McCarthyism, Still the Life of the Party
Novak, Michael
"McCarthyism, Still the Life of the Party" war movie or war drama never really was an interesting or enlightening genre: After all, The Red Badge of Courage is a great novel about war, not merely a great "war novel" (or "anti-war novel," for...
...Michael Harrington in Dissent (1955...
...In 1968, the presidential electoral struggle was not between Mr...
...By 1952, "there has been drawn a line of battle...
...The locus classicus of 1952 is an essay in the March Commentary by Irving Kristol, around which an unusually large correspondence grew up then, and a quite passionate debate still simmers today...
...2) the problem of interpreting a tradition...
...They could maintain the fiction of continuity on the left—a continuity of idealism—linking liberalism to socialism, and requiring only that they denounce Stalinism as an unfortunate aberration...
...Emphasis today falls upon well-known laws of national aggrandizement, imperial purpose, and military expenditure...
...Instead there were erudite essays on the "right to a job" that would haye corroborated William James in his mournful conviction that "the prevalent fear of poverty among our educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers...
...Immediately after this line come the offending sentences...
...About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing, and with some justification.' Even on their face, these sentences bear two interpretations...
...This is the ultimate reason why, psychologically and intellectually, socialism functions as a religion functions...
...Dissent was anti-assimilationist, not in the sense of being purely ethnic, but in the sense of holding to a faith which, if not ancient, had moved men "for over a hundred years...
...Liberals may believe that they alone understand Communism and thoughtfully oppose it...
...I imagine Jewish intellectuals in New York in 1952 ideologically stratified rather as Roman Catholics were, but with an important ironic twist...
...Repentance is never easy...
...Around no issue have family arguments among intellectuals been more intense for sixty years than around what position ought to be taken up concerning Communism...
...Harrington was saying that both represented major assaults upon freedom, and that within the U.S...
...It has political and economic ramifications, to be sure, but its real power comes from its "humane ends" and "values and ideals...
...But those involved in this debate do not really regard it in that pragmatic light...
...nor is there an inconsistency between being committed to a political and social vision and being intellectually honest...
...It is rather around the first mentioned set of difficulties that the real—and, for our purposes, the most relevant—problems arise...
...But there are two virtues in so doing...
...Let them take your job—as they certainly will anyway...
...The heart has reasons which the reason sometimes does not wish to face...
...Admission of a serious flaw in one's own judgment is exceedingly difficult for any human being...
...Or in both...
...Such persons wished to assert that Stalinism and the "Bolshevik illusion," in Howe's phrase, were wrong, evil, and to be opposed, and yet involved, for all that, only accidental aberrations and, on the part of those Americans who supported them, errors of excessive idealism...
...Already in 1965, Michael Harrington was referring to Irving Kristol as a "neo-conservative," a name only to rise to prominence a decade later...
...Critics of Michael Harrington's writings on socialism have frequently remarked that his exegesis of Marx is as painstakingly, as rabbinical, as jesuitical (one uses the word non-pejoratively) as that of any theologian poring over a sacred text...
...In good conscience, they could be both anti-Communist (that is, above all, anti-Stalinist) and also liberal...
...Howe confesses: "That there has been a tendency within the socialist movement to regard withdrawal as apostasy and betrayal, is true...
...Irving Howe picked up this argument thirteen years later: "What Harrington charged was that dominant figures in the ACCF were inclined to subordinate the fight against McCarthy to a campaign against those deluded liberals who, in the name of anti-McCarthyism, dismissed the threat of Stalinism...
...war movie or war drama never really was an interesting or enlightening genre: After all, The Red Badge of Courage is a great novel about war, not merely a great "war novel" (or "anti-war novel," for that matter...
...But Howe and Harrington—and a great many others—do endow their political and social vision with a quite deep religious intensity, speak of it almost entirely in moral terms, and hesitate not at all to dramatize their commitment in terms of fundamental movements of the cosmos or at least of history...
...The error is conceptual...
...Socialism justifies the self, offers a vision of history, gives meaning and value, separates friends from enemies, gives guidance in perplexities, provides much consolation in time of darkness, illuminates the future, inspires daily action...
...A Dark Age is threatening...
...In order not to repeat again, as we turn toward the 1980s, the policies of the 1960s, and the 1950s, and the 1940s, and the 1930s, it is exceedingly important to imagine the question before us in new and fresh ways...
