The status of social policy ideas—and the health and well being of American culture— can always be gauged by the rhetoric of political and cultural discourse in magazines of intellectual opinion. Recent evidence suggests that this rhetoric has reached a new low.

In the Fall issue of Dissent, in a piece called “They Made It! From the Notebooks of a New Yorker,” Alfred Kazin denounces neoconservative Jewish intellectuals who have had an influential effect on social policy in the Reagan years. Hilton Kramer, editor of The New Criterion, Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, Irving Kristol, Lucy Dawidowicz, and others unnamed are all maligned for supporting conservative social policies or expressing political views that Kazin has the audacity to link—deviously and insinuatingly—to Senator McCarthy, John Birch, Franco, Botha, Pinochet, Nazi Macht und Realpolitik, state-sanctioned murder, and “the lust for war.” It is an instance of the left-wing smear, with a broad brush, egregious enough to take one’s breath away.

Each of the men and women under attack in this piece is perfectly capable of responding to Kazin or of defending the interests and policies of his or her magazine or writings. It would appear to be a fracas among Jews; the goyimwill probably want to sit this one out. Yet although I am not a Jew myself, as may be apparent, I have both an intellectual and a personal interest in this internecine dispute between the privileged academic radical Kazin and the named