18
PARTISAN REVIEW
in comparison to the middle-class clerk. . . . The America . . . of
vast inequalities and dramatic contrasts is rapidly ceasing to exist."
Daniel Boorstin- he cannot be charged with the self-deceptions pe–
culiar to idealism- discovers that "the genius of American politics"
consists not in the universal possibilities of democracy but in a
uniquely fortunate geography which, obviously, cannot be exported.
David Riesman is so disturbed by Veblen's rebelliousness toward
American society that he explains it as a projection of father-hatred;
and what complex is it, one wonders, which explains a writer's as–
sumption that Veblen's view of America is so inconceivable as to re–
quire a home-brewed psychoanalysis? Irving Kristol writes an article
minimizing the threat to civil liberties and shortly thereafter is chosen
to be public spokesman for the American Committee for Cultural
Freedom. And in the Committee itself, it is possible for serious intel–
lectuals to debate- none is
for
McCarthy- whether the public ac–
tivities of the Wisconsin hooligan constitute a serious menace to
freedom.
One likes to speculate: suppose Simone de Beauvoir and Ber–
trand Russell didn't exist, would not many of the political writers
for
Commentary
and the
New L eader
have to invent them? It is all
very well, and even necessary, to demonstrate that Russell's descrip–
tion of America as subject to "a reign of terror" is malicious and
ignorant, or that de Beauvoir's picture of America is a blend of
Stalinist cliches and second-rate literary fantasies; but this hardly
disposes of the problem of civil liberties or of the justified alarm many
sober European intellectuals feel with regard to America. Between
the willfulness of those who see only terror and the indifference of
those who see only health, there is need for simple truth: that intel–
lectual freedom in the United States is under severe attack and that
the intellectuals have, by and large, shown a painful lack of militancy
in defending the rights which are a precondition of their existence.
l
1 It must in honesty be noted that many of the intellectuals least alive
to the problem of civil liberties are former Stalinists or radicals; and this, more
than the vast anti-Marxist literature of
re~cnt
years, constitutes a serious criticism
of American radicalism. For the truth is that the "old-fashioned liberals" like
John Dewey and Alexa nder Meiklejohn, at whom it was once so fashionable to
sneer, have displayed a finer sensitivity to the need for defending domestic
freedoms than the more "sophisticated" intellectuals who leapt from Marx to
Machiavelli.