...To interpret a mischievous text, one examines its proximate context...
...The heart of Kristol's article is expressed in the following words: There is only one way that the despotism of public opinion can be resisted...
...That is a narrow, nostalgic, an irretrievably dated way of imagining the necessities of intellectual investigation in our time...
...Kristol's argument was that their honesty did not go far enough...
...Both turned out to have been bogeymen, compared to realities...
...The difficulty on which Irving Kristol placed his finger was that of admitting moral self-betrayal...
...The single way that has not been tried is that of escaping the hold of socialism upon our imaginations...
...Even years later, and now that the shoe is on the other foot, the sequence of painful steps is clear...
...Dissent rejected Stalinism, but never Marx or socialism...
...The other two sorts of difficulties do...
...The struggles between Maoist China and the Soviet Union are vivid in consciousness, and the countless crosscurrents in that vast part of the world we roughly refer to as "communist" (lower case, these days) are well known to us...
...If it could be shown that other Americans were even more illiberal than they, and even more error-prone, then perhaps their own guilt might not be so keen...
...Long after belief in socialism as a concrete political program has ceased to quicken one's heart, it functions as a reminder to criticize the institutions within which one succeeds...
...It is obvious that Kristol loathed McCarthy and all that he stood for...
...The American Spectator November 1977 17 phrase: "and with some justification...
...The mistake is a mistake of theory...
...A researcher can hardly avoid concluding that there were strong passions in the air awaiting some such sentences, ready to fix upon them as an excuse, an occasion, a battle cry...
...By at least one interpretation—the one its critics Michael Novak is Ledden Watson Distinguished Professor of Religion at Syracuse University...
...Richard Rovere in Partisan Review, with a response by Irving Kristol (1952...
...In order not to destroy civil liberties, he argued, there were some cases in which one would wish to defend the right of Communists and fellow-travelers "to be what they are...
...Those who wished to be faithful to Marx and to socialism had to take the following steps, and many of them did: (1) They had to admit that the historical vessel in which they had trusted, the Communist Party, was seriously and tragically different from what they had imagined it to be...
...The issue, so we are often told, is whether McCarthyism or Communism was the more serious menace...
...It is to their discredit that they did not even try...
...The more "liberal" segments of the family evinced a willingness to "thaw," a less than convinced attachment to socialist doctrines and modes of perception, and a rather more experimental, open attitude toward the seductions of the new world...
...Dissent was founded in -opposition to backsliders...
...Michael Novak McCarthyism, Still the Life of the Party To ask whether McCarthyism or Communism posed the more serious threat in 1932 obscures the real issue, namely, the failure of liberals and socialists to acknowledge profound errors of moral ana'political judgment...
...The traditions springing from Marx were far more deeply compromised, both in their essence and in public perception, than the new socialists and the old liberals like Commager allowed...
...is certainly worth asking...
...Second, the acceptance of such a point of view by socialists, even in a hypothetical way, would be proof of bona fides...
...It is that socialism is one of the idols of the tribe, one of those alluring religious ideals that misdirect the practical mind...
...Michael Harrington wrote in 1955 that Kristol cast his "weight not so much in defense of those civil liberties which were steadily being nibbled away, but rather against the few remaining fellow-travelers who tried to exploit the civil liberties issue...
...Thus the reservoir of anti-American feeling was enormous...
...It was worse than that, Kristol was saying...
...Kristol's conservatism and my socialism...
...But Kristol wanted them to go one step farther: not only to be anti-Communist, but to cease to ally the cause of Communists and fellow-travelers with the cause of liberals...
...Howe's socialism, but between Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey...
...It may be useful to head off cyclic repetition by conceiving of the problem in a new way...
...It was a candle lit in a great and growing darkness, keeping faith alive in the catacombs beneath the new rich world of gathering affluence, suburban shopping centers, paperback books, and multiplying middlebrows...
...The sentences immediately before and after the quoted sentences thicken Kristol's meaning considerably...
...It is a myth that Senator McCarthy, for his own ends, is happy to accept, since it allows him to tag a New Dealer as being by nature an embryonic Communist...
...To be morally good is to be a socialist...
...He means commitment to a political and social vision, methodologically equivalent to a religious faith...
...But artists could have made an important contribution to the process of understanding, while the war was being waged and the question was most urgent...
...That issue is the judgment to be made today of the tradition of Marxism, even in its democratic socialist variants, as defended, say, by Dissent...
