The antinomianism Podhoretz would so forcefully oppose throughout the seventies had, in the prior decade, no more spectacular manifestation than the German Peter Weiss's play Marat/Sade (1963). Opening in New York at the very end of 1965, it was a carnivalesque fusion of Brechtian “demonstration” (ideas spelled out through dialogue, signs, can't-miss symbols, etc.) and Artaudian “cruelty” (a sometimes-bloody breaking of conventions for the sake of heightened perception). In January 1966, with the director Peter Brook, Leslie Fiedler, and others, Podhoretz participated in a forum devoted to the play. He confined himself to a few common-sense remarks about Weiss's “unresolved” opposition of classical radicalism and Sadean nihilism.

Fiedler, for his part, rapturously declared that the play's purpose was “to remind us that the sky might fall on our heads at any moment,” and this because, in the mid-sixties, American culture was at sixes and sevens. Witness the Road Vultures, a motorcycle gang in Buffalo that decorated its clubhouse with “pictures of Hitler and the killers of all the American presidents,” covered its tables with “Communist and Maoist literature,” and wrote on the wall “Death to the fascist fuzz.” This congeries of artifacts was, for Fiedler, analogous to the effect of Marat/Sade: “a refreshing and terrifying…confusion of the classical Right and the classical Left.” The difference between Fiedler and the Vultures, apparently, lay in his resemblance to Weiss's Sade, who “stands outside of his own madness instead of twitching with it.”