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disproportionate use of means to the ends. Norman Podhoretz, in
his retroactive endorsement of the American role, does so because he
is a moralist. Yet does moralism lead inevitably to a "hard policy"?
After all, Woodrow Wilson was a moralist. Yet I suppose it does if
one is a "hard moralist." Irving Kristol, as a neoconservative, has re–
treated from the idea of"prudential politics," in an ideological world.
Yet (not so surprisingly perhaps, because he is, by temperament, a
sqber man), in foreign affairs he has espoused a "realist" policy of
prudence, going so far, even, as to call for the renunciation of the
use of nuclear arms in a first strike.
I would not wish to repeat, in this catalogue of intellectual mis–
prision, the error I have accused some of the neoconservatives of
making, of seeing them as one unitary movement organized in com–
bat posture . There are large differences among them in tone, from
the urbanity of
The Public Interest
to the relentless combativeness of
Commentary,
as well as in point of view. My complaint, addressed as
much in the past to liberal and Left intellectuals, is (philosophical
differences apart) about conduct, the decline of civility (which con-
servatives presumably would embody) and the violations of what
I
years ago Sidney Hook called "the ethics of controversy." These are
matters not just of temper and tone, of manners and
moeurs;
in a
fragile society, they are central to the nature of political discourse.
"'
"'
"'
The reprise of the
Partisan Review
symposium has shown that
not only have the old political categories atrophied, but the old parti–
san distinctions have gone askew. The serious or academic literary
culture in the country, now that it has exhausted the theme of aliena–
tion, repeats in its dismembered new novels the jagged
nouveau
romans
of French yesteryears or the arid deconstruction of the infinite
regress of meanings. The polity is fragmenting, with few persons
who stridently promote the claims of rights (in legal theory as well as
social practice) accepting or even discussing the equal claims of obli–
gations, and an administration which tells a people not to trust
government.
The death of socialism, as I wrote previously in these pages, is
the most tragic political fact of the twentieth century, and those who
still mouth phrases about strategies for revolutionary change rarely,
if ever, match that utopian ideal with the brutal consequences that
