Norman Podhoretz and David Carlin, RIP

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Dec 20, 2025

Two writers who helped form my worldview as a young adult in the 1990s have died this month. Norman Podhoretz was 95. David R. Carlin Jr. was 87.

Podhoretz was far and away the better known of the two. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal (twice) have weighed in on his death. The impact of his life has been parsed by Compact, The American Conservative and, I am sure, many others.

The best description of Podhoretz was, I think, his own: that he was a “paleo-neoconservative.” Not, or not entirely, “neoconservative” in the sense we mean it today. His generation were the original neocons, former liberals who had been “mugged by reality” and became conservative. They were the “New York Intellectuals,” a mostly Jewish cadre of young anti-communist liberals who moved in a dazzling cultural milieu and wrote articles for important magazines at a time when those magazines had real impact on the life of the nation.

Even in his liberal days Podhoretz was famous for articles like “My Negro Problem—And Ours,” a 1963 piece that challenged the conventional leftist wisdom of the era. He and several others split with the Left in the late 1960s when the Left was becoming increasingly anti-American, a foreshadowing of today’s Wokeness. By the 1980s they were supplying much of the intellectual firepower that undergird the Reagan Administration. While National Review had already defined conservatism, broadly speaking, neocon magazines like Commentary and The Public Interest brought the social science data to back it up.

This was not just about being hawkish on foreign policy. To read Podhoretz is to be reminded of the wide breadth of “paleo-neoconservatism.”

Norman Podhoretz was a big influence on me in the 1990s, when I was taking my first baby steps toward the Right. His Commentary Magazine essays of that era were real eye-openers. I photocopied the one on “How the Gay-Rights Movement Won”—how the American Psychiatric Association’s removal of homosexuality from the DSM in the 1970s was entirely political—and I mailed it to a college friend with close connections to the Human Rights Campaign and asked her for an explanation. She didn’t write back.

“My War With Allen Ginsburg” is another one that stands out in my memory. The famous beatnik told Podhoretz that “we will get you through your children.” Culturally speaking, they did. A teacher here in Connecticut was forced to resign ten years ago for pushing Ginsburg’s homoerotic poetry on the kids. Today, that guy would probably be promoted. In fact, the Wall Street Journal had an article celebrating a wealthy gay male throuple the same day it ran a tribute to Podhoretz.

David Carlin was not as well-known as Norman Podhoretz. In fact, more than a week after his death, I have yet to see a single Catholic outlet take note of his passing, even though he wrote for several of them for decades. Podhoretz was a guy I discovered after I had already turned Right. Carlin was a guy who helped get me there.

I have written before about my past as a pro-life liberal. Dave Carlin was a lifeline for me back then. A glass of water in a desert. One of the few whose writings seemed to say to my young self, “No, you are not crazy. I see it too.”

Carlin was a Rhode Island sociologist and community college professor who was also a Democratic politician. He was even at one point the Democratic majority leader of Rhode Island State Senate. And he was pro-life.

An aspiring 20-something Catholic lefty in the early 1990s, I made it a point to read Commonweal Magazine. Funny thing about that experience. The columnist with whom I agreed the most was Dave Carlin. And most of Carlin’s columns were about how the Democratic Party—to which he and I were both committed—had betrayed its Catholic constituents. Under Bill Clinton, abortion had become the Party’s highest good. Everything else could be negotiated. But abortion was untouchable.

Carlin did not just say this in Commonweal. He said it in America Magazine too. He was the only voice on the Catholic Left making this argument from within the Catholic Left. I am not sure there is anyone on the Catholic Left who could make that argument anymore. I am not sure those periodicals would publish him if they did. I wouldn’t know because I stopped reading them years ago. For both Carlin and me, the chasm between faith and party grew too wide and we both left the party. The further levels of depravity to which the Democrat Party later sank only confirmed our choice.

My “America Since 1945” college class taught me about Norman Podhoretz’s foes but not about him. I had to find him on my own. Likewise, I was fortunate to discover Dave Carlin in Commonweal when Commonweal was still willing to publish Dave Carlin. I am grateful for them both. RIP.