360
qualifying adjective) has been
around long enough to have be–
come part of that state. May it
not also have become, 'as that other
fellow said, part of the problem
rather than part of the solution
and thus deserve examination in its
own right? Phillips himself seems
to think so in some of his moods.
Nowhere in the article did
I
ex–
press even the shadow of a "belief
that the left is the main threat."
Threat to
what,
anyway? Ameri–
can liberties, intellectual discourse,
the status quo?
I
assume Phillips
meant the first of these. Both in
my article and in my rejoinder to
critics in a later
Commentary
I
argued that the wilder tactics of
the New' Left were dangerous be–
cause they risked arousing similar
tactics by the right which were
far more likely to threaten the lib–
erties of all of us and especially
those groups the New Left claims
to represent. However, in the uni–
versities New Left radicalism,
"puny" though it may be in the
country as a whole,
has
in the
past few years far more than the
right displayed "contempt for in–
tellectual discourse" and threat–
ened the academic freedom and
sometimes the physical safety of
members of the university. Phillips
knows this as well as
I
do, prob–
ably better since his campus has
suffered more turmoil than mine.
I
charged
The New York Review
with ignoring these threats in their
highly selective coverage of the
universities. . . .
[M]aybe what really irritated him
about my article was my stress on
the continuity between the excesses
LETT ERS ,
of the New Left today and the
obsessive anti-Communism of in–
tellectuals like himself
in
the fif–
ties who so muted or abandoned
their left traditions that radicalism
virtually disappeared, permitting
the young rebels of the sixties to
delude themselves that, to adapt
one of Phillips's own phrases, his–
tory began when they discovered
politics. Phillips, I'm sure, would
agree with Rahv's response
to
Irv–
ing Howe that all this "was a long
time ago and in another country,
and besides the wench is dead"
(the wench's name was Djugash–
viIi) in preference to my insistence
on the links between the anti–
Communism and American cele–
bration of the fifties and the radi–
cal inanities of today over which
he moans so much.
I'm happy, though, to be able
to agree entirely with his high
praise for Hannah Arendt.
Dennis H. Wrong
AMERICA
Sirs:
I
have considered and recon–
sidered the rebuttals offered by
Messrs. Harrington and Schlesin–
ger. Neither scribble impresses nor
persuades me on any major point.
I
am instead struck by the plenti–
tude of evasion, special pleading,
false syllogisms, and overblown
rhetoric.
I
rest my case with the
reader who works his way through
my books, and my reply to their
initial criticisms.
William Appleman Williams
,