Norman Podhoretz, the man who predicted the culture war

Norman Podhoretz, the longtime editor of Commentary magazine and who the New York Times called “a lion of neoconservatism,” passed away last week at the age of 95. He was a brilliant writer and ardent patriot, whose book My Love Affair with America: The Cautionary Tale of a Cheerful Conservative is a modern classic.

Podhoretz was also the man who saw the culture war coming.

It happened on a winter night in 1958, when Podhoretz, then a young writer, had a confrontation with the poet Allen Ginsberg. The resulting Podhoretz essay, called “My War with Allen Ginsberg,” is prescient. With elegant and funny observations, Podhoretz predicted everything that would happen for the next sixty years: drug abuse, transgenderism (and the medical malpractice that comes with it), mental health problems, anti-Americanism, socialism, and atheism.

CONSERVATIVES

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