A modern literary intellectual lives and writes in constant dread—not, indeed, of public opinion in the wider sense, but of public opinion within his own group. As a rule, luckily, there is more than one group, but also at any given moment there is a dominant orthodoxy, to offend against which needs a thick skin and sometimes means cutting one’s income in half for years on end. Obviously, for about fifteen years past, the dominant orthodoxy, especially among the young, has been “left.”1;0;
—George Orwell, “Writers and Leviathan,” 1948

It was inevitable, I suppose, that the collapse of Communism and the waning of the Cold War would sooner or later bring in their wake a revaluation of the writers most explicitly identified with the anti-Communist cause. It is not to be expected, however, that this process of revaluation will redound to the favor of the writers in question. History may have proved them to have been right about Communism and the Soviet system all along, but it is precisely their having been right—right, it will no doubt be said, for the wrong reasons—that will be held against them. In this country, anyway, the imperatives of cultural life remain as unforgiving as ever about assaults on Left-liberal orthodoxy, which is as dominant today—in the academy, in the media, and in literature and the arts—as it was in George Orwell’s day. The truth is, smart literary opinion has always looked with disfavor on the forthright expression of anti-Communist