PARTISAN REVIEW
419
Morris Dickstein
What we have been witnessing these last two or three years
is not a resurgence of conservatism among American intellectuals but
something more private and limited - a noisy campaign by a few well–
situated editors and critics to reverse the cultural direction of the six–
ties, a reflex reaction against the real and imagined excesses of the New
Left and the "new sensibility." In short, backlash; and it already seems
exhausted, empty, because it had so little of its own to say, and be–
cause its few valid targets proved ephemeral or exaggerated.
This waning campaign resembles Agnew's a ttempt to crea te a
backlash constituency by manipulating the "social issue," by playing
on middle-class anxiety and
ressentiment
and proclaiming a diversion–
ary
Kulturkampf
in defense of "Western" or American values. There is
much that could be sa id for a true conserva tism that would seek to
revitalize and reform the most valuable of our existing institutions.
Instead, in the name of reason and moderation, we get a shrill apoca–
lypticism that echoes and infla tes the "Crazy" radicalism which it
attacks but needs. Onl y the most unthinking booster of youth culture
would say, as Robert Brustein did, that " the radical young are ques–
tioning the very roots of our civiliza tion," that our civilizat ion in turn
is "tottering" under the assault, and tha t " there will surely be no fu–
ture .. . unless the more ex treme of our young can cease from an–
nihil ating the past." Only a bad melodramatist, with little historical
perspective, cou ld say (as Brustein did apropos of
Dionysus
'69) that "all
this self-expression . .. could spell the end of history, literature, and
tradition while banishing cra ft and inspira tion from the a rts."
Even more peculiar th an this note of hyste ria and crisis is the
air of minority diss idence that these intellectuals assume, though their
politics sit well within the spectrum of opinion that holds sway in
Washington. It's an odd gadfly that has the attorney general in his
corner and the vice pres ident as his (emba rrassing) admirer. Indeed,
some of these writers and journals only began attacking the New Left
in earnest afte r the 1968 elections : tha t is, a ft er the K ennedy assas–
sination and the disaster of Chicago, and after the New Left had ef–
fectively expired as an organized movement. This sugges ts an analogy
with the way other "dissident" intellectuals ran polemical interference
for J oe McCa rthy, minimizing his importance, puncturing earlier liberal
"illusions" and bolstering the work of those in the universities, the
cong ressional committees a nd the courts who were eroding our civil
liberties.
Fortuna tely the decl ine of the movement has not mea nt the dea th
of radicalism. Beset by factionalism and failure, infiltration and sup–
pression, misguided by frustration into fantasies of violence, the New
Left has been dispersed into pockets of social anger tha t lie dormant
but dangerous in every corner of our society, in all the unresolved but
110
longer invisible issues which cannot be swept away. Torn to pieces
like Dionysus, the movement is nowhere and everywhere - like the
coun terculture whose history it parallels, which now reaches out to
working-class kids, cops, ha rd-ha ts, middle America, etc. For the most
