The Outsider Perspective Issue 472 | The Beltway Outsiders

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Good Friday Morning! And a very special good morning to the man who set a new Guinness World Record for Christmas caroling. Dave Purchase broke the previous record by standing and singing carols for a solid 42 hours.

Yes, you read that right. 42 consecutive hours of singing, nonstop. He covered 684 songs in that period, with special guests joining in the fun. But it wasn’t all happiness and such, he nearly quit after 32 hours.

Speaking after the challenge Dave, from Gloucester, said it was not just a vocal challenge but also a physical one. He continued: “I nearly gave up at about 4 o’clock on Friday morning. “I felt as if I couldn’t carry on because I was hallucinating with the lack of sleep. I was falling to sleep singing the songs.

He claims a crowd helped him out, adrenaline kicked in, and he sang for another 10 hours, making it through—props to him. I’m pretty sure I’d have quit in hour one.

This week, I’m going to cover the death of Norman Podhoretz, and what he meant to both conservatives and America – links to follow.

Quick Hits:

A Wisconsin judge found guilty. A jury deliberated for six hours and found Hannah Dugan guilty of helping an illegal immigrant avoid arrest by ICE agents in a courtroom. It’s the right decision, in my opinion. However, I’m going to go ahead and write the final chapter on this one for you: at some point in the future, a Democratic President will get pushed to, and will, pardon Dugan of all charges. If you want to get ahead of the outrage machine, prepare now.
Brown University and assassination. Authorities finally found the body of the man who is alleged to have killed and shot people at Brown University. The Associated Press also reports authorities think this man was behind the targeted killing of a nuclear scientist at MIT this week, too. Conservatives have blasted the investigation this week for how Keystone Cops it’s been… and it’s hard to deny that. And now, with these two shocking events connected, there are even more questions.
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Where you can find me this week

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Australian Gun Control Leads To More Needless Deaths – Conservative Institute

The Green New Deal Era Is Dead – Conservative Institute

Bernie Sanders Suggests The Impossible – And Helps China – Conservative Institute

American Legend: Norman Podhoretz

Norman Podhoretz passed away this week at the incredible age of 95. Podhoretz helped build Commentary Magazine, which would eventually become one of the country’s foremost conservative Jewish outlets. His son, John Podhoretz, wrote a touching obituary in Commentary, where he’s the Editor-in-Chief.

There’s been a lot of touching tributes to him this week, and I’ll share a few below, and even quote a few here. But what struck me is that it’s truly the end of an era, particularly in 20th-century conservatism. Like William F. Buckley, Jr., Norman Podhoretz was one of the most important writers and thinkers of the century.

He sits easily in that company, and it struck me, reading through the many pieces about him, that it felt like the closing of an era.

My first encounter with Norman Podhoretz came in college. I started leaning more toward libertarianism in college, but shifted more toward conservatism the more I read. I ate up political philosophy courses in college, but I found them lacking. And that makes sense when you realize liberals taught all the classes.

That was true until I came across a book at a yard sale while working on a Republican campaign one fall. It was a 1979 copy of George H. Nash’s “The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945.“ It was a thick volume that covered in detail what conservatives did from the fallout of the end of WWII through 1976, the year Nash’s book was published.

It’s a fascinating look at conservatism because it’s before the ascendance of Reagan. Still, it very clearly saw the coming movement that would sweep Reagan into office. But at the time Nash published it, conservatism didn’t yet have its champion. Barry Goldwater’s previous presidential bid was a total electoral disaster.

But what it did for a young person on the right in college was fill in the gaps in their intellectual history. I knew everything from Aristotle and Machiavelli to the ascendance of modern liberalism, Marxism, and the rest, with the Second World War. But what Nash did was complete the picture, showing you the intellectual threads that continued forward and where you stood in that movement.

Nash covered a lot, and one of the people he briefly touched on was Podhoretz and Commentary. And what that book did was give me a mental picture of where I stood, and I pretty easily saw the direct connections of my thoughts to the strands there. In particular, the Russel Kirk view, that the American Revolution was good and the French Revolution was universally a disaster, matched up with my beliefs.

But the importance of this comes into play because I was reading another essay in college at the same time. A major political event happened at the time: Barack Obama won the 2008 election. Sam Tanenhaus, who recently published a biography of William F. Buckley, Jr., wrote a viral essay titled “Conservatism Is Dead.“ He eventually turned it into a book.

