98
PARTISAN REVIEW
I can't remember the answers to them." Norman Podhoretz cited this
exchange in
Making
It,
and Nathan Glazer borrowed it for the title of
his collection of essays on the campus revolts,
Remembering the
Answers,
although both of them missed the self-mocking, ironical note
in Phillips's remark. I recall running into Glazer at the time and saying
to him, "look, it's not so much that people forgot the answers as that
you guys never thought the questions were going to be brought up
again!" Glazer, always one of the most reasonable of men, allowed that
there was considerable truth in that. Now that sixties radicalism has
been dead for a decade, the repeated harping on the old answers by
neoconservatives has become tiresomely catechistic and one can be sure
that the questions will still be coming up when all that was new about
the New Left and "neo" about neoconservatism have long been forgot–
ten.
The questions keep coming up not only because America, like all
other societies, is far from perfect and therefore bound to produce
dissenters, but because the United States is specifically committed in
the very Constitution that established it to the secular ideals of liberty
and equality as well as to a democratic form of government that insures
continual efforts to move us further toward the realization of these
ideals. Democracy, in effect, institutionalizes the general aspirations of
the Left. It is sometimes necessary to insist on the corruption of
particular versions of these aspirations and to stress, as the neoconser–
vatives do, the need for an awareness of "limits" and the dangers of
"utopian greed," but in America such an emphasis can only be a
partial , even a reactive, one rather than the basis for a comprehensive
political philosophy. This constitutes what Marxists would call a
"contradiction" in the very idea of an American conservatism, as
profound a one as that implied by the support some neoconservatives
give to such restless, uprooting, world-transforming agencies as capi–
talism and the market.
Nor can an "end of ideology" ever be achieved in a democratic
polity this side of utopia, because, as Franz Neumann once put it, "the
democratic process compels each social group to strive for mass
support [and] to present its egoistic interests as universal. " But, as
Neumann went on to contend, ideologies are not therefore mere fig
leaves hiding the nakedness of selfish group interests, for the very
requirement that they be stated in universalistic terms wins them new
adherents with the result that their appeal transcends its original
source. The neoconservatives are guilty of lapsing into the practice of
their Marxist adversaries when they reiterate interminably that de-
