My Love Affair with America: The Cautionary Tale of a Cheerful Conservative

Podhoretz grew up in New York speaking Yiddish before English. He writes: "America, according to some who have preceded me in feeling much as I do about it, is 'God's country.' That is, as the pages that follow will attest, a judgment with which I have no inclination whatsoever to disagree." "My Love Affair with America" occasionally veers toward cliche, but only because patriotism is a shop-worn topic for "cheap politicians." Podhoretz knows when he's approaching the danger zone, and combines a wonderful writing style with an infective fondness for his subject matter to make this book rise far above the typical Fourth of July oration. Those familiar with Podhoretz's previous writings will find plenty of what they've come to expect--stories about growing up, tales of the New York intellectual world, and occasionally zinging comments. My Love Affair with America will particularly appeal to anybody whose spine has tingled during a rendition of "America the Beautiful." --John J. Miller

Product Description
In this touching and delightful memoir, Norman Podhoretz charts the ups and downs of his lifelong love affair with his native land, and warns that to turn against America, from the Right no less than from the Left, is to fall into the rankest ingratitude. While telling the story of how he himself grew up to be a fervent patriot, one of this country's leading conservative thinkers urges his fellow conservatives to rediscover and reclaim their faith in America. A superb storyteller, Podhoretz takes us from his childhood as a working-class kid in Brooklyn during the Great Depression -- the son of Jewish immigrants singing Catholic hymns in a public school staffed by Irish spinsters and duking it out on the streets with his black and Italian classmates -- to his later education, his shifting political alliances, and his arrival at a happy personal and intellectual resolution. "My Love Affair with America" shows us a gentler and funnier Podhoretz than readers have seen before. At the same time, it presents a picture of someone eager to proclaim, against all comers, that America represents one of the high points in the history of human civilizations. In this powerful, elegantly written, and poignant cautionary tale, Podhoretz pleads with his fellow conservatives not to fall, as some have lately done, into their own special brand of anti-Americanism, as he reminds them of the disastrous consequences that followed the assault by the New Left against the United States in decades gone by. Warm in feeling and brilliantly perceptive, "My Love Affair with America" points the way back to a thoroughly unabashed love of country -- the kind of patriotism that has rarely been encounteredin recent years and that is as invigorating as it is inspiring.

[This idea] is especially associated with immigration. The future neoconservatives mostly came
from relatively recent immigrant stock. It is arguable, though certainly unproven, that such people
in America feel a stronger need than those of longer American lineage to display their credentials
as Americans; or rather, that those whose families came over on the Mayflower feel that there is
nothing incompatible between deep patriotism and a propensity to shout about what needs to be
changed.
-The World Turned Right Side Up : A History of the Conservative Ascendancy in America
(1996) (Godfrey Hodgson)

Boy, Godfrey Hodgson really hits the nail on the head there. Norman Podhoretz's book, My Love
Affair With America, is basically a protracted attempt to suggest that he loves America more than any
of his former rivals on the Left, or current rivals on the Right. Podhoretz famously broke ranks with
the intellectual New York set in the 1970's, having determined that their anti-Americanism, most
ostentatiously displayed during the Vietnam War, neither jibed with his own life experiences--the
meteoric rise of a poor Jewish child of immigrants to respected writer status--nor was compatible with
the need to maintain a militarily strong and assertive America, to stand as a final guarantor of an
embattled Israel's continued existence. He has an easy time rewinning his old battle with the radical
counterculture (though he's unable to resist the compulsion to claim credit for having created that
counterculture in the first place). Their anti-Americanism is a result of their genuine opposition to
freedom, which is America's organizing principle. They do not wish to perfect America, but to
destroy it and remake it in an image of their utopian (or dystopian) fantasies. Podhoretz gives them
yet another well-deserved drubbing.

But then he takes on the modern Right, and here he founders badly :

In the mid-1990s there unexpectedly came an outburst of anti-Americanism even among some of
the very conservatives I thought had been permanently immunized against it...I was already pushing
seventy, and it made me a little tired to think of going back into combat over a phenomenon that I
had fondly imagined I would never have to deal with again, and certainly not on the Right

The anti-Americanism he's talking about is the harsh, but loving, cultural criticism of Bill Bennett and
Robert Bork, and the tentative suggestions on the Religious Right that the Supreme Court may have so
far departed from the Constitution in its decisions on social issues, specifically abortion and
Church/State issues, that it is no longer a legitimate institution. Podhoretz is horrified by these trends
and seeks to read them out of the Conservative movement, but they were there long before him and
will remain long after.

The problem for Podhoretz, and for neoconservatism in general, is the absence of a core political
philosophy. The Left believes that the central duty of government is to guarantee equality of
outcomes among the citizenry and that government is capable of solving social problems and
effectively running the economy. Classic Conservatism is structured around a countervailing belief in
freedom, which necessitates a very limited government, but strong social institutions, and, though it
requires equality of opportunity, accepts that the resulting outcomes will be very different.
Neoconservatism is really only interested in supporting Israel and opposing quotas, it's largely agnostic
on the other issues and has no firm view of the proper role of government generally. On social issues,
a natural distrust of Christian conservatism and the fact that neoconservatism arose in the urban milieu,
combine to create a willingness to countenance big government, and the need for a massive military
requires big government. On the other hand, if equality is enforced by the state, it will work to the
detriment of groups, like Jews, who are disproportionately successful, so there's a reluctance to trust
government too far. This naked self-interest is certainly legitimate, but it's hardly a coherent political
philosophy.

