City Desk: Temptation Island

tance, some of them familiar, some of them less so. I found myself struck by one reason in particular: “Fear of nuclear war [played its part] in silencing criticism of the Soviet Union.” I remember that, when a college student, I would venture questions on, say, the Gulag, and some of my professors and classmates reacted as though I by myself might trigger a nuclear conflagration. They practically looked to the heavens as they shushed me.

But “at last,” writes Hollander, it may be that the kind of conformity detected in America by Tocqueville survives and helps to account for [anti-anti-Communism] even among supposedly iconoclastic academic intellectuals. Once certain conventions and beliefs become established and upheld by a vocal minority, few apparently have the stomach to challenge them and become unpopular in the circles in which they move. As the public expression of antiCommunist sentiments became both morally reprehensible and a matter of poor taste (in liberal circles), American intellectuals were not going to probe the crimes of Communism.

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

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tance, some of them familiar, some of them less so. I found myself struck by one reason in particular: “Fear of nuclear war [played its part] in silencing criticism of the Soviet Union.” I remember that, when a college student, I would venture questions on, say, the Gulag, and some of my professors and classmates reacted as though I by myself might trigger a nuclear conflagration. They practically looked to the heavens as they shushed me.

But “at last,” writes Hollander, it may be that the kind of conformity detected in America by Tocqueville survives and helps to account for [anti-anti-Communism] even among supposedly iconoclastic academic intellectuals. Once certain conventions and beliefs become established and upheld by a vocal minority, few apparently have the stomach to challenge them and become unpopular in the circles in which they move. As the public expression of antiCommunist sentiments became both morally reprehensible and a matter of poor taste (in liberal circles), American intellectuals were not going to probe the crimes of Communism.