Paul Hollander
THE SURVIVAL OF THE
ADVERSARY CULTURE
There is a widespread belief that the Reagan years have
been marked by the retreat or virtual disappearance of the adversarial
movements and dispositions associated with the 1960s and character–
ized by a visceral rejection, or reflexive disparagement, of the major
American institutions and "middle American" values . It is my con–
tention that these adversarial attitudes have survived well into the
1980s, notwithstanding the Reagan presidencies, the "me-decade,"
the "Yuppies," the neoconservatives, and the transformation ofmany
former activists and full-time protesters into professionals and bur–
eaucrats of various kinds.
Since the 1960s much of what had once been considered radical
social criticism has become assimilated, with some modifications, into
mainstream social values. Notions of "moderate," "liberal," "radical,"
or "conservative" have been redefined - the "center" shifted towards
the left. These developments have made the critiques of society, which
have been with us for decades, less noticeable; we are so used to
them we barely register them, just as we hardly notice the billboards
lining the road along a familiar route to work.
The major producers of social criticism and the most steadfast
adherents of the adversary culture have been our intellectuals and
quasi-intellectuals (people with some higher education in certain
non-manual occupations who are predisposed to take an adversarial
stand, without exhibiting any of the more creative and truly noncon–
formist attitudes traditionally associated with intellectuals). They
can be found primarily in academia, and especially in the schools
and departments of the humanities and social sciences; in the media,
foundations, publishing houses, and some church organizations; also
in the so-called helping professions. Given the original conception of
intellectuals as a small, nonconformist, often beleaguered vanguard
on the battlefield of ideas, it is hard to think of them as numbering in
the millions as they do today in the United States.
There is growing evidence that the contrasts between the 1960s
- seen as the period of the most vocal rejection of American society
in recent times - and the decades that followed have been greatly
overdrawn. To be sure, the rejection of the status quo in the 1980s
