Most of the left, by the late sixties, was anti-American, and were certainly not Cold Warriors of any stripe. So that was one very important point. The second point, which was organically related, had to do with the nature of American society. We loved this country and we came more and more to believe that the traditional attitude of our fellow intellectuals, which ranged from mild disdain to outright hatred, was wrong and dangerous. That this was a society worth defending and that it embodied a precious institutional heritage that was under assault, externally from the power of the Soviet Union and internally from ideas such as some of the ideas that we ourselves had been propagating and that our fellow intellectuals been propagating for at least one hundred years or more.
People are free to choose whatever view they wish to hold.
As I just said, if it were up to me, all intellectuals would be defending our kind of society. Let me add to this. I think American civilization is one of the high points of human achievement as a socio-political system. I compare it to fifth-century Athens. And that is not nothing, to put it mildly.