Politics & Power Quote by John Podhoretz

There’s an almost disarming candor in “wholeheartedly attracted”: it reads less like a policy conclusion than a confession of taste. Podhoretz isn’t describing a conversion after studying marginal tax rates; he’s describing the seduction of an ecosystem. The key word is “atmosphere,” which shifts conservatism from an argument to a climate - something you breathe in, something that signals belonging. Washington, in this framing, becomes less a workplace of deliberation and more a social weather system where certain instincts feel natural, rewarded, even inevitable.

The intent is reputational as much as ideological. By praising a “conservative atmosphere that permeated” the city, he’s staking out a self-image: someone drawn to order, hierarchy, realism, and the satisfying certainty of institutional power. “Permeated” implies saturation, an ambience you can’t escape; it flatters conservatism as the quiet default of serious governance rather than a factional stance. That’s a subtle power move, because it relocates political legitimacy from voters to insiders - the people who set the tone in capital corridors.

Context matters: a writer coming of age as post-Reagan conservatism professionalized into a media-and-think-tank pipeline would naturally talk this way. It’s the sound of ideology as career habitat. Subtext: Washington didn’t merely host conservative ideas; it offered conservative identity as a ready-made culture - complete with gatekeepers, language, and status. The attraction isn’t to dissent. It’s to a capital where conservatism feels like the room you want to be seen in.