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PARTISAN REVIEW
required by people who believe in democracy and in social change:
to make the political adjustments that are required in relation to
these contending political forces. Where do you make an alliance
here? With whom can you make an alliance there?
If
you are caught
in between two forces which you feel are threatening your very
existence...how do you parry one against the other? Now, you can
take a very simple-minded stand. On the one hand, unconditional
anticommunism; or you can take a very simple-minded stand on the
other side, and there are plenty of people who do that, and I think
they're both mistaken.
DICKSTEIN :
I'd like to add a few words of comment to Bob Lifton's
question. I agree with everything that Irving has said about the
difficulty of keeping the kind of balance and poise; but somehow I
think that making it a matter of such difficulty somewhat devalues
the rather remarkable role that he and
Dissent
played, for example, in
the 1950s, in a period in which an honorable anti-Stalinist model,
which had served a vital and important function in the 1930s and
1940s had become, by the 1950s, an excuse for general anti radicalism;
had spilled over into considerable depoliticization of intellectuals
who had prided themselves on how political they were.
It
had created
among the more extreme examples a kind of intellectual parallel to
McCarthyism. The obsession with Communism in the 50s had
caused intellectuals to do all sorts of things which were simply not
honorable.
KRAMER:
What was the intellectual equivalent of McCarthyism?
DICKSTEIN:
The intellectual equivalents of McCarthyism are, for exam–
ple, writers who justified the firing of teachers who were supposed
to
be communists, or who were communists, from schools. There were
a number of intellectuals who did that. ..how's that for an example?
KRAMER:
That would be an expression of McCarthyism if it was
unfounded.
It
wouldn't be an intellectual equivalent of the thing, it
would be the thing.. .if it was unjust.
DI CKSTEIN:
And if it was just, if they were communists? Would your
values of liberal democracy say that. ...
KRAMER:
Well, that's not the question. That's not the question. You
spoke of the intellectual equivalent of McCarthyism in the 1950s that
Dissent
held the line against and I want to know what this intellec–
tual equivalent was because I don't recall it.
HOWE:
Suppose you change "equivalent" to "approaches toward."
KRAMER:
Well, and where does that lead you?
HOWE:
It
leads to many examples which would be perfectly easy to
cite.
