Little Old Professors in Tennis Shoes

Students of cultural commentary are well aware of what might be called “The Mirror Effect, in which a writer finds in his opponents vices which most conspicuously are his own or his friends. Thus Critic A, several times caught publicly in flagrant canards, publishes his collected essays and reviews—and reveals that most of his opponents are liars. Thus Professor B, visibly a Yahoo, habitually finds his enemies to be deficient in taste (Wallace Markfield has much to say about this phenomenon). Now in recent years, such social scientists as Daniel Bell, Richard Hofstader and David Riesman, and such publicists as Arnold Forster, have developed a “portrait” of the American right-wing extremist, enshrining it in such books as The Radical Right, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (a Pulitzer Prize winner), and Danger on the Right. The features of this portrait are familiar enough: the extremist exhibits “indignation,” he believes in “conspiracies,” he “feels persecuted,” his language is “violent,” he may even resort to “violence.” For all I know, this description may well fit certain kooks out on the fringes of our culture, whether or not in tennis shoes. What is startling is to find that the Bell-Hofstader-Riesman-Forster portrait also applies to our literary establishment and its academic offshoots, not only to Minutemen and Birchers but to the Ward Professor of Linguistics at MIT, to an Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities in the N.Y. State University, to an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Education at Columbia, to the New York Review of Books, to Partisan Review.

According to Bell, the extremist is characterized by “indignation,” and he habitually converts politics into moral issues remote from ordinary give-and-take and political compromise. According to Noam Chomsky, Ward Professor of Linguistics at MIT, American involvement in Vietnam is an “atrocity,’ and his language— “genocide,” “final solution”—implies its similarity to Nazi crimes. (N.Y. Review of Books, 2-23-67). As far as H. Stuart Hughes is concerned, “we and the President are living in two different ideological worlds” (Partisan Review, Winter ’67), and in the same issue Nat Hentoff calls for a domestic politics of “confrontation, not accommodation.”

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Jeffrey Hart

Jeffrey Hart is a contributor to National Review.

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Students of cultural commentary are well aware of what might be called “The Mirror Effect, in which a writer finds in his opponents vices which most conspicuously are his own or his friends. Thus Critic A, several times caught publicly in flagrant canards, publishes his collected essays and reviews—and reveals that most of his opponents are liars. Thus Professor B, visibly a Yahoo, habitually finds his enemies to be deficient in taste (Wallace Markfield has much to say about this phenomenon). Now in recent years, such social scientists as Daniel Bell, Richard Hofstader and David Riesman, and such publicists as Arnold Forster, have developed a “portrait” of the American right-wing extremist, enshrining it in such books as The Radical Right, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (a Pulitzer Prize winner), and Danger on the Right. The features of this portrait are familiar enough: the extremist exhibits “indignation,” he believes in “conspiracies,” he “feels persecuted,” his language is “violent,” he may even resort to “violence.” For all I know, this description may well fit certain kooks out on the fringes of our culture, whether or not in tennis shoes. What is startling is to find that the Bell-Hofstader-Riesman-Forster portrait also applies to our literary establishment and its academic offshoots, not only to Minutemen and Birchers but to the Ward Professor of Linguistics at MIT, to an Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities in the N.Y. State University, to an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Education at Columbia, to the New York Review of Books, to Partisan Review.

According to Bell, the extremist is characterized by “indignation,” and he habitually converts politics into moral issues remote from ordinary give-and-take and political compromise. According to Noam Chomsky, Ward Professor of Linguistics at MIT, American involvement in Vietnam is an “atrocity,’ and his language— “genocide,” “final solution”—implies its similarity to Nazi crimes. (N.Y. Review of Books, 2-23-67). As far as H. Stuart Hughes is concerned, “we and the President are living in two different ideological worlds” (Partisan Review, Winter ’67), and in the same issue Nat Hentoff calls for a domestic politics of “confrontation, not accommodation.”