508
PARTISAN REVIEW
My friend Nathan Glazer says we were all socialists when we were
young. I was not.
I didn't know what a Trotskyite was until Dan Bell explained it to
me. I'm still not sure I can repeat the definition. I was raised in
Southern California, in Los Angeles, where people don't ordinarily say
you're beautiful unless you are, but where a large proportion of the
people are. I was raised in a Catholic family of parents who were from
the south and the west in a community overwhelmingly midwestern
and Protestant in its orientation . The on ly distinctive ethnic group was
the Mexican-Americans, whom we didn't understand, and who didn 't
understand us.
Coming to the east, coming to the University of Chicago, and then
at Harvard, I discovered that the things I had learned about politics in
my life-what I was brought up to believe in my home, church, and
community-were not believed by my intellectual peers. I came to
realize I was a dissident, a heretic. I had wandered (many of my
colleagues assumed by accident) into a citadel of orthodoxy.
If
you held
the views that are characteristic of most Americans, the citadel either
tolerated you kindly, or placed on you (somewhat benign) labels, such
as neoconservative. And you were expected to justify yourself. I've been
teaching now for nearly twenty years at Harvard. I am struck by the
relationship between my opinions, which I am told are neoconserva–
tive, and popular opinions. That relationship is formed by my own
experiences, not in the eating halls of CCNY, but on the playing fields
of David Starr Jordan High School in Long Beach, California. In both
the popular views and in neoconservative opinion are certain tensions
and ambiguity.
First, people in general have due regard for their self-interest;
when they engage in that sober reflection which is required by
citizenship, they think of their self-interest, rightly understood. They
wish freedom, but they wish amenity-personal benefits-as well.
When intellectuals state this, they discuss the virtues and defects of the
market; when they speak of amenity they debate alternative ways of
achieving it. Conservative or neoconservative intellectuals are inter–
ested in achieving amenity in ways that are consistent with the market,
if possible produced by the market, because we feel that the market
tends to produce, if properly induced and constrained, solutions that
are more desirable than planned solutions. This is not how the average
citizen would state it. He is concerned about his job, the security of his
home, his environment, and the quality of his schools. Intellectuals
discuss the matter in somewhat more abstract ways.
