How We Became a Braid

By John Podhoretz

Thursday, October 23, 2025

 

What is it about November and anniversaries? As it happens, this one marks the 80th anniversary of the creation of the magazine I edit, Commentary, as well as the 70th anniversary of National Review. So we’re older. But then, NR was famously “right” from the beginning, while Commentary only really began to move to the right in the late 1960s. In that sense, Commentary is kind of the kid brother of National Review, at least when it comes to the crucial intellectual labor of making arguments for traditionalism, ordered liberty, and the responsibilities of the West and of the United States as the world’s leading power and force for good.

 

The journey of Commentary, under the stewardship of my father, Norman Podhoretz, concomitant with the rise of the crew of thinkers and writers who came to be known as the “neoconservatives,” provided the occasion for a 1971 editorial in National Review titled “Come On In, the Water’s Fine.”

 

It came in response to an essay by Nathan Glazer in Commentary called “The Revolt of the Intellectuals.” Glazer’s piece detailed the ways in which the conventional consensus among the thinking elite had degraded over the 1960s. It was one of the earliest explorations of the rise of the anti-American, anti-Western, and anti-Jewish campus and elite culture that is now the key issue of our day. The NR editorial commended the Glazer piece and others that appeared in a package of Commentary articles under the rubric “Revolutionism and the Jews,” noting that “we will be delighted when the new realism manifested in these articles is applied by Commentary to the full range of national and international issues.”

 

There was something remarkable in this gesture of welcome, because (here’s a big secret) intellectuals are usually not interested in broadening their tents. Quite the opposite. We fold the tents of others and try to keep people who we fear are undesirable out of ours. We are critics. Part of our job is to draw boundary lines around the ideas we hold dear and try to keep them from becoming bastardized or cheapened by those who would cherry-pick the more popular aspects and exploit them. Since the neoconservatives — who did not like being called neoconservatives at the time, not one bit — seemed like they were moving in on National Review’s territory, I would have expected (I expected nothing then, as I was ten at the time) NR’s response to be that they ought to scram and stop playing in Buckley’s sandbox.

 

But that was not Bill Buckley’s way. He was a movement builder and believed there was life in welcoming a multiplicity of opinions — so long as there was commonality when it came to core principles. By core principles, I don’t mean matters of tax policy or deregulation or even international relations. And I don’t mean bumper sticker slogans, which too many on both left and right now confuse with the convictions that govern our interactions with each other and that we teach our children and that we wish to impart to our friends and neighbors and everyone we share a country with.

 

By core principles, or maybe “first things” is the better way to put it, I mean: belief in the one God or at least a respect for the moral seriousness of that belief even if you could not summon it yourself. I mean: belief in the fundaments of Western civilization as originally expressed in Hebrew and Greek and Latin. I mean: belief in the nobility of the American experiment. On these there must be agreement or there can be no consistency of thought.

 

So when NR suggested to Commentary that the water was fine, Buckley and Co. were acknowledging that we all fundamentally believed in the same things — only that our approaches to achieving our common aims might differ. When it came to “national issues,” for example, things start to get pretty fascinating from the perspective of 2025 and the shifting strategies of the non-left.

 

As Jonah Goldberg likes to point out, neoconservatism, such as it was, did not center on foreign policy. Its founding publication was not Commentary but the Public Interest, which came into being in 1965 as a quarterly dedicated to examining whether public-policy aims were being achieved through public-policy actions. So, for example, everyone would like poor people to do better in life and rise from poverty if possible. This feeling was made policy flesh by the interlocking pieces of legislation that came to be known as the Great Society.

 

The question posed by the Public Interest under the original stewardship of Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell (later, Nathan Glazer replaced Bell): Was it working? Were efforts in cities to combat inequality and racial injustice having the effect they were intended to have? Public Interest authors and editors were subjecting these efforts to put ideals into action to real-world stress tests. If they worked, great — and if they didn’t, they could be stopped, revised, reformed, and fixed. They were approaching these matters in a “value-free,” fact-based way. They were also informed by their belief that the social safety net created by Franklin Delano Roosevelt with the New Deal had been a necessary expansion of government power to help people in need — providing the elderly, for example, with money for retirement in the form of an entitlement granted to everyone regardless of need or standing. That was a good thing, they thought, and the conservative/libertarian objection to the creation of the social safety net was wrongheaded.

 

National Review, by contrast, stood in opposition to the Great Society approach from the outset because of a belief that centralized power was fundamentally oppressive, even if oppression wasn’t the intent. A paternalistic representative government was a contradiction in terms; the government of a self-governing people should necessarily be in a position subsidiary to the citizen, not be its sovereign. It would also serve as a disruptive force for institutions in no need of disruption, like the family and centers of worship. By implementing policies that trumped the responsibilities of individuals for their own and their families’ well-being, the government was weakening the pillars and foundations of society itself.

 

Sixty years later, those who still claim the mantle of neoconservatism are far closer to the National Review position than the Public Interest’s originating position — in part because the Public Interest provided the data and analysis that supported the NR position. The welfare state of the Great Society proved to be a fiscal disaster, with the vast expansion of a federal bureaucracy more committed to the furtherance of the interests of those who work for it than to the public that funds it and a macroeconomic trend line that shows the United States on an almost irreversible path to insolvency because of entitlements.

