408
LEO BERSANI
ican speech. To shock the country into an awareness of the
illiberal
assumptions which may support its liberal rhetoric is a politically
radical act only if the strategy of shock underlines the
gap
between
the two. The purpose of radical criticism should be to encourage a
rejection of the complicities which such criticism uncovers. The danger
from our extreme Left is that its supposed exposure of those com–
plicities
will,
on the contrary, appear to justify the language of the
Right. Liberalism is challenged to prove that it cannot be reduced
to the ideology of the Birchers when it is confronted with political
behavior which it may find uncongenial but which can be rationally
defended as behavior made imperative by the proclaimed goals of
liberalism itself. But the responsibility for a possible liberal backlash
rests at least partly with those against whom it is directed when the
latter legitimize a right-wing nightmare. The forms of resistance–
including even armed resistance - are surely more varied than
that. The enactment (rather than the critical exposure) of a meta–
language of intolerance "belongs" to an intolerant society. The critics
of that society become its allies when, however desperately the jump
may be taken, they seek to contest its rigidity and its violence by
bringing about new opportunities for rigidity and violence.
