SOURCE: Hitchens, Christopher. “Born-Again Conformist.” New Statesman 99, no. 255 (21 March 1980): 437-38.

In the following review, Hitchens criticizes Podhoretz's political posturing and ignoble descriptions of fellow intellectuals and contemporaries in his two memoirs, Making It and Breaking Ranks.

Anglo-American commentary on ‘culture and society’ has sometimes been infiltrated by writers who believe they are Orwell but who think like Babbitt. Norman Podhoretz, for example, is to Manhattan what Bernard Levin has become to our commuter belt—a born-again conformist with some interesting disorders of the ego. If this seems an excessive way to begin a consideration of a ‘serious’ writer, then recall what Alfred Kazin wrote in his essay on the brave days of Podhoretz's own magazine Commentary:

There is real madness to modern governments, modern war, modern moneymaking, advertising, science and entertainment; this madness has been translated by many a Jewish writer into the country they live in, the...