Manifest throughout Podhoretz's My Love Affair with America: The Cautionary Tale of a Cheerful Conservative (2000) is an acceptance of his country as neither a hell nor a heaven but as the sort of place human beings have always inhabited – only, thanks to its natural resources and even more to its political system, a place much better than most.

In the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson called patriotism – “vigorous support for one's country” (Oxford English Dictionary) – “the last refuge of a scoundrel.” So it has sometimes been. But it has also been a noble emotion, especially when the country in question has stood for liberty. What Bertrand Russell said of his country – “Love of England is very nearly the strongest emotion I possess” – Podhoretz wished to say about his: love of it had been strong since he was a boy, when our men fought overseas to save other nations from the tyrannies of fascism and Kate Smith sang “God Bless America” every week on the radio.

Not that a New York writer starting out in the fifties was often called on to express patriotic sentiments. Expression became urgent, for Podhoretz, only in the late sixties, when his reaction to the hostility of the New Left and its fellow travelers was largely defensive. But soon after his epiphany in 1970, he went on the offensive, and now, nearer the end than the beginning of his life, he wanted to finish the job – to glorify America “with a full throat and a whole heart.