848
PARTISAN REVIEW
to entertain the thought that there might be Stalinist tendencies in
his own thinking and activity. I reacted strongly to the radicalism of
the sixties, but I tried, as I had tried in my quarrel with my Stalinist
upbringing, to keep my balance. I didn't want to be a case of the in–
verted ideologue, who is nourished by the passion of constant hostil–
ity to radical ideology .
This is the case of the neoconservatives, who emerged as an im–
mediate reaction to the illusions of the sixties, but who represent a
deeper tendency that began with the disillusionment with Stalinism
and went underground in the sixties. As a conservatism without
roots, it has a curious resemblance to the object of its revulsion . One
has to listen or read for voice as well as sense, and I hear in the ac–
cents of neoconservatism some of the old ideological patterns from
the past. While traditional conservatives have the equanimity of
those who have nothing to exorcize, neoconservatives, or at least
those of whom are embittered ex-leftists, recoil from their past with
particular intensity. I find them stridently confident, predictable ,
and even fanatical in their opposition to every liberal or radical
tendency (e.g., homosexual culture, feminism) , in their habit of
dividing the world too neatly between good and evil. They tend to be
intolerant of softness, hesitation, equivocation, the contemptible
faults of liberals. I recall the same scornful guilt inducing dismissal
of liberals by Stalinists and sixties radicals. I think it a mark of
strength in the liberal to scorn the scorners . The cultural corollary of
the neoconservative position is, curiously enough, philistine in its
cherishing of popular feeling and its mistrust of what it regards as
avant-garde pretension. (In sketching a portrait of the neoconser–
vative type I risk falling into the trap of ideological reduction. As
with people on the Left, I know admirable people of neoconservative
persuasion who do not fit the type. The first humanizing wisdom
about ideology is that type and reality do not coincide.
It
is a wisdom
that makes possible friendship across political lines, though these
friendships are difficult to sustain in proportion to the intensity of
ideological conflict.)
In comparison with the thirties and the sixties, the present time
is, relatively speaking, devoid of ideological passion . The dominant
conviction in most areas of tho•1ght is skepticism. I had been drawn
to Matthew Arnold's idea of literature as a criticism of life and in
particular of the political life. For all of his skepticism about the
ideologies of his own time, he remained confident to a fault about
the values of the literary imagination. But now for many of us whose
