Here is a quote about American intellectual liberals from “No name in the street” by James Baldwin, pages 29-31.
I returned to New York in 1952, after four years away [in Paris], at the height of the national convulsion called McCarthyism. … it was a foul, ignoble time, and my contempt for most American intellectuals, and / or liberals dates from what I observed of their manhood then. … I had come home to a city in which nearly everyone was gracelessly scurrying for shelter, in which friends were throwing their friends to the wolves, and justifying their treachery by learned discourses (and tremendous tomes) on the treachery of the Comintern. Some of the things written during those years, justifying, for example, the execution of the Rosenbergs, or the crucifixion of Alger Hiss (and the beatification of Whittaker Chambers) taught me something about the irresponsibility and cowardice of the liberal community that I will never forget. Their performance then, yet more than the combination of ignorance and arrogance with which the community has always protected itself against the deepest implications of black suffering, persuaded me that brilliance without passion is nothing more than sterility. … And what I watched them do to each other during the McCarthy era was, in some ways, worse than anything they had ever done to me, for I, at least, had never been mad enough to depend on their devotion. It seemed very clear to me that they were lying about their motives and were being blackmailed by their guilt; were in fact, at bottom, nothing more than the respectable issue of various immigrants, struggling to hold on to what they had acquired. For intellectual activity, according to me, is, and must be, disinterested — the truth is a two-edged sword — and if one is not willing to be pierced by that sword, even to the extreme of dying on it, then all of one’s intellectual activity is a masturbatory delusion, and a wicked and dangerous fraud.