58
PARTISAN REVIEW
tendencies which the individual cannot manage-his repressed desires
for promiscuity, destruction of property and general looseness of liv–
ing. (In Europe, the Jew must do double duty, as the outlet for both
id and super-ego dynamisms.) Today, on the one hand, the increas–
ing sexual emancipation of Americans has made the Negro a less
fearsome image in terms of sexuality (though he remains a realistic
threat to neighborhood real estate and communal values) and, on
the other hand, prosperity has meant that the Jew is no longer a
salient emblem of enviable financial success. Thus, while the KKK
declines the former "racial" bigot finds a new threat: the older edu–
cated classes of the East, with their culture and refinement, with
"softness" and other amenities he does not yet feel able to afford.
Furthermore, the sexual emancipation which has made the Ne–
gro less of a feared and admired symbol of potency has presented
men with a much more difficult problem: the fear of homosexuality.
Indeed, homosexuality becomes a much more feared enemy than the
Negro. (It may also be that homosexuality is itself spreading or news
of it is spreading, so that people are presented with an issue which
formerly was kept under cover- another consequence of enlighten–
ment.) How powerful, then, is the political consequence of combin–
ing the image of the homosexual with the image of the intellectual–
the State Department cooky-pusher Harvard-trained sissy thus be–
comes the focus of social hatred and the Jew becomes merely one
variant of the intellectual sissy-actually less important than the
Eastern-educated snob. Many people say of McCarthy that they
approve of his ends but not of his methods. We think this statement
should be reversed to read that they approve of his methods, which
are so obviously not sissified, but care little about his ends, which
are irrelevant provided that the targets are drawn with the foregoing
constellation in mind.
As a result of all this, the left-wing and liberal intellectuals, who
led the masses during the New Deal and who played so effective
a role in the fight against Nazism and in "prematurely" delineating
the nature of the Communist as an enemy, today find themselves
without an audience, their tone and their slogans ineffectual.
