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John Podhoretz
Based on years of listening to him, and on everything I’ve heard about him, John Podhoretz is a gentle, humane, and thoroughly decent man. I envy him his ability to pluck precisely the right word from his obviously vast vocabulary, and to speak, when he chooses, with extraordinary nuance and precision.
Sure, he’s prone to outrageous hyperbole (a quality hardly unique to him in this, the Age of Trump), is unduly proud of his Judaic morosity, and has a sense of humor that resonates with 12-year-old boys and Jonah Goldberg (but I repeat myself). But still, I enjoy listening to him.
But he often lands a clinker, as he did in the June 6 podcast (here) when he averred, at about 1:10:00, that, should the Democrats win in 2020, the right is “certainly going to turn anti-patriotic in the event of his defeat. … So you’re going to have the right hating America and the left hating America.”
I’ve mentioned this before about our own Rob Long, and I’ll say it now about John: I think too many conservative intellectuals have a poor idea of what actual conservatives are like, and of who makes up “the right” out in that vast unexplored and boring portion of America that people who don’t live in New York, Washington, or Los Angeles call home.
Thank G-d we still have VDH.
Published in Culture
John Podhoretz is a part of that group of Neocons who achieved great heights of power and influence in the wake of 9/11, while cheering on and being somewhat responsible for every strategic disaster of the United States in the era before Trump. They are never held to account for their mistakes, and this applies to Podhoretz as well. His political predictions, which are built upon shallow analysis that any person on the street could give, usually never come true, and he does not seem to correct his mistakes. He predicted that Romney would win in 2012, he was certain that Trump would lose in 2016, and at some point in 2018 he thought that the Democrats would fall short in the midterms due to some leftists on Twitter that few people had ever heard of.
Rothman is a little more careful, but his writings also demonstrate his lack of any technical ability whatsoever. They usually contain a thesis that cannot be falsified, so he often cannot be proven wrong. He usually speaks in a manner similar to Buckley, as if he is going out of his way to use the most obscure words he can find in a thesaurus. I suspect, as I suspect was the case with Buckley, that this is meant to distract the reader and wider public from his lack of expertise in the subjects which he speaks and writes about.
If the right enforced any accountability for failure, Podhoretz’s career would have ended long ago, while Rothman would be learning to code.
LOLing out loud, because I enjoyed the bluntless — and, frankly, quite a bit of the perspicacity — of your comment. Yes, Podhoretz is notoriously linear in his thinking, projecting wildly from the input of the moment. And yes, Rothman speaks in sentences sufficiently circumlocutious as to have me often scratching my head just a little — no mean feat, if I may say so myself.
They’re pundits, not scholars. They opine for a living. I don’t expect very much from them in terms of rigor or original insight, and I don’t expect them to hold themselves accountable for past mistakes. Entertainers don’t do that, and that’s really what I think they are, at least when they’re podcasting.
My criticism is fairly narrow, and probably obvious: our urban sophisticate conservatives don’t know America very well.
I would add a further criticism, and it is that they take themselves very seriously. They do think of themselves as scholars. Rothman promotes his book nonstop on Twitter as if the book can explain just about everything wrong in America right now. Furthermore, recall their reaction to the firing on Kevin Williamson from The Atlantic. They thought that “the market of ideas” would be harmed. Who cares? Hardly anyone in a position of influence takes anything in these opinion magazines seriously enough to change their behavior. A corporation will not change their strategies based upon what is written in The Atlantic or Commentary. Governments usually do not alter their policies in any meaningful way. Nations will not rise and fall. On the few occasions when pundits or columnists are taken seriously by a government, this leads to the disasters of McCarthyism, the Hollywood Blacklist, and Middle Eastern failures.
JPod always sounds to me like he’s refining his open mic set for the Chuckle Hut that night. His Jackie Mason shtick isnt subtle. As a failed comedian myself, I find it alternately annoying and endearing.
I wonder to what extent the New York pundit class’ problem with trump is less a out politics and more about their decades living under the shadow of the tower of Trump, literally and otherwise. I hear most Manhattanites have their own Trump tales. Maybe it’s personal?
There is a certain incestuous nature of hanging around the New York-Washington media world that does tend to make pundits on the right seeking comity pull their punches. JPod was talking about some issue two years ago and using Maggie Haberman as a source, at a time when it was already known that both the Clinton and Obama people saw Maggie as a reliable flunky to get their messaging out without any qualifiers or questions.
