INTELLECTUALS AND THE DISCONTENTED CLASSES
261
and a few Communists or alleged Communists such as Alger Hiss and
Harry Dexter White. For the fanatical true believers of the Radical
Right, convinced of their own powerlessness and cynical about
poli~
ticians and big shots, the discovery of a few actual spies and com,
promised bureaucrats was perhaps not essential; for such an audience,
even so inveterate an
anti~Communist
as Dean Acheson could be made
to appear traitorous. Beyond such circles, however, with their crusading
wildness, the disorientation of accustomed outlooks stimulated by such
events as the Hiss case was important, providing McCarthy and his
allies with a gloss of rationality and demoralizing many liberals, whether
or not they had had any contact with the Communist Party or front
organizations. Looking inward at their own mistakes, moreover, as lack
of power often leads the reflective and the vulnerable to do, some
articulate and
self~conscious
intellectuals who have left the party or
various splinter groups have remained preoccupied with liberal guilt,
innocence, or disingenuousness in the period of the 1930's and 1940's
(and have perhaps exaggerated these). And while it is obviously
im~
portant to reach a better understanding of our individual and collective
past, there is the danger that many liberal intellectuals have become
fixated in the past and are distracted from imagining a better future by
the gnawing need to cope with vestiges of domestic Communist
con~
tamination as well as with the live embers of McCarthyism. In practical
politics, for instance in the peace movement, these vestiges and embers
create difficult questions for strategy, morality, and clarity, ,but they
contribute diminishing returns to our understanding either of the dangers
or of the opportunities of the future.
If
we must wait until we understand ourselves, we aren't likely to
get out of the nuclear age; indeed we may not get out of it whatever
we do. But clearly one requirement is a less oppressive climate, and
achieving
this
would seem to entail drastic
re~education
and measures
on many fronts abroad and at home to give Americans a feeling of
creativity in the discovery of a political equivalent that would also be a
moral equivalent for war.
Finally, in the light of all these crescent dangers, the earlier article
seems to me today too detached and somewhat complacent an essay.
Since it was written, both intelligence and discontent would seem
to have gained more importance in American life. Emerging from
the sordid and frightening distraction provided by Senator McCarthy,
though not by any means from all the legacies of his procedures and
his view of the world, intellectuals regained some confidence. And in