 

Meanwhile, the NR right and the Commentary neoconservatives also agree that the welfare state contributed to the atomization of the American family and a corresponding decline in moral standards that have manifested themselves in high levels of drug use, growing sexual confusion and depravity, and the collapse of our education system. As Dean Wormer says in National Lampoon’s Animal House, “Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.” And yet here is America, heading down the road to idiocracy.

 

***

 

What the two magazines shared from the inception of NR in 1955 was the deepest of moral commitments to anti-communism and exposing the evils of the Soviet regime and its vassal states. But within that commonality, there was difference; Commentary did not, as many NR contributors did, advocate the “rollback” of communism but rather its “containment.”

 

These two terms, which played a major role in the intellectual discourse surrounding U.S.-Soviet relations for decades, are likely completely obscure to the majority of people reading these words — just as almost no one remembers ancillary Cold War skirmishes over the Hungarian revolt of 1956, the disputed islands of Quemoy and Matsu in 1958, the 1965 Dominican Republic civil war, or Angola in the 1980s. All of these controversies triggered passionate argumentation among anti-communists about where and how or whether the West should act — heated disputations that, in retrospect, are mystifying. It’s amazing how much emotion they generated compared with the shadow they ended up casting over history, which is to say, almost no shadow at all.

 

What we agreed on was that communism was the greatest evil the world had ever seen. Both magazines wondered at the unimaginable bravery of the dissidents who endured prison and psychiatric torture and isolation to tell the truth about what was happening to them, and expressed outrage in 1975 when Henry Kissinger prevailed upon President Gerald Ford not to welcome Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to the White House after his forcible exile from his homeland. And domestically, both publications welcomed Solzhenitsyn’s warning, in a controversial speech delivered as the commencement address at Harvard University in 1978, that the West was in danger of losing its moral core.

 

What none of us foresaw as a realistic possibility was that Soviet communism would crumble into dust after only 70 years, that Chinese communism would make a complicated shift first into frenzied mercantilism and then into a soft totalitarian export machine, and that Vietnam would become a popular tourist destination for Americans on the hunt for exotic locales. The communist regimes in Cuba and Venezuela survive almost alone on the planet, one a strange kind of prison museum, the other kept afloat by oil deposits that should have made it rich but instead have allowed it to coast on life support as it pays off its regime-supporting thugs while spreading poverty far and wide.

 

The Cold War was won by the West in 1991. Perhaps the sole remaining bone of contention between NR and Commentary had to do with Jewry and antisemitism, and the view among neoconservatives that the world of National Review was unfortunately accommodating to those hostile to the State of Israel. I won’t rehearse that history here; suffice it to say that a combination of biases had led, by the 1980s, to a general tone of skepticism about the value of Israel as an ally of the United States and to darker intimations that American Jews were using what power they had to subordinate America’s interests in the Middle East and the world to Israel’s. And besides which, weren’t Jews overwhelmingly Democratic and wasn’t Israel philosophically socialistic?

 

This unpleasantness only sporadically reared its ugly head until 1990 and the rise in hostilities between the United States and Iraq after Saddam Hussein’s invasion and takeover of Kuwait. It was then that some prominent and talented voices at NR and in its ambit began advancing the argument that the U.S. was being led into an unnecessary war by disingenuous voices who were actually in Israel’s service. The idea was outrageous on its face; the issue that led to war was whether the civilized world could allow one nation literally to swallow up another without a response. The coalition that eventually assembled to reverse the occupation and annexation of Kuwait comprised 42 nations. Israel was not one of them. This inconvenient fact did not prevent the brilliant rhetorician Patrick J. Buchanan from using his command of argumentation to imply that Jews were intent on getting Gentiles killed, saying that America was fighting a war for Israel in which those who died would be “kids with names like McAllister, Murphy, Gonzales, and Leroy Brown.”

 

Sentiments similar to these were expressed by NR staffers like the late Joseph Sobran, whom William F. Buckley had to put on the bench when it came to writing on the Middle East and then eased out of his senior editorship when he openly opposed NR’s support for the war to liberate Kuwait. In the aftermath of all this came Buckley’s landmark essay on antisemitism, which took up an entire issue of National Review. That extraordinary work put paid forever to the possibility that the most important conservative magazine in the history of the world would provide even a quiet and indirect voice for antisemitism and ensured that it would thereafter be known, for its word and deed, as a great Gentile friend to the Jewish people.

 

We are more than three decades removed from this moment, and Commentary and National Review have long since been more like brothers than rivals. I spent years writing for the Corner on National Review’s website, only ceasing my more than daily labors when I became Commentary’s editor. Now my longtime colleague at Commentary, Noah Rothman, is publishing brilliantly on the site while occasionally still contributing to our pages. We share writers. We share perspectives. We share the same alarm at the rise of the kind of communist-aligned radicalism we thought the death of the Soviet Union had killed off. We both remain dedicated to the idea that culture matters — not just culture as a subset of politics but arts and literature. And we are both dedicated to the power of the written word even as we have joined the battle in full force with the worlds of screen journalism and podcasting.

 

Where we differ is on matters of emphasis. Commentary has a special mandate to focus on the place of Jews in America and the world and to serve as a defender of the State of Israel — a role that, clearly, became all-consuming after October 7, 2023. National Review is here to save America, as was its writ from the very beginning. Thank God — the one God — for both of us.