One of the best things in Jacob Heilbrunn’s new book, They Knew They Were Right, is his analysis of the children of the neocons. Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz had struggled to attain prominence. They had varied careers, generally on the outside of mainstream culture, wearing moth-eaten tweeds, and never thought they’d achieve political power, as they did beginning in the 70s. Indeed, Lionel Trilling, one of their mentors, said that instrumentalized intellectuals–intellectuals who served power–were debased. Anyway, Heilbrunn says that the children of the neocons–John Podhoretz, Elliott Abrams, and Bill Kristol, that whole generation–didn’t get the life experience and the political development their fathers did. And meantime their fathers placed too much value on filial piety, and wanted the narcissistic pleasure of seeing their kids doing what they did, and having the same politics. So the kids didn’t develop the intellectual toughness their fathers had. (Let alone serve in the military, as their fathers generally did!)
A long way of saying: the kids gave us Iraq.
I bring this all up because of the succession at Commentary magazine. Norman Podhoretz is the editor emeritus. As we all know, his son John Podhoretz, whose online handle is Jpod, is due to become the editor of the magazine this year some time. It’s a sad moment for a once-noble magazine that led opposition to the Vietnam War. Podhoretz is an impish, tabloid intellectual. And a weak copy of pa. Shouldn’t Commentary have threshed the fields a little? Or looked around for a new direction… It feels samey to me; honestly, I don’t know if I’m going to renew my subscription ($45 a year.).
Oddly enough, the succession at Commentary is most like those regimes that the neocons so desire to smash: Arab dictatorships. In Egypt, Hosni Mubarak is about to be succeeded by his son Gamal, they say. Over in Iraq, Saddam had groomed Qusay to be the head Fred; and we know how that turned out. In Syria, Hafez el-Assad was grooming his oldest son, then when he died it went to the London son, ophthalmologist Bashir.
Is that any way to run a country–or a magazine?
[Thanks to Dan Swanson for this idea]
