168
PARTISAN REVIEW
against the pursuit of European and American interests. This cor–
rosive movement has reached a peak in the growth of the Green s and
in the campaign against armament in Germany and in the unilat–
eralism of the Labor Party in England . And it seems to be growing
in this country.
In this situation,
Partisan Review
and other publications have
felt that this new ideological tide should be combated , just as the
fellow-traveling of the thirties had to be countered by those intellec–
tuals who did not jump on bandwagons. But this does not mean
now, any more than it did then, that we must abandon our criticism
of the inequities of democratic Western society and of those who in
the name of anticommunism support the most reactionary ideas.
This attempt at a political balance is one of the reasons why a
few of the current conservatives persist in lumping us with the mind–
less left. Some of their diatribes against us have had nothing to do
with political or intellectual differences - which might have led to a
fruitful discussion. On the contrary, they have consisted of personal
attacks, factual distortions, and a kind of meaningless political (and
self) righteousness that can be described only as the Stalinism of the
right .
This is not meant as an indictment of all neoconservatives . The
writings of such conservatives as William F . Buckley, Jr., Irving
Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Peter Berger, Wil–
liam Barrett, Norman Podhoretz, H . J . Kaplan, and Lionel Abel
have been remarkably free of personal calumny to sustain their
arguments . One could agree or disagree with them without being
dragged down into the kind of morass I have been describing as the
Stalinism of the right.
However, it must be noted that one neoconservative , Joseph
Epstein, does stand out as a practitioner ofloaded polemics. Indeed ,
there would be no point in discussing him, if he had not distinguished
himself as a critic whose putdown of those who do not meet his con–
servative standards reminds us - if his politics were reversed - of
Stalinist methods of argument. Nor should Epstein's new conser–
vative conformism be surprising, for he is a fairly recent convert,
and converts are notoriously more regal than the king , purer than
the Pope. As late as 1973, Epstein wrote a stinging piece in
Dissent,
entitled "The New Conservatives: Intellectuals in Retreat .» In this
piece , he lashed out at Hook, Podhoretz , Glazer, Kristol, Buckley,
James
Q.
Wilson, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan-and of course
Commentary Magazine,
the publication that featured these intellectuals
