“The trouble with conservatives,” Murray Kempton once remarked, “is that they’re becoming as dishonest as the liberals.” With this trident’s thrust, he hoped to impale the conservatives, the Liberals, and himself; that is the nature of Mr. Kempton’s nihilism. But for all of its provocation, the remark was untrue and lacking in intuition.
Whatever the verbal dishonesties of the Liberals, they are all too forthright in their aims: to retain control of the intellectual community, and thereby the media of mass thought and mass communication, and to destroy utterly all who oppose them. Those three weird sisters of Liberal rhetoric—James Wechsler, Richard Rovere, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.—have made this all too clear.
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