...His critics, of course, saw reality differently...
...While a socialist perspective sheds light upon many phenomena, as would any fresh perspective, even one known to be unrealistic and merely hypothetical (aswhen one says, constructing an ideal universe, "Look at it this way for a moment"), socialism as a theory of economics, society, and liberty works best in bookish discussions...
...By estimating that McCarthyism was a greater threat to liberalism than Stalinism, they reaped two advantages...
...And not only enormous, but necessary for the assuagement of guilt concerning one's own success...
...They are nonetheless mistaken," Kristol writes, "and it is a mistake on which McCarthy waxes fat...
...The errors both of political and moral vision were substantive...
...The socialist language of faith amid the ruins has also been potent for prominent converts from Catholicism—Michael Harrington in an earlier period, Garry Wills today...
...that participatory democracy is an effective check upon authorities at certain levels of social life, but by no means a practical, effective, wise, or even humane way of making most daily decisions...
...According to another, McCarthy is clear, but liberals are suspect...
...Is it true of all political convictions that they arise from an attraction to "humane ends," or is this an attraction peculiar to socialism...
...He called the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, which Kristol led, "too jaded, too imbued with the sourness of indiscriminate anti-Stalinism to give itself to an active struggle against the dominant trend of contemporary life in America...
...Those around Dissent, as Irving Howe put it, "made the indissoluble connection between democracy and socialism a crux of their thought...
...Howe's socialism, and neither did the political struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, nor even the war in Vietnam...
...He argues strenuously, and with barely concealed disdain, against those disciples who for so long misinterpreted the master...
...One need not, of course, accept such a point of view...
...Kristol's offending sentences end, it will be recalled, with this • Not counting citations in Commentary in the May and June issues, these sentences are quoted by: Irving Howe in Partisan Review (1954...
...many of the less fervent retained at least a residual faith...
...Harrington uncovers the true, deep, and long-hidden intentions of the master...
...Now, at first, this looks like simply a judgment of relative weights and measures...
...and that national planning is an incoherent attempt to pretend that politics, with its interests and conflicts, can be transcended by the decisions of nondemocratic experts...
...Imagine collecting grants from capitalist foundations, holding prestigious chairs at prestigious universities, making fortunes as writers, producers, and actors in Hollywood, being famous, being rich, making it: Imagine how alienated then one must prove oneself to be...
...that the "redistribution of wealth" must be guided by differential considerations of many sorts, if it is to be related to the actual diversities of human life, and is by no means to be identified with schemes of equal outcomes and homogenized results...
...and (2) an errant characterization of "the spokesmen for American liberalism...
...He attributes this tendency to mere weak flesh, but the language of idealism recurs too often among socialists, as Kristol rightly charges, to be dismissed so easily...
...First Commentary and then Partisan Review, in the express words of defenders of the faith like Howe and Harrington, made too many surrenders to liberalism...
...itself, during the 50s, McCarthyism was clearly the more immediate danger...
...The political struggle between Israel and the Arab nations did not lend itself well to the 18 The American Spectator November 1977 polarity between Mr...
...Second, the continuity of their opposition to reactionary and mindless opposition—and, indeed, to the larger American public—remained intact...
...No theory now available does that...
...What can the rest of us learn from it, in helping us to make up our own minds...
...Deep in the mythology of the socialist imagination, capitalism with all its works and pomps is the source of social and personal evil...
...Democratic socialism resolves this tension...
...The greatest threat to the socialist, indeed, is the ex-socialist: hence, the special passion reserved for those in the 1950s disdained as "liberals" and today as "neo-conservatives" (they are identical personae...
...This new task is to create a critique of capitalism—and, particularly, a critique of American society—from a non-socialist position...
...Kristol accuses the liberals of the 1930s who joined hands with the Communists in a Popular Front of committing errors of grave moral and political consequence, not only private errors but public errors, of interest to all their fellow citizens., Kristol accuses the liberals of the 1950s of defending themselves poorly...
...One finds in the sacred text and in the holy traditions a very large proportion of what one would like to find...
...It is also the reason why socialist thinking suffers from the same liabilities as religious thinking: (1) the problem of reconciling ideals to history...
...Their The American Spectator November 1977 19 position was not unlike that of Roman Catholics explaining to themselves the Renaissance popes and the trial of Galileo...
...and in the way that line has been drawn, liberals are yielding too much territory to McCarthy: "Is it conceivable that the line was incorrectly drawn in the first place...
