LETTERS

...In their disenchantment with what they regarded as the heedless, arrogant, and often merely anti-American excesses of left-liberalism in the 1960s, Mr...

...Epstein's scrutiny as people subject to condemnation for failing to close ranks with the army of their fellow intellectuals...

...Nathan Glazer in the conclusion of his essay "On Being Deradicalized," for example, noted that "if we are ever to mount a successful assault on our problems," intellectuals must argue with and ultimately strip the New Left radicalism of "the pretension that it understands the causes of our ills and how to set them right...

...3. A philistine is defined by Webster as one who is "an active or passive opponent of progress or progressive ideas...

...3. Miss Decter remarks that in my discussion of Daniel Moynihan's proposal for an income strategy I remain "staunchly silent" about my own position...

...Drop into your local library, either university or neighborhood, and if it doesn't carry DISSENT, suggest that it do so...

...Epstein has so wilfully transplanted them, and as observations the implied meaning of which is not quite so self-evident as Mr...

...Epstein seems to think...

...Moreover, he is on the whole, though not in every instance, correct in ascribing the origin of this dissenting impulse to disillusionment with both the ideas and the results of 1960s leftist activism...

...Is that how Mr...

...q How to Help Editor: I have received your fund appeal and would like to send you something, but right now things are bad with me, so I just can't...

...Now, without entering into any dispute over his terminology— for as Mr...

...To continue in a course of leveling one's fire at the ideas, attitudes, and programs of one's fellow, left-liberal intellectuals, then, is only to lend aid and comfort to the enemy...

...But is there anything else I might do to help...

...Editor: Although you were kind enough to invite me to do so, I have no wish to comment in detail on Rose Coser's review of my book, The New Chastity...

...This point of attack is an all-too-familiar one, the stuff in fact from which popular fronts have always been erected—whether with Stalinists, Cold Warriors, or black nationalists...

...Yet the latter task, no matter how difficult, happens to be the major responsibility devolving upon in tellectuals worthy of the name...

...Epstein's own ef forts to understand the views of the men he has singled out for criticism must surely have yielded more intelligent results—for Mr...

...Mr...

...Epstein in the above quote...

...In a less contentious climate these examples might speak for themselves, both as remarks obviously found growing in a different and infinitely more interesting field than that into which Mr...

...Because the enemy (read, for convenience, Richard Nixon) too, is a critic of such ideas, attitudes, and programs...

...Daniel P. Moynihan, for instance, is invited to ponder on sleepless nights not whether his proposal for an income strategy to replace a services strategy was a good idea (a question on which Mr...

...Coser's is not...

...It has never ceased to be a prime political tactic to identify those who criticize one's ideas or positions not just as opponents but as bad people...

...Epstein of the unfortunate effect on the capacity (once considered essential for a healthy intellectual life) for detached and critical analysis worked by the felt need to "line up...

...A political proposal such as an income strategy is not, however, like a novel, to be judged on its intrinsic merit...

...As the years go by, as their journals become more predictable, as they appear to have become more tightly locked into fixed positions, feeling themselves embattled on all sides, growing increasingly intolerant of the least criticism, I at least begin to sense that the social justice aspect of the new conservatives has become just that, a "posture," and little more...

...One cannot, for instance, believe that reading Moynihan on the blacks could seriously have produced the assertion that Moynihan merely finds their plight to be grossly inflated...

...And as adumbrated in Glazer's essay "The Limits of Social Policy," the idea bears no important resemblance to the possi bilities explored by Mr...

...when used for the purpose of reasoning, it is both illogical and inaccurate...

...it is one thing to say that on certain brutally tough social problems we don't as yet have any convincing solutions...

...Tell us you care...

...it is quite another, if one is at all a serious intellectual, to get into the business of bestowing moral credit on oneself and withholding it from others on no other recognizance but the catch in one's throat...

...Miss Decter appears to feel that all this doesn't matter, that the only thing I need concern myself about is whether or not I think Moynihan's proposal a good one...

...but if he wishes to use a phrase from the pen of Nathan Glazer as a shorthand symbol, he is not free to misrepresent the attitude symbolized by the phrase...

...The "new conservatives" emerge from Mr...

...4. At a number of places Midge Decter remarks that my main indictment of the new conservative intellectuals seems "to concern not so much what they have said as what...

...I shall be equally brief: 1. It is precisely because ideologies are "not irrelevant" to movements that I undertook to explain what the women's movement is all about, a matter totally ignored in Decter's book...

...It is, we need hardly say, a good deal easier to lump things together than to sort them out and distinguish among them...

...Epstein's point of view, they have failed to say...

...MIDGE DECTER ROSE LAUB COSER replies: It seems that, for once, Midge Decter is almost speechless...

...Epstein—or any honest and perceptive reader LETTERS —would understand the sentence, quoted by him, "Some things are getting better, others worse...

...Epstein's indictment adds up to is that people may no longer criticize any of the ideas popular among left-liberals—no matter what the idea or what the grounds of criticism—without risking the charge that they are the servants of evil reaction...

...As I suggested in my essay, the main consequence of Moynihan's proposal appears to have been to supply the Nixon administration with the intellectual argument to disband a number of already existing service programs...

...Epstein, for the purposes of his analysis, himself remains staunchly silent) but whether in the end he did "the cause" more harm than good by proposing it...

...Or that their refusal to vote for McGovern while yet they elect a liberal Democratic Congress does not bespeak something at least a bit more complex than a wish to back off from social progress...

...In part, she is correct in both instances...

...some sorts of criticism are discussable, but Mrs...

...But that, I should have thought, was precisely one of the reasons that movements are inimical to a certain kind of intellectual seriousness...

...Nixon, at least before Watergate, in his budget proposal promised the worst of all possible worlds—the income strategy having been defeated, his budget proposals argued for a drastic reduction in service programs anyhow...

...Would Mr...

...Epstein is, of course, free to use the language as he pleases...

...For Glazer the phrase announces the need to dis tinguish between those social problems which are amenable to solution by official public policy and those which are not...

...It seems to concern not so much what they have said as what, from Mr...

...As I count them, four, 1. Midge Decter questions my "curious" use of the word "facade" to describe the liberalism of the Johnson administration...

...Epstein fully justified in pointing to and locating a gathering tide of dissenting opinion with respect to what is the majority sentiment of the intellectual community...

...I used that word because it seemed appropriate to describe an administration that forfeited its domestic program to pursue the war in Vietnam...

...I do think, however, that historically a healthy distrust has not proved entirely misplaced...

...Not alone in this essay by Nathan Glazer but in much of the writing in Commentary, even in that of Irving Kristol who styles himself as involved in "the enterprise of conservative reform," it is also implied that the conservative criticism is to be the entering wedge for a more serious reform...

...Epstein has elected to call opponents are to be criticized a priori (if not indeed ad hominem...

...She neither undertook—as the canons of proper criticism dictate—to analyze what I had in fact written nor to join the issue, which happened to be the articulated ideology of the Women's Liberation movement, that I set out to raise...

...They are to be held accountable, we discover, not for untrue assertions or mistaken inferences but for adopting postures which he wishes people would not adopt...

...Along with allusions to my moral defects, there is mention of popular fronts, fellow-traveling, and much else...

...To the extent that Vietnam came to dominate the Johnson administration, consuming all its energies and in the end bringing it down, to that extent can its liberalism on the domestic front be fairly called a "facade...

...Epstein's interesting borrowing from Orwell—is on the other player...

...Epstein is nor mally a most intelligent critic—than those he offers in his essay...

...Elsewhere she notes that I hold them accountable "not for untrue assertions or mistaken inferences but for adopting postures which he wishes people would not adopt...

...I might cite a few examples of my own from Mr...

...they have failed to say...

...Daniel P. Moynihan's, that while Americans are ideologically conservative, in practice they are liberal...

...Pars pro Coto may be an effective— though dated—art form...

...For in the end all Mr...

...Miss Decter, then, is correct in saying that a major burden of my essay is taken up with criticizing the new conservative intellectuals for adopting postures I wish they would not adopt...

...Epstein might say, to speak of something so fine and grand as "the alleviation of social pain...

...In any case, of course, the real matter for discussion is not so much Mr...

...One suspects Mr...

...It might have seemed somewhat anomalous, in a journal of socialist discussion, to come upon so fierce an expression of the philistine notion that ideologies are irrelevant to movements, but one has grown used to anomalies .. . Another essay in your spring issue is, however, discussable, and it is on that one, "The New Conservatives" by Joseph Epstein, that I hope you will permit me to make a few observations...

...Epstein's own efforts at a certain complexity on the matter testify, such terms as "conservative" and "liberal" have been muddied past all help and so to talk about them has become unutterably fruitless—I think Mr...

...In fact, I do not believe that intellectuals ought automatically to view their government as the enemy...

...After the sad record of the late 1960s one is surely entitled to a certain amazement that such an invitation should be issued by one intellectual to another...

...What actually is his main indictment of the "new conservatives...

...He does not, as he seems to imagine, carry further any real political discussion: that is, he does not open it out to that place where disagreements, if any, between himself and the so-called "new conservatives" might be aired and delineated...

...Part of the new conservative intellectuals' prestige derives from their own former liberal standing—or, to eliminate that label for a moment, from their concern with matters of social justice...

...No, I am afraid that the gramophone record— to borrow Mr...

...Epstein's true objections are not against the need to describe American society in terms less wholesale and careless than those the leftliberals had offered us with such assurance in the 1960s but rather against the inconvenience—emotional and intellectual—of its public expression...

...384 LETTERS...

...2. What she wrote about is not ideologies (my emphasis), and not even the "articulated ideology," whatever that is, of the woman's movement, but one extreme ideology among several of different shadings...

...My silence is not really as staunch as all that...

...It is a big help to us to receive your subscription for a two-year period, rather than for one year...

...One need not go at any great length into the particular examples he finds to document this characterization—Irving Kristol's remark that the average American probably feels no more powerless today than in the past...

...its consequences in the world have to be taken into account...

...Ask a friend to subscribe...

...Epstein's substantiation of the indictment he makes as the indictment itself...

...quite another to say, as those who talk about the limits of social policy imply, that none exist or are likely to be found...

...As a collectivity, the new conservative intellectuals have shown very little such distrust, and even less printed criticism, of the Nixon administration...

...Such methods as applied to the life of the mind, however— and to the community whose very definition is that it is committed to that life—tend to breed the one most deadly intellectual disease: selfrighteousness...

...Once radicalism was out of the way, in other words, the assault on our social ills would begin...

...The New Left is dead, says Mr...

...Or that they have not in fact, despite a tendency to certain old-fashioned rhetoric, lent their largely ungrudging support (legislative and, what is more important, financial) to an everwidening network of social-welfare measures for something like 40 years now...

...The responsibility to sort out and make distinc tions is related to another and even higher respon sibility of intellectuals, and that is, to make the results of one's efforts known, even should it prove painful and costly to do so...

...His conclusions, however, do not seem to me at all consonant with the description of the phenomenon that he himself offers...

...I hope Miss Decter will understand my not bothering to respond in kind to this sort of thing...

...2. Throughout her letter Miss Decter implies that my attitude toward the new conservative intellectuals has to do with their criticism of the liberalleft offering "aid and comfort to the enemy" —the enemy in this case being Richard Nixon...

...or Norman Podhoretz's, that McGovern's resounding defeat was not attributable to "social meanness...

...In the name of what does he of all people sideswipe the authenticity of Johnsonian liberalism, particularly in view of the fact that it is just their critical attitude toward some of the results of the Johnson program for which he takes the "new conservatives" to task...

...E. J., Boston The Editor replies: Since we have received several such letters, here is an answer: • If you can't help right now, perhaps you'd like to make a pledge payable during 1973 or 1974...

...Could it be because they felt that to do so would be to lend aid and comfort to their enemy: the liberal-left...

...Movements, particularly radical movements, impose this sort of demand upon their members and fellow travelers...

...Another more important example is his discus sion of the idea of "the limits of social policy...

...In the best of all possible worlds, I would favor a combined incomeand-service strategy...

...JOSEPH EPSTEIN replies: What points in Midge Decter's letter can be argued with profit...

...One example, minor but significant, might be his curious use of the word "facade" for the liberalism of the Johnson administration...

...It is one thing, as Mr...

...Finally, throughout the thick pile of Midge Decter's prose there runs the heavy lint of innuendo...

...Epstein tells us, these intellectuals have swung to a point of excess of their own on the other side—to "Coueism" or "Rotarianism...

...Epstein say that Americans do feel more powerless...

...As such, it seems eminently suitable for criticism...

...On the contrary, in the end he merely succeeds in bringing all questions full circle: that is, to the place where despite his response to the actual substance of their actual arguments, those whom Mr...

...Epstein, and the Democratic party "in shambles," "done in by its own divisiveness...

...On the basis of my own brief experience as director of an antipoverty program in the South in the mid-1960s, I would tend to favor an income strategy, provided it be sufficient in amount to make a dent and that the many administrative complications involved in handling such a program could be satisfactorily worked out...