Finding vindication from Reagan era to Trump election
In recent years, there have been several celebrations to mark important anniversaries of the publication of beloved books — “The Velveteen Rabbit,” for example, or the stories of Peter Rabbit. This month comes a celebration of a book hardly anyone liked at the time — and the story of its evolution from cautionary tale to classic is the story of the evolution of our times.
The book is “Making It” by Norman Podhoretz, and when it was released 50 years ago this month, it caused a sensation, and not the sort that any author craved, then or now. Podhoretz, then the editor of the journal Commentary and one of the central figures in New York literary society, was pilloried for his apostasy, though really the criticism was for his honesty.
The crime of Podhoretz, born in Brooklyn to Eastern European Jewish parents and thus the very model of the New York intellectual at mid-century, was to avow that he aimed for money, power, fame and social position, and to admit “an order of feeling in myself, and by implication in others, that most of us usually do our best to keep hidden.”
It was a surprise — really, it was a shock — when the New York Review of Books, today more leftish than leftist, decided to reprint “Making It” this spring, in the “Classic” imprint of its book publishing arm. In an interview, Podhoretz told me: “I thought it was a practical joke. I was flabbergasted. I never thought I would live to see the day when ‘Making It’ would not only be reprinted but allow me to feel vindicated.”
That word “vindicated” struck me as poignant. Some 37 years ago, I traveled to New York’s Upper East Side, sat down in Podhoretz’s apartment and heard him use the very same word in a very different context.
“Vindication,” he said that wintry day in 1980, repeating the word before going on: “Yes, there is vindication. There are incredible numbers of people who have been forced to admit that what we were saying was at least worth discussing if not true. But I also feel vindicated because these ideas have worked out exactly as I had predicted.”
This 1980 version of vindication had nothing to do with “Making It” and everything to do with the fact that, only five weeks earlier, Ronald Reagan had been elected president, causing funereal despair among liberals much the way the election of Donald J. Trump did several months ago. Podhoretz was one of the founding fathers of the neoconservative movement, and the election of Reagan affirmed his passage and rehabilitated him, though not in the eyes of his onetime allies or, in a phrase that still stings, his onetime fellow travelers.
More than a third of a century later, Trump — no conservative lineal descendant of Reagan — is committed to the former but not to the latter. And Trump is living in a world Podhoretz helped create, where new conservative voices argued for a muscular American role in world affairs.
That was the first Podhoretz vindication. The second is the one he feels about ambition.
Today ambition is no sin, and no one is silent about it or, in the social media age, silent about anything. And so, in my 2017 interview, I asked Podhoretz whether he, and “Making It,” had been the victim of honesty in 1967. His answer:
“The book was published in a perfect storm. It came out at the high point of the counter-culture, whose sworn enemy was anything having to do with commerce or capitalism or middleclass values . ... ”
The re-publication of “Making It” is an important moment, leading us to examine our own lives and motivations, re-evaluate our own priorities, discover our own sense of purpose and role in the world. The key, of course, is not to find the answer, but to ask the question.