INTELLECTUALS AND WRITERS THEN AND NOW
511
altogether unfairly, described as "a born-again Leninist." And in a case
of the pot calling the kettle black, this description of Rahv even
appeared in the
New York Review of Books,
the "chief theoretical
organ of radical chic," as Tom Wolfe devastatingly characterized it.
In due course, the spread of a very virulent strain of anti-Americanism
provoked opposition. In fact, it gave rise to a new breed of writers and
intellectuals who came to be known as neoconservatives, of whom I
myself was, and still am, one. To begin with, the neoconservatives were
more anti-anti-American than enthusiastically pro-American. But we
grew less and less inhibited or defensive in our affirmation of America
as any lingering or atavistically pious illusions about socialism were
gradually swept away by the economic realities of the second half of the
twentieth century.
Conversely, there developed among the neoconservatives an aware–
ness that economic freedom-capitalism, to use the dread name-was a
necessary if not sufficient precondition of political liberty. Furthermore,
the neoconservatives also wound up being persuaded, on the basis of
much empirical evidence, that capitalism was the only road out of the
economic "immiseration" for which socialism had once been prescribed
as the cure but that turned out to be an iatrogenic exacerbator.
Despite some defections from our own ranks on this and other issues,
we neoconservative intellectuals exercised increasing influence in the
political sphere. Some of that influence even affected our enemies within
the intellectual community, who would rather have suffered a slow
painful death than admit it. But things were different in the cultural
realm. There-among writers and intellectuals, and in the new redoubts
in which they were ensconced, especially the universities-the old-time
religion of hostility to capitalist, bourgeois America exercised a near–
hegemonic sway. Indeed, it even retained its power when the dream of
a socialist alternative had faded almost to invisibility. And to this old–
time religion, their acolytes in the major media of news and popular
entertainment were even more uncritically faithful devotees.
No wonder, then, that the only sector of American society that did
not respond to September
I I
with an explosion of patriotic passion was
the community of writers and intellectuals. Myoid ex-friend Norman
Mailer once proclaimed that the law of life was "grow or die." But any–
one comparing his contribution
to
the
1952
symposium with the things
he said about September
I I
wou ld have to conclude that the law did not
apply to him, since in the past fifty years he has neither grown nor died.
Ideas about America like those to which Mailer has clung are alive and
