DENNIS H. WRONG
97
the issues dividing American liberals and the Left from a
revitali~ed
conservatism. A few of the neoconservatives will-indeed, already
have-become spokesmen for the Republican party and the business
world; they certainly represent progress beyond the cliches about the
"American Way of Life" and "free enterprise" to which these groups
were addicted in the past, but not much more than that. After all, such
disparate figures as William Buckley and Milton Friedman have
already raised the intellectual and rhetorical level of conservative
argument since the 1950s, although they are presumably plain conser–
vatives whom no one would wish to adorn with the "neo" prefix.
Others identified as neoconservatives, including Senator Moyni–
han, whose vagaries and vanities are coolly noted by Steinfels, fit
Michael Walzer 's description as "nervous liberals," a much more
accurate label over the long haul, I think, than "neoconservative. " The
New Left and the counterculture of the sixties were what made them
nervous, but the nervousness is becoming a mere tic as that decade fades
into memory and we enter one in which the prospects of the Left, any
Left, look fairly unpropitious and far more complex difficulties than
the Vietnam War loom abroad.
It
was, as a matter of fact, in a some–
what similar period, the late fifties and early sixties, that the leading
neoconservatives earned their "neo" by becoming active liberal reform–
ers, several of them actually serving in the Kennedy and Johnson
administrations. When the radical
Schwiirmerei
of the late sixties broke
upon us, they reverted to an earlier posture rooted in the anti-Stalinism
that had been their youthful heritage. Most members of the generation
of intellectuals whose earliest political involvements were with the
anti-Stalinist Left did not, of course, become neoconservatives in the
seventies. (Nor, to be sure, do all neoconservatives share this particular
ideological history.) It is noteworthy however that no member of that
generation was prominent in the revival of radicalism after 1965,
although quite a few older men and women did, at least temporarily,
experience a rebirth of their youthful political hopes and expectations.
But for those of us who came out of the forties rather than the thirties,
Stalinism was from the very beginning the worm in the apple, the
skeleton in the closet, the blot on the escutcheon, rendering us
temperamentally incapable of the ardors and excesses that gave rise
to
neoconservatism as a reaction against them.
The timebound nature of neoconservatism is revealed by the uses
made of a reported conversation between William Phillips and Ken–
neth Tynan in the early sixties that has now acquired almost legendary
status. Phillips replied to Tynan, an early New Leftist fired with
enthusiasm for the Cuban Revolution, "your arguments are so old that