...The sentences did not cause a split...
...It is equally obvious that he carried his heaviest argument against what he deemed to be the stronger party, stronger not only in intellect but also in longevity and ultimate importance...
...But a merely empirical disagreement does not explain the raging controversy of 1968 or 1952 or earlier...
...Kristol's entire thesis is stated in the beginning of his article...
...The very next sentence begins: "With what justification, can be seen from an illustrative incident involving Professor Henry Steele Commager, a distinguished historian who never was a Communist and never will be...
...one can abandon creeds swiftly, but not fears...
...A researcher into the debate circa 1952 will be struck by how old-fashioned the references to "Stalinism" or even to "Communism" now seem...
...Loss of faith"—apostasy—sets in when one no longer believes that the world does, in fact, work the way the socialists desire it to...
...Lillian Hellman's Scoundrel Time, proclaiming her own bravery for precisely the dishonesty and cowardice that Kristol denounced (and which her memoir shows her to know were acts of dishonesty and cowardice, to be handled evasively), shows how difficult admission of radical error is...
...The debate of 1952 was often described by partisans on both sides as a debate between anti-Communists and anti-antiCommunists...
...Neither in socialism nor in capitalism, as we have known them, neither on the left nor on the right, neither in the traditions of liberals nor in those of conservatives, is to be found the whole and practical vision we now require...
...So long as these words are kept abstract, they evoke lovely images: social control, democratic procedures...
...The classic article by Kristol is called " 'Civil Liberties,' 1952A Study in Confusion...
...Historians will no doubt have countless answers in the coming years...
...i.e., not socialist...
...But Howe does not seem to mean here simple intellectual honesty...
...We have learned by 1977 to think poly-centrically...
...In the sense in which "Communism" was perceived to be a threat by all the participants in the debates of the 1950s—and one should emphasize that all parties to the debates were explicitly antiCommunist—"communism" is not perceived to be a threat today...
...2) they had to admit that those they despised most—as philistines, Babbitts, and reactionaries—proved more astute, in this instance, than they...
...With these lines, Kristol concluded his article...
...The socialist hope, that once capitalist institutions have been dismantled human beings will live more closely by the golden rule, underestimates the ingenuity of human selfishness...
...In those sentences which come before, Kristol denounces as "a calamitous error" the belief "that because a vulgar demagogue lashes out at both Communism and liberalism as identical," it is therefore necessary to protect Communism in order to defend liberalism...
...It is also a form of metaphysics that, for various reasons, is less and less compelling...
...Yet, with all the occasions of the last several years, not a single liberal voice was to say to these strange "victims" of Hollywood and radio: Speak up and damn the consequences...
...So if the debates of 1952 still go on, despite language that exaggerated or masked the true nature of the struggle, what was then at stake...
...The difficulties of interpreting a tradition, then, are surmountable...
...It is precisely at this point that Kristol affronted them...
...make, naturally—these sentences are not altogether happy...
...The American system is in need of accurate criticism, which takes into account the way things actually work here...
...If, indeed, one wishes to understand major intellectual struggles even today, one must cope with such episodes as one that occurred in the year 1952...
...But for intellectuals such admissions are excruciating...
...What a sorry morality play that is, compared to our true plight: which is how to make certain that democratic institutions and opportunity and mobility and rising expectations do not perish from this earth...
...It is that the turn from Stalinism is not sufficient...
...The economic and political presuppositions of democratic institutions—as distinct from democratic ideas—have by no means been definitively explored, not least in the light of worldwide experiences since World War II...
...Thus Howe can write: I admire Mr...
...In such matters, Kristol and Howe were probably closer to one another than either was to the major portion of public opinion...
...His criticism of "the major segment of American liberalism" for its behavior during the 1930s is far more devastating: "If American liberalism is not willing to discriminate between its achievements and its sins [in the 1930s]," he writes, "it only disarms itself before Senator McCarthy...
...The central debate of our time is not a debate between Irving Howe's "socialism" and Irving Kristol's "conservatism...
...But the real issue here is independent of personalities...
...So a few words must be said about quarrels "within the family," the family of mainly Jewish intellectuals whose point of reference was New York City, and who, in 1952, were just beginning to escape a form of cultural isolation...
...It's lamentable, I know, and a sign of cultural lag...
...The debate that began in 1952—and, in fact, even earlier—serves to this day to prevent intellectuals, in New York and elsewhere, from rising above the past...
