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people, either of Mr. Barth's general persuasion or of Mr. Kristol's,
have used it as a point of reference in describing their own views on
Communists and civil liberties.
It seems to me rather a pity that Mr. Barth's book is not better
than it is, for I believe that Mr. Barth, for all his faults, is on firmer
ground than many of his critics. His powers of analysis are weaker
than theirs, but his general approach seems more sensible. Moreover,
many of the faults which his more knowing critics are quick to detect
in him are shared, unknowingly, by the critics themselves.
In his essay, Mr. Kristol points out that Mr. Barth and others like
him allow Communists and fellow-travelers to be the beneficiaries of a
double standard of political appraisal. They invariably put a more
charitable construction on the words and acts of Communists and their
allies than they put on those of Senator McCarthy and his allies. As a
striking instance of this, Mr. Kristol cites an article in which Henry
Steele Commager characterized a meretricious defense of Soviet policy
as superficial and uncritical but "nothing that any normal person could
find objectionable." This was hardly the sort of judgment, Mr. Kristol
says, that Professor Commager or Alan Barth would have passed on a de–
fense of Nazi policy fifteen years ago, nor is it the kind of judgment either
of them would pass today on a speech by Senator McCarthy. Knowing
that Professor Commager has never been a fellow-traveler, Mr. Kristol
explains the lapse by attributing it to a susceptibility to "the insidious
myth that Communism is a political trend continuous with liberalism
and democratic socialism, only more impatient and inclined to the
fanatical." Acceptance of this myth as truth leads, as Mr. Kristol says,
to the employment of a rhetoric which, while "not designedly pro-Com–
munist, is compelled by the logic of disingenuousness and special plead–
ing to become so in effect. . . . Hence, the liberal argument runs
askew of reality and clothes itself in neat obfuscation."
Mr. Kristol's reasoning here is admirable. But I find in his article
and in others of a similar tendency a double standard of the very
sort he ascribes to the Messrs. Barth and Commager, only working
this time to the advantage of Senator McCarthy. Mr. Kristol is annoyed
by Professor Commager's failure to characterize a Communist speech
as "a tissue of lies," which is what it demonstrably was. But when Mr.
Kristol gets around to characterizing Senator McCarthy, who is as
contemptuous of the truth as any Communist, he does not call Mc–
Carthy what in fact McCarthy is-a liar and a bully-but speaks of
him instead as "a man with a preference for arguing in the large."
Now I know that this phrase of Mr. Kristol's is merely a pleasant device
