194
PARTISAN REVIEW
politics of liberal democracy, it showed itself to be ignorant,
indifferent, and snobbish-or, as they say, elitist. Go back to
those early numbers of
PR
in which the issues of the Second
World War are discussed, and see if you can read those pages
with anything but the most acute embarrassment. A class of
minds that took pride in an awareness of historical forces proved
to be completely out of touch with historical reality. They
themselves proved to be victims of the jargon of "revolution"
and the mystifications of Marxist ideology at the very moment
when their exposure of the Stalinist myth might have been
expected to cleanse them of the corrupting effects of radical
rhetoric and belief. But it was less the Second World War than
the Cold War that brought about an abatement in this devotion
to the jargon of "revolution " -a jargon, let us be reminded, that
has no language but the language of contempt and enmity for
the values of liberal democracy. For the " New York Intellec–
tual," Stalin and Stalinism were the only political realities that
were really felt and really understood, and to its great credit, the
"New York Intellectual" firmly resisted them-until the sixties
ran their course. To its great discredit, Stalin and Stalinism were
the
only
political realities that were felt and understood.
That language of contempt for liberal democracy is, alas,
one of the things our intellectuals have bequeathed to the
national culture-it is, perhaps, our most conspicuous political
gift to the nation.
It
was of this language, to which it added its
own peculiar embellishments, of course, that the New Left made
its movement-the movement that all but swamped the single,
shining political virtue that the old "New York Intellectual"
had to his credit: his firm opposition to Stalinism in all its
implications and manifestations; the movement, let us not
forget, that in 1968, in Chicago, gave us the Nixon presidency.
The political failure of
OUf
intellectuals-which is also a
moral failure-has, I think, created a political gulf (I would say
a healthy gulf) in the relation of intellectuals to the national
culture that does not exist in quite the same way in the arts.
Politically, we are not trusted-and we are not to be trusted.
When was the last time our intellectuals had anything cogent to
say about defense policy, or even about the need for a defense