The recent statue demolitions and the Times’ 1619 Project does seem to have strengthened Commentary’s spine a bit to the reality that outlets like the Times have changed their business model so it’s not in their financial interest to be unbiased — there actually have been a couple of episodes lately where Noah’s sounded like the staunchest Trump defender, because of the Democrats’ woke radicalism and the media’s complicity. But at the same time there’s still a reflexive first reaction to trust the accuracy of the latest scandale du jour involving Trump from the Times and elsewhere without taking a deep breath and remembering the Times, the WaPo, CNN and the others all now tailor their stories to feed conformation bias. So whether Trump makes a mistake or not, there has to be a new scandal every day.
Commentary is one of the very, very best part of Ricochet. Thanks for hosting the discussion.
Nearly 100 comments, and 50 likes, in just 5 hours? I hope @jameslileks is paying attention, and not wasting more time on Gary Robbins for another Post Of The Week.
I feel so badly that I have disappointed you. I will endeavor to do better in the future.
On the other hand, I don’t hide behind a pseudonym.
Gary, it’s a good podcast. I do find it a little self-indulgently gloomy, but then they joke about it themselves in their intro music and often enough on the show, so I figure they get a pass. I listen to all their shows, but I often reach the end with the same relief I feel when I get off the treadmill (the “dreadmill”) and know I don’t have to do it again for another day or two.
I’m just not as confident in the benefits from the podcast, versus the dreadmill.
Well remember, when the Left opposed Reagan, they were being Patriotic. When they opposed Bush, and Bush, they were being Patriotic. And now, when opposing Trump, they are ULTRA-Patriotic. But when Republicans opposed Clinton, they were being ANTI-Patriotic. And when they opposed Obama, they were being Racist AND ANTI-Patriotic.
Oh, and when Senator Obama was asked to vote for raising the debt ceiling, he called that un-Patriotic. When it came to running his own much larger deficits, why, those deficits THEMSELVES were Patriotic.
“Fascinating! A Pattern is emerging!” – Spock.
I’m sure it would have been, if they hadn’t lost control of Congress.
I stopped listening to the GLoP podcast several months ago. I think it was the giggling and tittering that got to me. Then there were the little jabs at folks they were too cowardly to name who work at The Federalist or one senior editor there in particular who challenges Goldberg’s rants on national television and constantly makes him look irrelevant and petty.
I had more substantive, meaningful, and entertaining conversations with some of my friends in high school than what I’ve heard on the GLoP podcast. Sad to say.
I have listened to the Commentary faithfully for years. I was happy when they went from once a week to twice a week. I rejoiced when they went to daily during COVIT-19. One thing that I love about J-Pod is that he is so willing to be himself and to express himself fully. I actually subscribed to Commentary, not because I wanted to read the magazine, but because I wanted to find a way to thank John and the gang.
One recent highlight of the Podcast was the reading of the statement of purpose, “We Must Stop the Great Unraveling.” https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-editors/refusing-mob-rule-defending-american-values/
The bottom line of that declaration:
What we stand for:
We hope you will join us.
I remember a regular caller to the Bob Mohan radio show who went by EB. Probably not you, but just in case…
I find it funny that John, Jonah and Rob are so harshly criticized for the heresy to questioning Trump. They are mild critics in my universe.
There are conservatives and Republicans who are working hard on defeating Trump. You will find them at The Bulwark, the Lincoln Project, Republican Voters Against Trump, and on Mike Murphy’s “Radio Free GOP With Mike Murphy” which has returned. We hope to bring about the restoration of the Republican Party after Trump and his band of populists is defeated.
118 days until the election.
Let’s say Biden does win. What makes you think that Trump supporters and even Never-Trump people haven’t taken notes on what the left has done these last four years? How does a “restoration of the Republican Party after Trump and his band of populists is defeated” even happen when revenge (aka “turnabout is fair play”) is at top of mind?
If you think, after these last 4 years, that the Right will go about the work of “restoration” instead of fomenting their own form of social/cultural unrest, your devotion to Reagan has made you blind and naïve.
I wish. I think its lashing spasms are due to a conviction that the moment is right, and the times must be seized. OTOH, they’ve moved right to post-revolutionary ideological purges, and you don’t hone and narrow the parameters of what’s intellectual permissible until after you’ve seized power, or until you’ve been so utterly crushed that intra-party purges are required to prepare the message for the next assault.
