Podhoretz eventually turned to neoconservatism, an intellectual movement that began as a liberal critique of the New Left counterculture, developed into illiberalism, and then degenerated into indiscriminate military interventionism. You don't hear much about neoconservatism these days because the Iraq War discredited it starting around 2005. (Though Donald Trump's latest folly, a potential regime change war in Venezuela, threatens a resurgence.) Podhoretz was perhaps the last surviving active practitioner of neoconservatism, and certainly the last survivor of the former circle of Upper West Side liberal intellectuals known as “the family” from which Podhoretz noisily departed with neoconservatism. 1967 publication of his memoirs. Let's do it.
Let's do it This is a better book than it is remembered, mainly because of the way it reflects Podhoretz's youthful resistance to assimilation into goysky ruling class. His mentor in these matters was a school English teacher, whom he calls Mrs. K., who mentored him from the ages of 13 to 16. “My grades were very high and obviously would remain that way,” Podhoretz writes, “but what good would they do me if I continued to look and sound like a ‘dirty little slum kid’ (an epithet she invariably hurled at me whenever we argued about ‘manners’)?” Podhoretz brought this identitarian resistance to Columbia, which sought to make it “like a WASP,” and what he writes about it is fascinating. But Podhoretz has also come to view academic achievement as a kind of cynical game, and what he writes about it is simply depressing.
Podhoretz's cynicism comes out most fully when he recounts how, in graduate school, he shifted his intellectual allegiance from his mentor Lionel Trilling at Columbia University (whose teacher Podhoretz was “able to easily emulate) to F. R. Leavis, who taught Podhoretz while on a fellowship in England:
