Can't agree with you entirely on this, Neo. I would modify your statement as follows:
They [the neoconservatives] were the bulk of those liberals who made a point of stressing their anti-Communism active in policy circles, including government and journalism.
By the late '50's, many liberals in policy circles did not feel it necessary to stress their anti-Communism. McCarthyism had subsided; domestically, Communism had no appeal and virtually no social base; on the international front, the Cold War was well under way, and there was no obvious need to beat the drums still more.
There was something of a revival of revolutionary Marxism, Maoism, Castroism, you name it, in the '60's, but it was a media-conscious intellectual fad, again with no social base of any consequence, limited for the most part to university campuses. I was at Columbia during the student strike -- a joke. Not worth getting excited about, IMO.
And who "drove the anti-Communist liberals out of the liberal camp"? Podhoretz's egomaniacal ex-friends? Norman Mailer et al? Again, a little self-important clique. |
