Harnessing the Energy of the Former New Left
Morrison, Micah
Micah Morrison HARNESSING THE ENERGY OF THE FORMER NEW LEFT David Horowitz and Peter Collier should hold their next conference in Moscow. rr his is a tale of two conferences. 1 From the moment I...
...What are the strengths and weaknesses of Communist states seventy years after the October Revolution...
...The trap doors are readied for the nations of Eastern Europe as well, each of which approaches the new Soviet line with its own blend of wariness and eagerness...
...As events unfolded, and reports of widespread suffering and bloodshed became harder and harder to deny, I felt that those of us who had participated in the anti-war movement had a moral obligation to admit that we had been profoundly wrong concerning the postwar future of Southeast Asia and the nature of the Vietnamese and Cambodian Communists...
...Hungarian philosopher Ferenc Feher, exiled in New York...
...Michael Novak would later obliquely comment on the shrouded messianism of the proceedings—indeed of much of political life today—by noting that when people have a strong sense of God in the world (certainly not a salient feature of our times) they don't need politics to be their religion...
...Edward Kuznetsov, a dissident who spent over fifteen years in Soviet jails...
...Hilton Kramer took the podium and let go with a blast: leftists, libertarians, second thinkers were made mute by the bitter force of Kramer's condemnation...
...he added that he had "a parenthetical remark" to make at the end of his speech...
...I realized too late that I had left my Mace back in New York City...
...Space does not permit a full listing of participants nor a full account of the proceedings...
...They too spoke of the need to reshape the rhetoric of the debate, of finding a "positive approach" to anti-Communism, of finding role models and, indeed, heroes on which to shape a campaign for a better world...
...So he was, in effect, converting again, publicly...
...At the least, each visitor not enthralled by the progressive workers' state might lend a bit of hope to the citizens of that state—hope that the Americans might be growing a little less naive, hope that the children of the West have not abandoned them...
...China appears to be ahead of the others in the economic experiment and it is being closely watched...
...Second thoughts" was the leitmotif, and the National Forum Foundation thoughtfully provided a bound volume of participant confessions...
...I have seen the post-Communist future," announced panel moderator Arthur Waldron of Princeton University...
...Here are the people who fought Communism from inside, fought it for long years, went to jail, lost their jobs, were exiled from their homes and their languages, in some cases lost everything, everything...
...Deep in the bowels of the Grand Hyatt Hotel a piano player in white tails was tinkling the ivories on a toy island moored in a pool of blue water...
...With Reagan gone, liberals of various sorts may find themselves drawn into the lively debates on the conservative side...
...Like many at the conference, I might have enjoyed a few moments of sick satisfaction at seeing this leftist purveyor of neo-Stalinist factoids retching all over his rumpled summer suit...
...The East Europeans had seen other "thaws" and were not optimistic, yet they noted that there might be some more room for the various dissident groups to maneuver from "below" while the rulers sought to introduce economic "reform" from "above...
...Two years ago, Cameron was a key figure in swinging a few important Democratic votes behind contra aid...
...A positive approach to anti-Communism...
...S I had heard what the reformed 1...
...The tone of some of the confessors also irritated many in the audience...
...But they appear to be scattered all over America, lacking both a cohesive network of supporters and political weight...
...Americans need to study and explore ways to expand the ideological war for democracy, not against Communism...
...Crouch spoke of his travels through American cities, of the many black people deeply distressed by teenage pregnancy, crime, drug use, illiteracy—many of whom agree with a healthy part of the right's positions on these issues but balk at the label "conservative...
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...Antonim Liehm, one of the intellectual leaders of the Prague Spring...
...Their vanity had been their undoing, he said, and nothing had changed...
...T his of course is an old story, but conservatives can give it a new twist...
...Just exactly what the post-Communist future will look like, or when it will come to pass, was not spelled out...
...No one Micah Morrison is deputy director of the Committee for the Free World and editor of its monthly publication, Contentions...
...they built the empire by ruthless means but accuse others of imperialism...
...Ni Yuxian, jailed for criticizing Mao and presently a researcher at Columbia University...
...I thought about my friends, all of them of the generation of the second thinkers, all from a liberal-left background, as I am...
...It was Washington and it was October, and a bunch of prominent former New Lefties had gathered to renounce the sins of the sixties and consider what to do next...
...We lived in Darkness but now we see The Light...
...The Nicaraguan ex-left was represented by, among others, Xavier Arguello, former general-secretary of the Sandinista Ministry of Culture and Arturo Cruz, Jr., past chief adviser to the Sandinista ministries of Economic Planning and Foreign Affairs...