I reacted negatively to this, as I was getting my feet under me with Nash and the movement. And now everyone was saying it was dead. I had professors who believed it and also pushed the other big theory of the moment: that demographics are destiny and that the Democratic Party wouldn’t lose any more elections (the now-defunct emerging Democratic Majority thesis).

Watching that entire political theory collapse has made me incredibly happy over the years. However, I still hold an intellectual grudge against Tanenhaus and refuse to read his books as a result.

As an aside, if you want a modern version of Nash’s work, Matthew Continetti’s intellectual history, “The Right,” is amazing. I am a massive fan of Continetti, who was, until recently, a regular in Commentary. If you want another version, though challenging to source now, “Leftism Revisited: From De Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot,“ may be the best volume ever written (Jonah Goldberg does a version of this argument in his “Liberal Fascism“ book).

It was around this time that I got hooked on Twitter, as well (I had a friend who got me on the platform in 2009, and I’ve basically never been off since, except for about a six-month stint in 2017). And that introduced me more thoroughly to the current National Review and Commentary set of writers – and I’ve been hooked ever since.

When I got my first job as a lawyer, one of the things I immediately did was subscribe to Commentary Magazine. When I lined up my first writing gig, I got asked what kind of conservative stuff I read, and I said, “Typical things, like National Review and Commentary.“ And the interviewer joked, “Oh… so you’re old guard conservative and Republican.”

Which is a fair description.

That brings me back to Norman Podhoretz. His influence is everywhere in the conservative movement, and its thoughts and ideas. He firmly believed in America as few did. I appreciated what Yuval Levin wrote in National Review:

He was a truly great writer, who appreciated great writing as a high art, full of beauty and meaning. And he embodied, in his attitudes and arguments, a grasp of what may be the deepest insight of the philosophical tradition of the West: that the true, the good, and the beautiful are one. Arguing about art and arguing about politics and arguing about fundamental moral commitments were different ways of doing the same thing — and that one thing was what Podhoretz had a gift for.

For this reason, he was larger than this moment in a simpler sense, too: He thought that the subject of all of those arguments was serious. It mattered. This is the way in which our moment feels small. Everyone runs away from the seriousness and importance of living by the truth. Everything in the public arena now is said in a kind of half jest, as if we are afraid to think deeply and speak plainly of things that aren’t a joke. This attitude tries to present itself as cool and knowing, but it is an expression of ignorance and terror. It’s small, and it makes our culture and our politics small.

It’s why I still love and read Commentary, because the writing and thoughts are that good. To this day, I don’t think anyone published anything better early on in the pandemic than Commentary. In their May 2020 issue, they ran a piece by James B. Meigs, “Elite Panic vs. the Resilient Populace.“

That one piece did more to shape my view of the pandemic than anything else. And by then, I had already written extensively about the pandemic, including a highly critical piece on China for The Dispatch.

An aside: Meigs wrote a follow-up to that in 2022 that was also great.

The point is this: Norman Podhoretz is one of those guys you read about in history, literature, and philosophy classes, and he was still with us. The Free Press did an extraordinary interview with him a few months ago.

And now that he is gone, it feels like we’re finally saying goodbye to that generation. On the right, there were a lot of intellectuals who were fed up with socialism, saw the tyranny of the Soviets, and then built a response. The thing about modern conservatism in this country is that, while it traces its roots to longer histories, it is still relatively young.

Historians often see the Civil War as the second founding of the country, and it’s common to call FDR and WWII a kind of third founding. The America that emerged from those events is fundamentally different than anything that preceded it.

The country that emerged from WWII needed a response to the massive government expansion of the New Deal, and an anti-Soviet response, as liberals and the Democratic Party were riddled with communist spies. Norman Podhoretz was one of the luminaries who built that very response. He defined the neoconservative movement itself.

As Senator Tom Cotton noted on the Senate floor this week, his country owes him a great debt:

Not many men truly change the course of history. Those who do usually do it through their actions, like General U.S. Grant’s brilliant military campaigns in the Civil War. Fewer still do it with a combination of words and actions, like Abraham Lincoln. Perhaps rarest of all are men like Norman Podhoretz, who change history with mere words.

What Podhoretz wrote drove conservatism forward, paved the way for Reagan, and has brought about much good in America.

There are very few men who, when they pass from this world, you know it’s the end of an era. Podhoretz was one of those luminaries. America is very lucky to have called him ours.

May his memory be a blessing.