You’re a haaaaard man, McGee.
Those intra-party purges, including purges of their own upper-class white voters, are going to put them in position where it takes them a long time to prepare a consistent message that is impervious to hypocrisy charges. We’ve seen it happen with white liberals in the ’70s and ’80s, and we’ve seen it happen with white conservatives from 1994-2016.
When we are on cruises – I KNOW, I KNOW – John would frequently bring up his Minnesota relatives, and his connection to my part of the world, and do so with affection and admiration. Then we would argue about stupid stuff, like 70s TV show soundtracks.
I know everyone loves to dump on TEH CRUISES but I feel immense goodwill towards a lot of people with whom I would disagree if I knew them only on paper or podcast, because we got boiled as owls every night for a week and talked about everything. I’ll always value the friendships formed on those trips, even though John interrupted a speech I was making from the audience and I had to tell him to shut up because he was on stage the next night and he’d have his chance, for God’s sake. I mean really.
If they’re unable – really, just unwilling – to support his re-election, their “praise” is not useful.
You’re quite right. At best, the writers are laying down markers for future historians to note who pegged it correctly, and who was huffing into their own hot-air balloon. The Atlantic, Commentary, Dissent, Dysentery, et al could publish 500-page tomes weekly, and their wisdom and prescriptions would be swamped in a trice by the certainties of the mob.
Oh, the tragic blacklist again. I have the same attitude towards Red sympathizers in the screenwriting community as Woody Allen at the end of “The Front.” Yes, there were excesses, etc, but let’s apply our horrors over that to current culture, and see how that Harpers Mag statement about freedom of expression plays out. The lamentations over the McCarthy period might be less eternally strenuous if the subjects hadn’t been sympathetic to collectivist leftism.
First of all, yes! I am paying attention, particularly because nice things were said about me early on. Second, Gary has had his POTW for 2020, and I did that not because I agreed but because it led to a fun discussion about art as well as party identification. Third, stop ragging on Gary! I disagree with a great deal of what he posts (see also, Queen, Borg, Krieg, Alice) but I fully expect I could have a good argument on a CRUISE SHIP at night in the bar.
Anyway, to the main point: I am opposed to anyone who believes that America needs to be transformed, and that was the stated objective of President Obama and now Joe Biden. Opposition to this idea is not anti-patriotic. Opposition to government is not anti-patriotic. If someone traduces a fundamental conception of the American ideal, the fact that he is borne aloft by a cheering corporate media – and a crafty corporate culture wishing to pluck profit from reading the shifting winds – I am not obligated to go along because dissent, all of a sudden, is not patriotic.
The fun part is, he’s actually wrong just often enough that you shouldn’t really just accept whatever he says, without checking.
You think maybe he’s never played tennis or handball, either? And maybe gotten a blister or callous from that? I guess that’s possible.
John, Jonah, and others would have their share of blame for helping convince at least some people that what they personally don’t like about Trump as a person, is worth letting someone like Biden win. (And that’s not even accounting for those who deliberately say that Conservatives should actively support and vote for Biden.)
Jonah especially seems fond of saying things like “the election is over” when it comes to supporting Trump vs Hillary. But he seems to ignore that the PRIMARIES were over too. He doesn’t get to choose between voting for Trump and voting for some other conservative/Republican candidate he likes better. (If there even is one.) The choice then was Trump or Hillary, and now it’s Trump or Crazy/Creepy/Whatever Joe Biden, and whoever his replacement would be.
I’ll pipe up simply to say that I enjoy GLoP, the Commentary Podcast, the Ricochet Podcast and VDH’s 2 Podcasts very much and am grateful to have them in my Stitcher feed. Strains of NeverTrumpism in the first three don’t bother me particularly, but then I’m routinely frusterated by Trump’s inadequacies myself. (It’s not like they’re few in number or easy to overlook.) I am often bored by NTism, simply because mainstream news is such a constant onslaught, that to encounter it in conservative chat shows can be tedious.
We’ll see whether John’s crushingly morose prophecy comes to pass. Some may react that way. I doubt the bulk of conservatives will. But I don’t mind him floating his own heavy sense of dread, here and there. He generally knows how to pull back from the brink and hope for the best.
Having spent 40+ years in the coding profession, my far-more-likely-to-be-correct-than-Podhoretz prediction is that neither of them could learn to code their way out of a paper bag.
Perhaps the greatest unintentional typo ever.