"They had changed the system—and in culture created an entire vast secondary system of their own—and how the system had changed them!"

Ante Up 

The scales of power seen through Norman Podhoretz’s eyes

"They had changed the system—and in culture created an entire vast secondary system of their own—and how the system had changed them! The oceanic efforts of the founders had trickled down into a spoon-deep pool reflecting every pose of the imperial Narcissus. The demon from Vienna, commanding the apocalyptic armies of a whole white continent and poised to flood all earth with genocide, had shriveled into the butcher from Tikrit, clinging to a middling fraction of the Middle East besieged by American sanctions and dissected by American no-fly zones, his slaughters matched or even exceeded by those of any number of American client states. Who could fail to see how Partisan Review’s conflicted martial benediction had swollen, over the course of a long chain of small and not-so-small compromises, into the New Republic’s suavely vehement hurrah for storming Baghdad?"