz has encountered his whole life. He thinks for himself, but most people don't, so they often want to crucify him for not joining the right team.

>42 prosfilaes: Your post makes a mountain of a molehill. I find this to be a habit of liberals and Democrats and the left in general. It is of a piece with other bad habits: idealism, abstraction, the pursuit of impossible far-off goals, the inability to live in the here and now, turning politics into religion and therefore distorting the purpose of politics and government. Add humorlessness and lack of perspective and sense of norms.

>45 barney67: Who do you think you're talking to?

Somebody who cut and pasted a long text without citing the source. Somebody who, when challenged, responded, "What difference does the source make?" (>37 barney67:). All we know of you is what and how you post, so that's who I think I am talking to.

>46 barney67: Barney, I must protest. Your description of 'the left in general' is quite inaccurate. The left, first and foremost, believes in economic equality.

>48 RickHarsch:

I was amused by "turning politics into religion and therefore distorting the purpose of politics and government" in >46 barney67:. I rather thought the right had done that par excellence in the USA. As for "humorlessness", Barney is probably not aware of the British anti-establishment satirical magazine "Private Eye", nor of the TV series "Spitting Images", nor of the vast number of stand-up comedians who tend to be a bit left of centre. And as far as "lack of perspective and sense of norms", I think a lot of left wingers are trying hard to maintain norms against a rightwing onslaught which is trying to create a "new" normal and make us forget the old one. Thatcher did this very well - there has always been greed in society, but at least it was looked down upon until Thatcher made it a central value, something to be aspired to. And one's "perspective" probably depends on which end of society one is familiar with and which identity groups one belongs to. The right tends to favour its own, whereas the left tries to reach beyond itself and, as you say, aspire to economic equality for all.

>47 John5918: Does this make it all better?

https://www.claremont.org/crb/basicpage/an-interview-with-norman-podhoretz/

>49 John5918: The right was accused of bringing religion into politics during the 1980s, during the popularity of Falwell, Robertson, and a renewed interest in Protestant evangelicalism. The left has always religious-ized politics. The French Revolution a good example. Muslims always. For the left, politics is a substitute for religion.

"a rightwing onslaught which is trying to create a "new" normal and make us forget the old one"

This is more a habit of the left than the right. I'm speaking of American politics because that's what I know and because this an American forum. It is more a habit of the left for the very reason that politics is their religion. They use politics to uproot, to establish new social and moral norms that can only be attempted through the efforts of politics and law, i.e. force, because they don't occur naturally. Hence the attraction toward big government, the nanny state, government as caretaker and provider, and Hillary Clinton's "politics of meaning".

What do I mean by a connection between the belief in socialism and extraterrestials? Faith. Belief despite the absence of evidence. Belief rather than argument or proof.

Believing Thatcher invented greed is stupid. Greed has always existed since mankind has existed, and it transcends all boundaries. If you think you have been voting for people whose motivations are pure, who have never experienced greed, you are dead wrong.

>53 barney67:

You obviously didn't read what I said:"there has always been greed in society, but at least it was looked down upon until Thatcher made it a central value, something to be aspired to." Yes, there has always been greed in society and it transcends boundaries. However it has also always been viewed a little disparagingly, and those who promoted it did so somewhat guiltily. What Thatcher did was make it a positive value as opposed to a negative vice.

>54 John5918: And to bring it home for Uncle Barney: it's indisputable that by making profit central to economic success, greed is rewarded to an inconscionable extent.

>55 RickHarsch: This thread reminds me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2q2YWcr5nDA

>51 barney67: this an American forum

You are correct in that it was founded in and is based in the USA. However I think you will find that the owner and many, many of the members are striving to make it an international forum rather than an "American forum", where people of many nations and languages can feel at home. Many of the regular posters on this Pro and Con Group are not from nor based in the USA.

Edited to add: Come think of it, "where people of many nations and languages can feel at home" used to be an American ideal, didn't it?

>56 theoria:

Reminds me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpAvcGcEc0k

>58 John5918: "Oh I'm sorry, this is abuse"

Brilliant.

