Joanne Barkan Replies

Call this a reckless claim, but I know I made the main point of my article clear -that is, Dissent magazine's editors and writers in the 1950s didn't criticize the liberals for not being socialists; they criticized liberals for not defending liberal principles vigorously enough, for compromising those principles too often. What mattered to Dissenters, and to my argument, were the many instances when liberals caved on civil rights, civil liberties, and foreign policy. So, a useful reply would have demonstrated that the liberals had, in fact, taken principled positions on those occasions or that they had no choice but to surrender or that I had misinterpreted Dissent's position or perhaps a combination of all three. Such an analysis would have added something to the debate about how to evaluate cold war liberalism.