The Search Goes On

Ralph de Toledano has written an exclusionist book (Lament for a Generation, Farrar, $3.95). Before now, and ringingly, he had settled his score with the fellow travelers, socialists and Liberals with whom he once kept glad company. He stitches together his case against them here, and his indictment would not keep a sensible jury out for very long. Now he goes further. To begin with, he disavows Senator McCarthy and his principal lieutenants, and does so in harsh terms. The rhetoric of disavowal is characteristically harsh. Toledano was once their friend and ally; he regrets the association, and now he turns against them with a melancholy bitterness. Eugene Lyons once answered a detractor of Senator McCarthy by saying, “I too regret Joe McCarthy is not Abraham Lincoln.” That perspective Toledano no longer permits himself—not where McCarthy is concerned. It is true that Senator McCarthy came out for 110 per cent parity for farmers (Toledano takes a liberty some people might classify as “McCarthyite” by putting the figure at 120 per cent). It is true that McCarthy spoke directly to the demos (which no conservative will do, except in extremis). It is true that the whole movement was impossibly disorganized (so would the Encyclopaedia Britannica have looked if arrested at an early stage). But these would not seem to be the points worth making nowadays about the McCarthy years, at least not by someone who prides himself on the realism of his approach to contemporary political problems. Certainly they are not the points of salient interest to an intellectual surveying, in the bloody aftermath, the causes of the abortion of the single visceral manifestation of popular anti-Communism since the war’s end.

Toledano, heaven knows, is not grown soft on the subject of Communism. His disagreements with Communism are set down in irreconcilable philosophical terms. He is permanently scarred by his apprehension of the quintessence of the spirit of Sovietism, in the opening lines of the Catechism of a Revolutionist by Bakunin-Nechayev: “The Revolutionist is a doomed man. He has no personal interests, no affairs, sentiments, attachments, property, not even a name of his own. Everything in him is absorbed by one exclusive interest, one thought, one passion— the revolution.” He knows what we are up against; and knew, but has forgotten, that McCarthy has to be located within the terms of that absolutist and definitive confrontation for which we are headed.

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William F. Buckley Jr.

William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review magazine in 1955.

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Ralph de Toledano has written an exclusionist book (Lament for a Generation, Farrar, $3.95). Before now, and ringingly, he had settled his score with the fellow travelers, socialists and Liberals with whom he once kept glad company. He stitches together his case against them here, and his indictment would not keep a sensible jury out for very long. Now he goes further. To begin with, he disavows Senator McCarthy and his principal lieutenants, and does so in harsh terms. The rhetoric of disavowal is characteristically harsh. Toledano was once their friend and ally; he regrets the association, and now he turns against them with a melancholy bitterness. Eugene Lyons once answered a detractor of Senator McCarthy by saying, “I too regret Joe McCarthy is not Abraham Lincoln.” That perspective Toledano no longer permits himself—not where McCarthy is concerned. It is true that Senator McCarthy came out for 110 per cent parity for farmers (Toledano takes a liberty some people might classify as “McCarthyite” by putting the figure at 120 per cent). It is true that McCarthy spoke directly to the demos (which no conservative will do, except in extremis). It is true that the whole movement was impossibly disorganized (so would the Encyclopaedia Britannica have looked if arrested at an early stage). But these would not seem to be the points worth making nowadays about the McCarthy years, at least not by someone who prides himself on the realism of his approach to contemporary political problems. Certainly they are not the points of salient interest to an intellectual surveying, in the bloody aftermath, the causes of the abortion of the single visceral manifestation of popular anti-Communism since the war’s end.

Toledano, heaven knows, is not grown soft on the subject of Communism. His disagreements with Communism are set down in irreconcilable philosophical terms. He is permanently scarred by his apprehension of the quintessence of the spirit of Sovietism, in the opening lines of the Catechism of a Revolutionist by Bakunin-Nechayev: “The Revolutionist is a doomed man. He has no personal interests, no affairs, sentiments, attachments, property, not even a name of his own. Everything in him is absorbed by one exclusive interest, one thought, one passion— the revolution.” He knows what we are up against; and knew, but has forgotten, that McCarthy has to be located within the terms of that absolutist and definitive confrontation for which we are headed.