Doesn't make sense to "internationalize" a forum about politics because politics is different from country to country, and most of us vote in only one country, making one country's politics of immediate interest. The place we know best is the place where we live, not someplace far away. Hearing foreigners comment on American politics is amusing at best. They don't have a clue how things work here.

>60 barney67:

Your old chestnut that the only people who can comment on US politics are US citizens. I don't think you have convinced many people about it, and I have pointed out to you often before that there are plenty of non-citizens and non-voters who are resident in your beautiful land, or who have been resident, or who visit it often, or who study it academically. I've also pointed out that in any country an outsider can often notice things which the insiders fail to notice because they take it for granted.

And yes, politics is different from country to country, but there are also points of commonality and global trends. Would you not agree that populism and nationalism are on the rise in many parts of the world, not only the USA, as are militarism, xenophobia, an anti-immigrant trend? And wouild you not also agree that since the USA is the single most powerful country in the world, and one which does not hesitate to project its power into other countries' affairs, we all need to take an interest in US politics because it affects us all even though we have no vote?

1) "USA is the single most powerful country in the world" – I don't know that. Depends on what you mean by power. I do think this is the best country to live in, giving the greatest chance at happiness, but I don't think of it in the context of power because I agree with John Adams that power is poison.
2) "one which does not hesitate to project its power into other countries' affairs" – Actually we hesitate quite a bit. Others invite us. Beg us.
3) "we all need to take an interest in US politics" – Not really.
4) "it affects us all" – Not really.
5) "anti-immigrant" – A loaded term. What you are seeing is a response to Muslim terrorism and the refusal by Muslim immigrants and others to adapt to the countries into which they move. The world is no more militaristic xenophobic than it has been in the past. Probably much less so. We probably won't see "world" wars anymore or the forced drafting of civilians into combat. The internet has given us a better look at other countries than the press has given us in the past. I hope that people are getting past judging the U.S. by its movies, TV shows, and music, which are a reflection of Hollywood and New York City and that's it. Moreover, as the world shrinks, in a certain sense, and boundaries are thinner than ever, the subject of national identity naturally arises. With a laptop I can work from anywhere in the world. To whom or what do I owe my allegiance?
6) The simple fact is, one knows best the world in which one lives, the circle in which one lives and works, not the people or events a thousand miles away. One can observe those people and events as though looking at stars through a telescope, but a telescopic view isn't going to reveal much. It's no substitute for the real thing, for face to face contact, the best kind. The very thing "Face"-book doesn't give you. Reality.

>62 barney67:

1. Military and economic, at the very least.
2. Just for a start, who begged you to invade Afghanistan? Iraq? Who is begging you to seek military confrontation with Iran? Oh yes, Israel.
3. Can you explain why we do not need to take an interest in the politics of a country which has such a huge global footprint at almost every level?
4. Can you explain how the USA does not affect us all? Did you know that almost all money transfers anywhere in the world are at some point subject to US jurisdiction, for example? Are you aware of the global implications of the USA's use of treason laws against a foreign journalist, Julian Assange? Have you thought through the global implications of the USA's spat with the Chinese company Huawei, and its efforts to pressure other nations to do the same? Do ups and downs in the US economy not affect the rest of the world? At this point I judge none of these things as good or bad, but merely point out to you that your statement is demonstrably erroneous.
5. What we are seeing is you presenting a particular rightwing and populist narrative on militarism, xenophobia, immigration, Islam et al, not objective fact. You're entitled to believe that narrative, but it is not objective fact and there are other narratives, shared by many other US citizens, including many of those who post here.
6. For one thing, the world in which we live is now a "global village" and we cannot afford to ignore what goes on thousands of miles away, as the USA discovered to its cost on 9/11 when it woke up to the "real thing" and found that its policies and actions towards "people or events a thousand miles away" had real consequences back home. For another, you continue to live in a fantasy world where nobody else has ever lived in or visited the USA when you suggest that non-US citizens don't have "the real thing... face to face contact, the best kind". I'm pleased to remind you that I have lived and studied in your beautiful country, have been back frequently, am in regular communication with friends and colleagues there (none of whom, funnily enough, present the same narrative on the USA as you do) and will be back again in about six weeks time, for some of the real thing, face to face contact, "the best kind", which will include meetings with government departments, churches, non-profit organisations, and last but mot least, ordinary people. And, of course, a model railroad store.

