Conventional wisdom has it that the adversary culture of the 1960s has been swept away by the social and political changes of the 1970s and 1980s, notably the two-term Reagan presidency. In this collection of essays, almost all written since 1983, Paul Hollander, author of the now classic Political Pilgrims, says otherwise. The street demonstrations, the dramatic political gestures, the proliferation of alternative life-styles may be gone. But many of the patterns of behavior and values underlying them have been incorporated into the culture. Much of the intellectual elite--in universities, churches, the media--is propelled by what Hollander calls a "savage rejection" of Western political institutions.
Even some of the chief actors are still with us, their manner subdued, their purposes unchanged. Tom Hayden has left behind the rhetoric typified by a leaflet he endorsed in 1968: "Burn your money.... Break down the family, church, nature, city, economy." He has embarked on the long road through the institutions, from his base in the California legislature. Bernadine Dorhn, once a leader of the Weather Underground, now has joined a prominent New York law firm. But on surfacing from the underground in 1980, she stated her continuing conviction that the United States was guilty of "unspeakable crimes" and there was continued need for "underground work." Staughnton Lynd, no longer an antiwar activist, as a labor lawyer seeks to move us closer to "economic democracy," that is, socialism.
The term "adversary culture" was coined by Lionel Trilling in the early sixties to describe what he called the "subversive intention" of modern literature, its effort to detach the reader "from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes," giving him a vantage point "from which to judge and condemn... the culture that produced him." What Trilling described was primarily a cultural and aesthetic antagonism to the tastes and values of bourgeois society.
In his essay on George Kennan, Hollander provides a case study of someone whose critique, although formally political, appears to be rooted in the elitist contempt for the decline of standards of the traditional adversary culture. Kennan is moved more by distaste for Western moral decline than fear of rising Soviet power, which on occasion he seems to think might be used to salutary effect. Describing the hippies at a Danish port, their motorbikes, their drugs, their girls, the pornography, the drunkenness, the noise, Kennan observes: "I looked at this mob and thought how one company of robust Russian infantry would drive it out of town."
The doctrine of moral equivalence
But Kennan is an exception. The intellectual and emotional roots of most of those described in these essays are in New Left perspectives, even if, in some cases watered-down and second-hand. Central to their attack on Western institutions is the doctrine of the moral equivalence of the superpowers. In a period in which inflamed anti-American rhetoric is out of style, moral equivalence tenets permit the critic to assume the appearance of an objective and detached observer. By obliterating basic distinctions, it permits more effective denigration of the United States. Thus the presence of a small number of U.S. advisers in El Salvador is equated with the ruthless Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. In fact, of course, the doctrine of moral equivalence disguises a moral absolutism
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