...Such a person may have to suffer for his convictions, as others have suffered before him, and as others will suffer after...
...Lillian Hellman also alludes to Kristol's article in Scoundrel Time (1976...
...Yet the question "Why were we in Vietnam...
...Self-hatred turns into hatred of the system in which one lives and moves and has one's heart's desires...
...In the Jewish world, socialism—hostility to capitalism, a theory of resistance to America—was the conservative, orthodox force...
...Senator McCarthy for his part has no cause for dissatisfaction with things as they are...
...Kristol's conservatism and Mr...
...And when he is finished with his long investigations, lo and behold, Marx stands forth as a classic proponent of American democracy, civil liberties, and humanistic values...
...To be faithful to a lifelong ideal is no badge of morality, if the ideal is merely inherited...
...Kristol's rhetorical strategy: in effect, "Aw, come one, Irv, you don't really believe in all that socialist stuff, do you...
...Something far deeper, far closer to significant passions, is at stake...
...Normally, religion and politics are in some tension...
...Kristol goes on to analyze a rather well-known (and later anthologized) article by Professor Commager in the May 1947 Harper's...
...Democratic socialism provides so lovely and full an ideal of human behavior, of democracy and justice and truth and brotherliness, that it absorbs psychic territory normally occupied by bothpolitical and religious vision...
...By refusing to confront the problematical nature of their own intellectual tradition, they could hide behind the very liberal and democratic ideals to which Stalinism was so egregiously opposed...
...and Irving Howe in a book review in the New York Times (1976...
...That is for a person with unpopular views to express himself, loudly, brazenly, stubbornly, and with disregard of the consequences...
...The reason for their poor self-defense, he suggests, is dishonesty...
...Some could say this was the greater danger, some could say that...
...On this point, he and most of his critics agreed...
...Socialism is a form of metaphysics...
...But this must have been a smokescreen...
...The major impact of socialism among New York intellectuals was, then, and is, not programmatic, but quasi-religious...
...The offending sentences, quoted so often since, run as follows: There is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy: he, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist...
...Bluntly put, it doesn't work...
...The error is not, however, merely an error of the practical order...
...Those who then continued to call themselves socialists, as Irving Howe put it, "cut whatever ties of sentiment still held them to the Bolshevik tradition and made the indissoluble connection between democracy and socialism a crux of their thought...
...First, it would establish a tradition of radical criticism on a fresh and original basis, drawing perhaps on both Anglo-Saxon and socialist sources, but reducible to neither...
...If his full illustration of Commager's confusions need not detain us, his central/accusation should be cited: Professor Commager seems to be seduced by the insidious myth according to which Communism is a political trend continuous with liberalism, only more impatient and inclined to the fanatical...
...What is it...
...What exasperates me about the current political situation [1968] is that the polar irrationalities now in fashion get in the way of what ought to be the main political struggle of our time, that between Mr...
...Two sentences in that article are the focus of that controversy...
...But I really want to see the major segments of the American economy socially controlled and democratically operated, and I really want a major redistribution of power and wealth in the U.S...
...and (3) they had to admit that the tradition they represented—the identification of liberalism with Marx, Communism, and socialism—was no longer innocent...
...Kristol plainly understood that the Stalinism of that time was an organized, subversive movement in which those who took pan gave up their right to independent thought, and in which the idea of a civil society and its liberties could not be entertained...
...If we grasped that clearly, we would surely have clearer insight into what divides us today...
...The moment one begins to imagine who, where, and how, enormous conflicts arise...
...In such cases, he warned, the liberal "must speak as one of us, defending their liberties...
...Read in context, however, these sentences do not support the damaging interpretation...
...The liberals are loathe to weigh the possibility, as it gives comfort to the enemy...
...Dissent nourished and expounded the inherited orthodoxy...
...Others were not so sure of their affirmations but scarcely escaped the ancient fears of capitalism, of "conformity," of non-Jewish America...
...But the responsibility for the mind's freedom in a democracy lies with the intransigent thinker, with his courage to shout the truth in the face of the mob, with his faith that truth will win out, and with his maddening commitment to the truth, win or lose...
...To be morally evil is to be—well, it must be said—conservative...
...The body of Kristol's article consists of citations from contemporary articles and books by Professor Commager, Alan Barth, Zechariah Chafee, and Francis Biddle, which exemplify the tactic he deplores...
