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This article first appeared in the Feb. 26, 1963, issue of NATIONAL REVIEW.
By Steve Allen
A, er, Liberal celebrity addresses the conservative community on how we should deal with him — what’s fair, and what isn’t. Proceed with caution…
Audubon Society members interested in the Golden-Throated Warbler, the Red-Breasted Robin and the Great Horned Owl must detect a familiar ring in those hardy denizens of the political forest, the Black-Hearted Communist, the Die-Hard Reactionary, the Moss-Backed Conservative and the Fuzzy-Minded Liberal. In any event, the hunting season appears more open than ever and arrows fly in all directions.
Those who believe they have precisely indexed and labeled me when they have identified me as a Liberal are mistaken. To explain their error I will assume two points of view, the first of which is limited and common, the second of which is wider and more profound. Many conservatives err in believing they have correctly sized me up because, like most American Liberals, I am to a great extent conservative. In other words I respect the Constitution, the flag, our national tradition, and the political philosophy of our forefathers. As much as any conservative I despise Communism — as I despise every other form of tyranny — and I yield to no one in regard to appreciation of the beauty of the ideal of human freedom.
But, even short of this extreme, conservatives sometimes err in attacking Liberals because they have not taken the trouble to get their targets into precise focus. I agree with Mr. Buckley that my own case is appropriately illustrative. In relating some of its details I shall not resort to documenting my 25-year record as a militant anti-Communist: the record is there, and such men as Senator Dodd and J. Edgar Hoover have drawn attention to it. “Some people,” Averell Harriman recently observed, “think it is only if you are ready to involve our nation in atomic war that you are a patriot.” Obviously those who think that Robert Welch is more patriotic than Dwight Eisenhower are truly in need of psychiatric advice, although how they are to get it when they also suppose that the mental health movement is a Communist plot I do not know.
Much political mischief and nonsense, of course, is traceable not to malice but to a clumsy use of labels. And even when labels are used correctly they tell very little about a man. A socialist, for example, is not only a socialist. He may also be a violinist, a Unitarian, a chess-player, a husband, and a comforter of the afflicted. And when you kill the socialist you also kill the violinist, the Unitarian, the chess-player, the husband, the father and the Good Samaritan.
