Does Neo-Conservatism make more sense when you read this?
The most articulate analysis of the obsession with power and violence was actually written by [Norman] Podhoretz himself, in 1963, in his famous essay “My Negro Problem—and Ours.” Despite what the title might suggest, it is actually an argument against racism and in favor of miscegenation. When Podhoretz grew up in Brooklyn, the common assumption was that Jews were rich and Negroes were persecuted. This was not how things looked to Podhoretz on the playground of his local public school, where poor Jewish boys like him were regularly being beaten up by Negroes: “There is a fight, they win, and we retreat, half whimpering, half with bravado. My first experience of cowardice.” Negroes, he goes on, “made one feel inadequate. But most important of all, they were tough, beautifully, enviably tough, not giving a damn for anyone or anything…. This is what I envied and feared in the Negro….” And then there were the effete snobs, “the writers and intellectuals and artists who romanticize the Negroes, and pander to them,” and “all the white liberals who permit the Negroes to blackmail them into adopting a double standard of moral judgment….”
The key to Podhoretz’s politics seems to me to lie right there: the longing for power, for toughness, for the Shtarker who doesn’t give a damn about anyone or anything, and hatred of the contemptible, cowardly liberals with their pandering ways and their double standards.
It’d be easy to go too far with the ‘negroes stole their lunch money’ line of explanation, but it seems a common feature of these right-wing nut jobs that they were picked on as children. Now they want revenge.
