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not on moral grounds was unique. He was anti-Stalinist early on,
though he did think some anti-Stalinists went too far-as they did. In
the end, he came to see how most liberal intellectuals betrayed their
country, their civilization, their liberal faith. He rationalizes his shifts
into a steady course of thinking by claiming that he was always
against "liberal orthodoxy," against "established liberal wisdom," at
first from the left, more recently from the right. Hence he was always
breaking ranks. Unfortunately, this picture of intellectual heroism
does not always correspond to the facts and involves a certain amount
of self-inflation. His anti-Stalinism was indistinguishable from the
politics of the community he grew up in-as was his early attempt to
hold on to a radical position in conjunction with his anti-Stalinism.
In the sixties he fell for the politics of the new left, more than most of
us did, though in his latter phase he accuses some of us of having
succumbed
to
it. His feelings about Vietnam were not as unique as he
likes to think they were. Nor is his latest turn toward conservatism
either distinctive or unpopular. Being out of step with one group
meant being in step with another.
Further, Podhoretz's defense of his own shifting views is weak–
ened by his misrepresentation of the views of those who have not
always agreed with him. Thus he singles out Norman Mailer, Lionel
Trilling, Irving Howe, and myself as betrayers of the anticommunist
faith. All of us, according to Podhoretz, acted out of fear, fear of
criticism by the left, though he also says Howe has a religious streak.
The evidence appears to consist of our unwillingness to take the
extreme positions occupied by Podhoretz and his fellow neoconserva–
tives.
It
does not seem to have occurred to him that Trilling was
drawn to modulated views; he shunned extreme and shrill ones. Or
that Howe has his own mind, and has always tried to maintain an
anticommunist politics within a radical perspective. Mailer is Mailer,
and he cannot be defined by the usual left-right, communist–
anticommunist categories. As for myself, Podhoretz has a small point,
but a distorted one.
It
is true that I have had some fears, but they have
been fears not of criticism by the left, but of being boxed out by
ideological commitments from a relation to the contemporary scene–
a fear, one might say, of living in some imaginary idyllic past or in
some futuristic dream. Podhoretz also manipulates the facts when he
says I gave in
to
the counterculture. How did I give in?-by publish–
ing Susan Sontag, Richard Poirier, and Morris Dickstein. One would
never suspect from Podhoretz's polemical portrait of me that I have
been accused of being too anticommunist, as well as a cultural
