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PARTISAN REVIEW
new sensibility, and of the reaction of older writers, is vastly oversim–
plified - as though it all boils down to clear-cut distinctions between
moderate and extreme, fashionable and serious, old and new left. There
are several knowing remarks about how people on the left feel toward
avant-garde writing. But this too is more than a matter of choosing up
sides, and I can't make out what Wrong himself thinks about the subject.
Since Wrong resents my characterization of his politics, one would
have expected him to spell them out. Unfortunately, his polemical style
serves as a means for concealing them. Discrediting my politics still
doesn't answer my questions about his.
But what are Wrong's politics? The fact is that the whole tone
and emphasis of his
Commentary
article, like his letter here, is critical
mainly of the left, from a point of view which isn't clear. There is almost
no criticism of the intellectuals who have moved to the right, either
on their own or as a reaction to the excesses of the left. Nor does Wrong
distinguish among the different brands of radicalism. Hence he gives
the impression he is against all of them. There are, of course, as Wrong
says, a lot of stylish causes these days but I can't tell whether he thinks
there is anything else.
Wrong seems to be more concerned with the campus lunatic fringe,
which is really just a nuisance, than with the national assault on liberal
values, which he presumably leaves to
Life
and CBS News not only to
talk about, but to worry about. It is true that the wilder tactics of the
New Left are exploited by the right for its own purposes. But the right
won't go away if the left behaves itself. Agnew, for example, has his
own ax to grind regardless of what the Weathermen do.
This is why I said Wrong seems to assume that the left is the main
threat to this country, by which I mean that Wrong writes as though
the left were endangering democratic institutions. Obviously he would
be singing a different political tune if he felt that our troubles came
from the inequities of the system or the power of business or the politics
of the Administration - or if he felt, as I do, that the crazies are a
threat not to the country, but to the left itself, because they create con–
fusion about means and ends and hinder the growth of productive op–
position. He's picked the wrong enemy, and for the wrong reasons.
The answer to these objections is not to say one is concerned with
the politics of intellectuals and not with the state of the nation. This
is, of course, the standard rejoinder of those who are taxed with pick–
ing on the left while ignoring the right.
It
is a specious argument, I
think, for nobody objects to a criticism of intellectuals or of their in–
fluence on public opinion. The question is rather one of political per-
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