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The Middle of the Journey and the End of the Line
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15228 |
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BOOK WORLD
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8 / 1989 |
3,473 Words |
| Author
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Alexander Bloom
Alexander Bloom is professor of history at Wheaton College in
Massachusetts. He is the author of Prodigal Sons: The New York
Intellectuals and Their World (1986) and the
forthcoming "Takin' It to the Streets": America in the 1960s.
He is working on a book titled Red Diaper Babies: Growing Up
on the American Left. |
It became a rite of passage in the years after World War II for former thirties' radical-intellectuals to write about their connections to and abandonment of the Left. This form of literary passage into mainstream American society has been resurrected--along with a good deal more of fifties rhetoric--by Peter Collier and David Horowitz in Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts about the Sixties. I have argued elsewhere (including THE WORLD &I [October, 1986]) about the connections between the issues raised by contemporary neoconservatives and by fifties' liberal anticommunists. With this book, Collier and Horowitz are not only trying to align their ideas with Irving Kristol's and Norman Podhoretz's, they are lining up the patterns of their lives.
The last chapter of Destructive Generation, "The Middle of the Journey," takes its name from Lionel Trilling's novel of the simultaneous rejection of radicalism and coming to middle age of a group of thirties radicals. Trilling's identification as a neoconservative has always been a matter of some debate: Some claim him, others steadfastly reject his inclusion. What is striking is that it is not Trilling's later writings on culture--the ideas usually identified with neconservatism--that draw Collier and Horowitz. It is this 1947 novel. Collier and Horowitz see themselves in the "middle" of their own journey, rejecting their sixties radicalism and coming to terms with their own middle age.
According to the dual coordinates of age and politics, Collier and Horowitz have gone from lower left to middle right. They intend their book to show the intellectual rationale for their rightward movement; how they became the infamous "Lefties for Reagan." In the end, however, their book is
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