THIS AGE OF CONFORMITY
19
It is in the pages of the influential magazine
Commentary
that
liberalism is most skillfully and systematically advanced as a strategy
for adapting to the American
status quo.
Until the last few months,
when a shift in editorial temper seems to have occurred, the magazine
was more deeply preoccupied, or preoccupied at deeper levels, with
the dangers to freedom stemming from people like Freda Kirchwey
and Arthur Miller than the dangers from people like Senator Mc–
Carthy. In March 1952 Irving Kristol, then an editor of
Commentary,
could write that "there is one thing the American people know about
Senator McCarthy: he, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist.
About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they feel they know
no such thing. And with some justification." In September 1952, at
the very moment when McCarthy had become a central issue in the
presidential campaign, Elliot Cohen, the senior editor of
Commentary,
could write that McCarthy "remains in the popular mind an unre–
liable, second-string blowhard; his
only
support as a great national
figure is from the fascinated fears of the intelligentsia." (My em–
phasis-LH.) As if to blot out the memory of these performances,
Nathan Glazer, still another editor, wrote an excellent analysis of
McCarthy in the March 1953 issue; but at the end of his article,
almost as if from another hand, there again appeared the magazine'S
earlier line: "All that Senator McCarthy can do on his own authority
that someone equally unpleasant and not a Senator can't, is to haul
people down to Washington for a grilling by his committee. It is a
shame and an outrage that Senator McCarthy should remain in the
Senate; yet I cannot see that it is an imminent danger to personal
liberty in the United States." It is, I suppose, this sort of thing that
is meant when people speak about the need for replacing the outworn
formulas and cliches of liberalism and radicalism with
new ideas.
IV
To what does one conform? To institutions, obviously. To
the dead images that rot in one's mind, unavoidably. And almost al–
ways, to the small grating necessities of day-to-day survival. In these
senses it may be said that we are all conformists to one or another
degree. When Sidney Hook writes, "I see no specific virtue in the
attitude of conformity or non-conformity," he is right if he means
