ABSTRACT
Attacks on anti-Stalinists have focused on their resistance to McCarthyism and the Vietnam War. In 1974 a study was published that shed light on both. The American Intellectual Elite included a survey of 110 “representative” intellectuals drawn from a pool of eight thousand contributors to serious magazines and journals. The war in Vietnam discredited anti-Communism, which many came to see as the cause of America’s misadventure. Anti-Stalinists were hurt by this backlash even though they were themselves against the war. New-left scholars naturally wished to turn the liberal version of recent events upside down by showing the anti-Stalinists as villains, and progressives as farsighted and heroic enemies of the Cold War. New-left leaders were scions of the “First Families of American Stalinism,” and the movement itself was an effort “by the children of McCarthy’s victims to avenge their parents on the flesh of the country which had produced them.”.
