THE DISCONTENTED CLASSES
69
function it previously was to see ahead now become as quickly dated
as the Museum of Modern
Art
and other once avant-garde groups.
And this situation, too, tends to make them cool and conservative,
for they are caught between alliances with a vanishing proletariat
and with those aristocratic residues who speak the prestige-language
of the past- a past in which the capital of one's own ideas was un–
impaired by mass-media inflation.
And, finally, the self-confidence of the liberal intellectuals is
weakened by their own egalitarian ideology, which has led them not
only to attack ethnic and class barriers but to defer to the manners
and mores of the lower classes generally. Whereas in the days of
Eastern seaboard hegemony the masses sought to imitate the classes,
if they sought to rise at all, today imitation is a two-way process,
and intellectuals are no longer protected by class and elite arrogance
10
(and the strategic ignorances arrogance protects) against the attitudes
of their enemies. We find, for example, the cynicism of the lower
strata reflected in the desire of the intellectuals to appear tough–
minded and in their fear to be thought naive. Such tough-mindedness
in turn may then require acceptancc of belligerent and vindictive at–
titudes in domestic and foreign affairs, and a further weakening of
any visionary hopes and motives.
What the left has lost in tone and initiative, the right has
gained. The right has believed ever since "that man" entered the
White House in the utter deviltry of the New Deal. But what was
once a domestic misanthropy has now been writ large upon the globe:
the right has hit on what it regards as an unquestioned truth, which
needs only to be spread (the utter sinfulness, the total evil, of the
idea of Communism and the total perfection of the idea of Ameri–
canism ); it maintains the zeal of missionaries in propagating this
truth; it feels today it possesses a newer, better, altogether more avant–
garde knowledge, even though about so limited a subject as the in-
10 We ourselves experienced this problem when we undertook to write a
criticism of Norman Dodd's semi-literate report as Staff Director for the Reese
Committee investigating foundations. It seemed legitimate enough to attack
the report's crackpot notion that the socialists and the foundations had been
plotting together to take over American education and the federal government.
But we then had misgivings about pulling the rank of our own education and
relative fluency and withdrew our original comments on the style of the report.