...At the heart of the mystery lies democracy...
...In this sense, McCarthyism was a godsend...
...Many persons in their maturity may have rejected socialism on such empirical grounds—as Stuart Hampshire once put it in conversation, speaking about a conference of socialist intellectuals he had attended: "Where did we go wrong...
...They try to take their way around the past, attributing political errors to harmless and private "idealism," whether their own or others...
...According to one, many Americans are puzzled by the relationship of liberals to Communism, and liberals should prevent that...
...Such an exercise brings a profound feeling of sadness, that so much energy has been wasted and that events are again stirring memories along ancient battlelines...
...Regarding the article in question, one does not have to look far...
...The point is never raised...
...His accusation was that they did not take their own past with sufficient seriousness...
...Of the intellectual calling Howe writes: "Either we do try to live by some value or ideal, or we're not worth a minute's notice...
...tell the truth—you have nothing to lose and honor to gain...
...They focussed it...
...There is no necessary contradiction between having a religious faith and being vigorously honest in intellectual matters...
...The true and proper political morality is to stand for an economy "socially controlled and democratically operated" and for "a major redistribution of power and wealth in the U.S.A...
...In an exchange of correspondence in Commentary in 1968, Irving Howe found two implications here that he did not like: (1) an ugly comparison between McCarthy and the spokesmen for American liberalism...
...In their Commentary correspondence in 1968, Irving Howe gives us a clue in the way he speaks about both "the intellectual calling" and "the humane ends" which originally prompt a person to become a socialist...
...The reason for the founding of Dissent was explicit: resistance...
...We might cease trusting that the world is divided by good and evil, suitably incarnated in the "humane ends" of socialism and the malign indifference of capitalist profiteers...
...and (3) the discovery that ideals beautiful and unified in vision are often in practice incompatible...
...It is that socialism is a sort of intellectual mystification, which prevents one from interpreting even one's own experience aright...
...Those who are conservative—that is, tied by previous commitments to ideals and traditions rooted in the past—will be unwilling to undertake it and unable to comprehend it...
...In practice or in theory...
...So also in 1952...
...The closer one brings it to concretion, the more its concepts shiver into incoherence and break upon the rocks of fact...
...First, their moral self-esteem was protected...
...The retribution of one side against the other is not excessively gentle or forgiving...
...For neither McCarthyism nor Communism is, in 1977, the relevant name for what stirs our deepest anxieties...
...Irving Howe in Commentary, quoting Michael Harrington, and then in an exchange with Irving Kristol (1968...
...socialism (or Communism) is the imagination of "humane ends" and creative outcomes...
...Such fears lodge in one's bones rather than in one's creeds...
...One would like to make this the main line of history, and treat everything else as mere appearance...
...Kristol, in a word, was trying to commend a more appropriate strategy for defeating McCarthy, a new way of drawing the battleline...
...Something wholly new is open, therefore, to American intellectuals...
...Instead of insisting in the 1950s that dissenters and nonconformists stand up and tell the truth, too many defend moral cowardice...
...Many who were "right" about Vietnam and about Watergate would now like to see those who were "wrong" abase themselves publicly and do public penitence...
...The true import of the phrase, however, appears to be: "backslider...
...20 The American Spectator November 1977...
...But contemporary emphasis would scarcely be on some ideological mystique, on some spiritual virus, or on networks of domestic espionage that might attack this nation "from within...
...Consider the reasoning process necessary to meet these difficulties...
...Thus, to begin with the last first, in the simple vision expressed by Irving Howe of an economy "socially controlled and democratically operated," there is, to the practical mind, at least, a nest of glaring practical contradictions...
...What I am proposing, and what Kristol seemed to be dimly suggesting in 1952, is, of course, rank heresy...
...But I do...
...The one possibility never seriously considered in the democratic socialist tradition is that there may be some—quite vulgar and yet ironically practical—connection between capitalism (specifically, private property) and concrete democratic institutions...
...Some may hold that the Soviet Union is such a threat, even a far more dangerous and vastly more powerful threat in 1977 than it was in 1952...
...Kristol's conservatism and Mr...
...A reflective person may, for example, conclude from experience that the elimination of private property does not serve democracy, but tyranny...
...To the extent he insists that they are on our side, that we can defend our liberties only by uncritically defending theirs, he will be taken as speaking as one of them...
Vol. 11 • November 1977 • No. 1
