'
. .
,
"
David Riesman
THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE
DISCO NTE NTE D CLASS ES
SOME FURTHER REFLECTIONS
. Seven years ago in the pages of
Partisan Review,
Nathan Glazer
and I SQught to explain McCarthyism, and especially its attack on the
intellectuals, less in terms of the Korean War and the problems of
foreign policy than in terms of endemic strains in American life. We
discussed the growing power of intellectuals in a complicated society
and the vulnerability and availability of this group to Right Wing at–
tack. We interpreted McCarthy and other Right Wing leaders as radical
demagogues, seeking opportunistically and somewhat randomly for con–
stituencies and targets, and discovering both in the new alignments cre–
ated in American life by a prosperous economy supported by war
industry, by German and Irish resentment of both World Wars, and by
the discovery that charges of domestic Communism enabled politicians
to seem strong, rough and effective without actually having a program.
The essay, along with others of somewhat similar bearing, was in–
cluded in the volume,
The New American Right,
edited by Daniel Bell;
and the planned reissue of that volume has been the occasion for my
re-examination of the earlier essay in terms of what has occurred since
and what now seems mistaken in what we wrote.
The original essay was criticized by many readers for seeking the
sources of American discontent only in America, and primarily in ir–
rational motives, rather than seeing this discontent as a rational re–
sponse to Communist aggressions. I still think we were right to empha–
size strains endemic to American life, strains which, to
be
sure, the Cold
War intensified but did not create. However, today it is quite clear
that the Cold War and the revolutionary ferment in the world
~hi~h
both feeds on and inflames the Cold War have radically altered the
position both of the intellectuals and of the discontented classes in
American domestic politics. Certainly any effort to separate domestic
from foreign policy is arbitrary, especially in a democracy. Yet there are