Edited to add: Actually, on second thoughts, you might be right that "the world is no more militaristic" than it was in the past. The USA in particular has always been a very militaristic nation ever since its violent foundation. My own nation, the UK, has also always been militaristic and still is. But there were signs of hope in the last decades of the 20th century, when the Cold War had ended, when a number of long-running conflicts throughout the world had come to an end, when international arms treaties were in force, when there was an increasing respect for multilateralism and peace, when there were growing peace movements in many parts of the world, that militarism was declining. The USA's response to 9/11 put an end to all that.

Did anyone notice that 'Somebody's' arguments crawled like arthritic iguanas out of a Hermes hand bag only to get hit on the head with a top heavy (redundant?) mallet?

>62 barney67: Pay attention please, Barney, because this is true.

"The simple fact is, one knows best the world in which one lives, the circle in which one lives and works, not the people or events a thousand miles away. One can observe those people and events as though looking at stars through a telescope, but a telescopic view isn't going to reveal much. It's no substitute for the real thing, for face to face contact, the best kind. The very thing "Face"-book doesn't give you. Reality."

My first boss in Slovenia always listens to my observations about Slovenia, the Balkans, Euroean politics, and so on, because he once traveled to Milwaukee to visit some Slovene relatives and was astonished at how much more he knew about Milwaukee, including local history and national, than anyone he spoke with did. He was not strung up, rather treated as the smart relative. So he knows that a thoughtful, well-read outsider can teach local people a lot about their own town, region, country. I have found that in such a complicated region as this there is always more to learn, but only a few great historians have a good grasp on the overall situation. I teach more than I learn because I learn from obscure sholars, learn many an obscure fact, but I am no longer surprised to find that new vistas of my own ignorance open up constantly.
Here are two facts to illustrate the phenomenon:
1. I live in Izola, where before I wrote of it, no one I have ever come across knew that Casanova was given his prison escape beard and hair trim by a barber from Izola, the town in which I live. Francesco Soradaci was the feller's name. I know because I read the scholarly, edited edition of Casanova's memoirs, which made much use of Venezian archives, whereas Izola's burned.
2. The loveliest nearby town is Piran, Pirano under the Italians. I am the bearer of the odd news that it was in Piran that James Joyce first damaged his face, leading to his life (after that night in 1910) long eye problems that ended in blindness. I know because the Ellmann literary biography of Joyce happens to make specific mention, Joyce referring to that night he got drunk and slept on the marlstone (this was after visiting his eye doctor in Paris in 1922, I believe).

So, Barney, the felicitous, the faithful, the fearless combine what they can learn with what they can teach, it all gets bound up in a life, motivated by mind in movement, the pleasures of intellectual wanderlust are endless.

>64 RickHarsch:

Can't be much fun being an arthritic iguana. I feel sorry for the poor little bugger.

>63 John5918: "The USA in particular has always been a very militaristic nation ever since its violent foundation."

Wrong. America was so isolationist that Woodrow Wilson put men in crowds during speeches to shout anti-German hatred to shore up support for intervention for World War I. While Hitler was marching across Europe, there were still large numbers of Americans who didn't want to enter World War II because it was considered a European war and not our business. General MacArthur, who is often portrayed as a militant monster, urged JFK "don't take us into the jungle" of Vietnam but was ignored. Americans were so adamant about stopping slavery that the Constitution nearly wasn't ratified in 1776 and America fought a war over it a hundred years later—against itself. We would much rather go to work than go to war. We would rather repair our houses that sit and talk talk talk about some arcane historical dispute from hundreds of years ago.

Contrast America with homogeneous Irish who found it so impossible to live 20 yards from each other that they fought a religious war for 500 years, engaging in acts of terrorism against innocents through the 1990s. Their solution was to draw a line down the middle of the room: Ireland and Northern Ireland. Pathetic. I don't need to go over the dumb conflicts which still continue, rooted in ethnic and religious hatred (still fighting the Reformation), while Americans, the most heterogeneous and diverse people in the world, continue to live in peace with each other. America never had a 500 year religious war. It never will. Americans allow each other to disagree. We don't kill each other over a line in the Bible or the Koran.

