INTELLECTUALS AND POLITICS
609
and a few pockets of civility and freedom.
If
some quarters of the
left see the United States as the chief destabilizing force in the
world today, one can only say that they ought to see an ophthal–
mologist. Indeed one of the problems of American foreign policy
is that it seeks stability with such unfocused urgency that it often
loses the notion of what stability actually is.
The idea of nuclear war is of course a horror. Talking about
it, however, as if one were an expert on highly technical matters,
and quoting one expert, or pseudo expert, or another, is not exact–
ly a useful or uplifting way of spending one's time. The experts
themselves, as far as I can tell, are in a state of utter disarray and
disagreement about the technological state of affairs when it
comes
to
nuclear weaponry. The one thing that no one seems to
disagree upon, however, is that over the last twenty years the
Soviet Union has increased its military strength relative to the
West in significant measure. How momentous the consequences
of this change in the state of international relations will be re–
mains to be determined.
I do not see how literary or cultural liberal intellectuals can
be anything except anticommunist. Not to be so is a form of sym–
bolic suicide or childish self-indulgence. To be anti-anticommu–
nist or anti-American in a variety of symbolic ways-through
taking a number of specific political positions on particular is–
sues-is not a form of idealism. I can do no better than to quote
Max Weber: "the world is governed by demons and .. . he who lets
himself in for politics, that is, for power and force as means, con–
tracts with diabolic powers and for his action it is
not
true that
good can only follow from good and evil only from evil, but that
often the opposite is true. Anyone who fails to see this is, indeed,
a political infant." One of the luxuries of living in a political
democracy is that one can indeed behave like a political infant. I
find it both tiresome and embarrassing to see colleagues and asso–
ciates on the liberal left speaking as if they would like to attain a
monopoly on this form of behavior.
Leon Wieseltier
Years ago Harold Rosenberg described what he called
"the herd of independent minds. " What we have now is the litter.
Morris Dickstein's statement is not an analysis of anything;