That Podhoretz is only marginally conservative becomes clear from the fact that he almost completely
ignores the question of the size and role of government, from his dismissal of objections to the 1964
Civil Rights Act, from his failure to discuss, except in passing, the free market economic philosophy
of folks like Milton Friedman and F. A. Hayek, and from his failure to comprehend why abortion is
such a salient issue on the Right. Even more revealing is his thinly disguised contempt for the
conservative intellectuals of the first half of the century, who either go unmentioned (Albert Jay Nock,
for example) or are dismissed as cranks (like the Agrarians--Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, etc.).
He seems to think that conservatism was born in the 1950s, only became a significant political
movement in the post Vietnam era (not coincidentally, just after he joined it) and consists of little
more than nationalism.

Were that true, were conservatism nothing more than a blind patriotism, of recent vintage, then he
would be right to criticize cultural conservatives for questioning the moral climate of the country and
the direction in which it is heading. But conservatism, even American conservatism, antedates
America. And conservatism has endured precisely because it offers such a powerful critique of
America. In Albert Jay Nock's great book, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, he says the following :

Burke touches [the] matter of patriotism with a searching phrase. 'For us to love our country,' he
said, 'our country ought to be lovely.' I have sometimes thought that here may be the rock on
which Western civilization will finally shatter itself. Economism can build a society which is rich,
prosperous, powerful, even one which has a reasonably wide diffusion of material well-being. It
can not build one which is lovely, one which has savour and depth, and which exercises the
irresistible attraction that loveliness wields. Perhaps by the time economism has run its course the
society it has built may be tired of itself, bored by its own hideousness, and may despairingly
consent to annihilation, aware that it is too ugly to be let live any longer.

By economism, Nock means a kind of unfettered materialism or consumerism. These lines, prophetic
anyway, seem even more prescient in light of the events of September 11th. There is a palpable sense
in America's continuing discussion of the events that the America that died on September 11th
deserved to die (though the victims certainly did not), that it was too self-centered, too trivial, too
degenerate. People have now judged the America of the 1990s, which Podhoretz is here defending
against conservative critics, and, as W. H. Auden said of an earlier time, they have determined it to be
"a low dishonest decade."

In the final pages of the book Podhoretz offers a dayyenu, a list of each of the things that would have
been sufficient for us to owe America a debt of gratitude. After a brief, and platitudinous, generic list,
including such things as "domestic tranquillity" (which one is tempted to point out that China too
enjoys), he gets to his real reasons for feeling patriotic, and they are all about the success he's made of
himself : "...America...sent me to a great university..."; "...America handed me a magazine of my own
to run..."; "...America saw to it that I would live in an apartment in Manhattan..."; "...America
arranged for me to build a country house...". It's utterly vacuous and truly appalling.

Freedom is vital to everything that America stands for. It makes possible the kind of rags to riches
story that Podhoretz has lived. But it is not enough. Conservatives demand freedom, but also believe
that our country "ought to be lovely." This loveliness consists mostly of an adherence to the eternal
values of the Judeo-Christian tradition, of which, as Nock says, we are unworthy inheritors. And right
there is another key element, humility. Conservatives realize that our inheritance is too precious to
experiment with willy-nilly and so seek to conserve as much as can possibly be conserved of that
tradition. Paraphrasing Nock (one last time, I promise), who borrowed a phrase from Lord Falkland :

What it is not necessary to


Let Freedom Ring Loudly   January 8, 2001
 3 out of 9 found this review helpful

Norman Podhoretz' billet-doux to the country who has given him so much is an enthralling read occasionally marred by desultory digressions.

Like all long lasting marriages, this love affair went through periods of turbulence, but even when he felt instances of temptation, he was true to his citizenship and never gave into infidelity. Such inveterate loyalty did not extend to his politics. Once an avowed liberal, "Commentary's" long time editor maturated into as the subtitle declares "a cheerful conservative." Still, his devotion to his homeland remained steadfast regardless of where he was on the political scale. One of the salient disillusionments he found with liberalism was the ignominious tendency to badmouth America. Acts of such betrayal outraged Mr. Podhoretz and no doubt gave increased impetus to his propitiation toward conservatism.

This love letter warns of a similar concern more recently seen from the right, but this is one area where the supporting evidence is weak. Except for the discussion of a controversial seminar and a handful of other morsels, this charge remains rather unsubstantiated. Certainly, nothing is given that equates to the sixties radicals offering vainglorious aid and comfort to the Vietcong.

It should also be noted that Mr. Podheretz wisely does not see justified, severe criticism of the government as a lack of faithfulness to the nation. He was one of the many eclectic movers and shakers (ranging from Clinton/Gore cheerleaders Alan Dershowitz and Lawrence Tribe to conservative icons William Bennett and incoming Secretary of Labor Linda Chavez) who gracefully signed the brilliant syndicated ad urging the supine congress to take some action against Clinton, Reno, and company for the savage incursion and kidnapping perpetrated on the noble Gonzales family that infamous Easter weekend. Despite the natural umbrage he felt by this execrable breach committed by her opprobrious government, his allegiance to his beloved America was not diminished.

In this zeitgeist where patriotism and fidelity are routinely belittled, this tale of mutual honor and approbation stands as an example to be emulated.