WILLI AM PHILLIPS
\3
a "contest between those who, like Shils, Daniel Bell, and Irving Kristol
('conservatives'), defended Western liberal civilization and those who, like
Mary McCarthy, William Phillips, and John Kenneth Galbraith ('new Left'),
deplored the vulgarity, triviality, and conformism of Americanized 'mass
society,' its consumerism, its automobiles, its popular media." This is a fiction.
Neither McCarthy, Galbraith, nor I were ever members of the new left.
Moreover, I have been accused endlessly of being too conservative, too ac–
cepting of American society and the American government. It is true that I
have criticized some aspects ofAmerican life - who hasn't - but since the late
thirties I have not shared the anti-Americanism of many on the left. As for
Mary McCarthy, so far as I recall, she never participated in any debates of
the American Committee. Like most of us, she was not consistent in her be–
liefs. Of course there was her ultraleftist stand on Vietnam, but apparently
Coleman has not read her essay published in
Commentary
in 1947, "America
the Beautiful."
Nevertheless, there seems to be enough substantiated material in the
book to enable one to judge the politics and the ethics of the "liberal conspir–
acy." But any such judgement obviously would reflect our own political
experience and bias. Perhaps one criterion is the question I have often asked
myself: would I have accepted CIA subvention for
Partisan Review,
either
directly or via the Congress for Cultural Freedom? I cannot be certain I
would have refused , for to be offered funding for a magazine to which one is
committed is a temptation almost too great to resist. It might be said that, as
Oscar Wilde remarked in a famous epigram, the only way to have resisted
the temptation was to have yielded to it. But if I had accepted, I might now
be regretting it - such being the pressures ofliberal opinion, as well as my
own reservations.
In any event, it is a measure of how much the political situation has
changed that now we cannot even conceive of having to make such lasting
choices. As for the "liberal conspiracy" which belongs now to an almost for–
gotten epoch, it surely is ironic that Gorbachev should have been more
effective than the Congress for Cultural Freedom was in exposing the false
allures ofcommunism - and at no cost to us.
w.
P.
