Norman Podhoretz

"Our culture is ill-equipped to assert the bourgeois values which would be the salvation of the under-class, because we have lost those values ourselves."

"[[Allen Ginsberg|[Allen] Ginsberg]] turned out to be depressingly prescient when, after a heated argument with Norman Podhoretz in 1958, he yelled, "We'll get you through your children!" For countless American families, that turned out to be only too true."

"Like the medieval heretics that Norm Cohn wrote about in The Pursuit of the Millennium, the Beats cultivated an extreme narcissism that bordered on self-deification and that "liberated them from all restraints" and allowed them to experience every impulse as a "divine command". What Norman Podhoretz observed of Ginsberg was also true of the Beats generally: they "conjured up a world of complete freedom from the limits imposed by [bourgeois] responsibilities". Podhoretz added, "It was a world that promised endless erotic possibility together with the excitements of an expanded consciousness constantly open to new dimensions of being: more adventure, more sex, more intensity, more life". Alas, the promise was illusory. Instead of an "expanded consciousness", the Beats purchased madness, ruination, and, for many, an early death. Their attack on bourgeois responsibility led not to greater freedom but to greater chaos. The erotic paradise they envisioned turned out to be rife with misery."