The politics of resentment.

• Author: Glastris, Paul
• Position: Editor's Note

This month we feature, among other fine pieces, a profile by Jacob Heilbrunn of uber-neocon Norman Podhoretz (see "Norman's Conquest," page 32). Podhoretz is a senior foreign policy advisor to Rudy Giuliani. He has argued that the Iraq War is a triumphant success and that bombing Iran is an unavoidable necessity. Most recently, he has suggested that the latest National Intelligence Estimate concluding that Iran stopped its nuclear weapons in 2003 is the work of disloyal anti-Bush intelligence officials--a notion he retracted after it was pointed out to him that the president's own people control the elaborate process by which the NIE is put together.

That Podhoretz would make such accusations, and such a rookie mistake, isn't surprising. He has no government experience, no real foreign policy expertise, and has spent his entire professional life as an editor and polemical essayist. Why, then, would Giuliani choose him as a foreign policy mentor? The answer, says Heilbrunn, is that the two men are drawn together by a shared set of liberal enemies and an almost pathological combativeness each learned growing up on the streets of Brooklyn.

Podhoretz has been quite honest about the various animosities he acquired in his youth. In his seminal 1963 essay "My Negro Problem--and Ours," he confesses to sometimes feeling toward African Americans "twinges of fear and ... resentment," as a result of being repeatedly beaten up as a kid by blacks. In one incident, he is confronted on the sidewalk by a "surly Negro boy named Quentin." The boy gives Podhoretz a violent shove. Podhoretz pushes him back--and is knocked unconscious by the bat-wielding Quentin.

Blacks are just one group Podhoretz grew up to resent. In his autobiography Making It, he seethes at the treatment he, the child of poor eastern European Jewish parents, was afforded by his fellow classmates at Columbia University--"the prep school boys ... the homosexuals with their supercilious disdain ... and the prissily bred middle-class Jews who thought me insufferably rude."

Such powerfully felt class and ethnic animosities are, of course, not uncommon. It's what makes many people--and much of American politics--tick. In an intellectual way, I get this. But on an emotional level, I confess, I mostly don't.

This may have to do with where and when I was raised--not on the mean streets of New York in the 1930s and '40s but in the mostly quiet suburbs of St. Louis in the 1960s and '70s. Such places...