America's foundation was no more violent than anyone else's. If you are referring to Indians, American colonists were as much victim as aggressor. I fought that battle with you already, and it's dumb to go over it again because for the European leftist (and American leftist) it's part of the creed, an act of faith, a self-serving reading of history to support present agendas. It's a cliche of the European left to repeatedly bring up American battles with Indians. To call these "competing narratives" is to engage in relativism, to say objective fact can never be arrived at.

Saying that America is violent may simply be another way of saying Americans don't back down and are not passive cowards. I'm proud of that. I wouldn't want to be a frightened, passive European country hiding its lack of initiative behind finger-pointing and save-the-world rhetoric.

This thread has demonstrated the shortcomings of liberal, Democrat, and left-wing mental habits.

Instead of discussing Podhoretz, people have attacked me. They have used this thread to talk about what they want to talk about rather than the subject of the thread. This is the behavior of the spoiled, petulant, and perhaps ADD. Instead of discussing the particulars, people have abstracted away from it, looking far off, a species of day dreaming. I don't know about the rest of you, but I live on Earth, not in space, not in The Clouds. You might want to read that play by Aristophanes.

Rootless cosmopolitans.

>67 barney67:

While nobody denies US isolationism at certain points in history, what you present is a very selective history in which you miss out, er, most of the violent bits, and play down others.

I didn't bring up Native Americans, you did. Guilty conscience, perhaps? When you defend your land against people trying to take it over by force and drive you off it, as Native Americans did, are you the aggressor?

Americans allow each other to disagree. We don't kill each other over a line in the Bible or the Koran.

Tell that to abortion doctors who have been murdered by fundamentalist Christians. Of course much of your recent killing over lines in religious books is exported to Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, etc where non-Americans are being killed in their hundreds of thousands.

And indeed you don't need bibles or qur'ans as there is plenty of killing going on at home anyway with the preponderous of small arms and light weapons in civilian hands, and with incitement and hate speech coming from your leading politicians.

I wouldn't want to be a frightened, passive European country hiding its lack of initiative behind finger-pointing and save-the-world rhetoric

Since you've already mentioned World War II, are you here describing Britain, by any chance, a tiny island which for nearly two years stood alone against the might of the Nazis while being bombed from the air, threatened with invasion, and having its maritime supply routes all but cut off?

Saying that America is violent may simply be another way of saying Americans don't back down and are not passive cowards.

Was Gandhi a coward? Martin Luther King Jr? Jesus? You make a mistake common amongst people steeped in militaristic and violent narratives in thinking that there are only two options, violence and passivity. In fact there is a third option which is far more difficult and requires far more courage, and which also involves not backing down: active and organised nonviolent resistance.

>68 barney67:

Have you been attacked, or rather challenged to explain yourself? There is a difference. I would say that this thread has gone off (your) topic mainly because of your posts in response to questions and challenges.

>69 barney67: Rootless cosmopolitans.

Any chance you could explain that obscure comment to us?

It certainly has not been my fault that this thread has gone off topic. Start again at the top. I introduced comments by Podohoretz. Anyone is free to comment on them if they want, but they didn't.

Arthritic iguanas are not 'little' buggers. Imagine, then, the size of the Hermes handbag, and then it is not so absurd that the bloody lady is concerned she may have lost it.

I'll talk about Podhoretz. He's a clown.

>1 barney67: In praise of real estate moguls? Nah! That's just not alluring text, I'm afraid. And it's nonsense. But at least NP gets in that Trump would have been a good Jew and that the working man is likely thuggish.

>70 John5918: re "rootless cosmopolitans" in >69 barney67:

Ironically, it's an old CCCP slander and antisemitic trope.

>72 RickHarsch: What's in your Birkin bag?

>75 theoria: I thought it was a Spenglerian compliment.

>76 theoria: You ever hear of a guy named Alfredo Garcia?

>75 theoria: Ironic indeed. Sometime Barn outdoes himself.