According to the late Willmoore Kendall, at the bottom of the McCarthy controversy lay a philosophical question that never got properly aired: namely, is the Good Society also the Open Society, in which freedom of speech must be expanded until absolute, or (let us not forget the crowded theater) very nearly so? Kendall seems to suggest that the victory of the liberals— the anti-McCarthyites—established as quasi-official the doctrine that America was meant to be an Open Society, in which First Amendment freedoms were “preferred”; preferred to almost anything else one could think of. All questions were henceforth to be regarded as open questions—except, of course, the question whether all questions should be regarded as open questions.
Whether or not this is theoretically coherent, it has proven practically untenable, and most of the proof was supplied by its own advocates. True, liberal rhetoric, with its cry of “freedom of expression,” has tended to give the impression of “openness” (to “ideas,” as they say). So has liberal etiquette, with its histrionic deference to social and ideological pariahs (a famous extreme being Leonard Bernstein’s party for the Panthers). In fact, however, liberalism, like any other value system, has erected its own hierarchies, at the base of which are ostracized groups and proscribed heresies. William Buckley began his career by getting himself (under Kendall’s mischievous tutelage, as it happened) all but excommunicated by the opensocietarians; Sidney Hook, that incarnation of all that is noblest in liberalism, began his rejoinder to God and Man at Yale with the charge that the book and its author had received a great deal of abuse and vilification, but not, so far as he knew, a single rational answer.
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