...and that Gorbachev's reformism, whatever its mixture of rhetoric and reality, could bring trouble to the rulers of the island nation...
...Harmony between deceiver and deceived has been achieved...
...Gorbachev seeks this harmony because he needs, among other things, Western trade credits and Western technology...
...and now, perestroika and glasnost with unknown content is a depository for new hopes in an improvement, which will not come...
...Youthful idealism betrayed, eyes opened, new convictions replacing old—stories of second thoughts dominated the opening of the conference...
...In Cuba, said the exiled Cuban journalist Carlos Montaner, there was a consensus among the elite that the economic system was not working...
...So the Soviets continue with suppressions of human rights but present themselves as heirs of European humanism...
...This naivete is ridiculous to every emigre who knows the systematic lies of any propaganda, but not even a giant like Solzhenitsyn succeeded in reaching the American mind with the simple truth about Russian reality...
...poet and writer Stephen Schwartz, founder of the Young Communist League...
...Perhaps...
...Sending some of our boys and girls to Moscow and Peking and Prague and Budapest—trips preceded by, say, a series of workshops by dissident intellectuals and country experts —might just help to build grassroots support for the peoples of the Captive Nations and possibly help rouse among our own youth a greater appreciation for democratic culture...
...The previous sessions, he said, were yet another display of the "incredible smugness and spiritual vanity which was so suffocating to many of us in the sixties...
...2AS87 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1988 21...
...Who better to administer benediction...
...By the end of the weekend I chanced upon what seems to be some ignored common ground between the groups represented at the two conferences...
...Were they infantile leftists turned inside-out...
...In short, there was general agreement that Comrade Gorbo had started something, that each Communist country was reacting to this in a slightly difBut it is the post-Reagan conservative agenda, particularly its cultural aspects, where the second thinkers might aid conservatives by drawing in others of their generation...
...In other words, what the older dissidents lack, the generation of the second thinkers has...
...and Michael Novak, director of Social and Political Studies at the American Enterprise Institute...
...Staid and scholarly the weekend wasn't...
...Enter my subscription to The National Interest Name Address City State Zip O payment enclosed 0 charge my: 0 American Express 0 Visa 0 MasterCard Card No...
...On the panel: Hilton Kramer of the New Criterion, Norman Podhoretz of Commentary, Irving Kristol of the Public Interest, and William Phillips of Partisan Review...
...I wondered about the nature of active engagement as I left the hotel...
...He was a respected liberal and the Democrats trusted him...
...It was a cool day, just past the crisp cusp of autumn, and I found myself at Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House...
...The friend said that Cameron was in a difficult position...
...Then panelist Bruce Cameron, a Washington lobbyist, rose to make one of those pathetic confessions that immediately become the stuff of left-wing mythology...
...So the media, and then Western public opinion, is increasingly accepting the Soviet propaganda as if it were the truthful image of Soviet goals...
...What is dangerous are not Gorbachev's deceptive moves, but the new wave of self-deceptions entertained by peaceful and honest American gentlemen, who are deceiving themselves...
...It is becoming increasingly clear that this is a generation of educated know-nothings...
...Jean Pasqualini, a French-Chinese journalist who spent seven years in Chinese prisons and chronicled the experience in his book Prisoner of Mao...
...In the fight against Communism, so much of which in a democracy depends on public perceptions and public support, it might help to send a lot of our people "to Tehran...
...What about the second thinkers and their new politics...
...Politically, where were they...
...After a moment of shocked silence, angry shouts broke from several spots in the room...
...Participants on the China panel appeared more optimistic about the future...
...1 From the moment I spotted a well-known mad-dog English journalist making weird and dangerous noises in the corner of the hotel lobby I suspected I was not in for one of your average intellectual conclaves...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1988 19 exactly the same meaningless cliches about the Reagan Administration from years earlier: that he is a racist monster, that fear of Communism is ridiculous, that the Justice Department is run by fascist ogres bent on installing a police state, etc...
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...China is much further down the road of economic reform...
...Medved, who is Jewish and found himself increasingly drawn to religious tradition, discovered a painful irony in the fact that the giant C-5A transport plane, a military expenditure he had opposed and ridiculed as a flagrant waste of the taxpayer's money, was the only aircraft capable of resupplying the struggling democracy with the equipment it needed to survive...
...creation and hence untenable as a force for change...
...But they are also an aging generation and in New York they appeared somewhat burned-out: long on experience but short on energy...
...Can Communist regimes reform...
...They have all had profound second thoughts about the 60s Left and their role in it," blurbed the pre-conference promo material, "about the damaging consequences of radical politics on their own lives and the life of the nation...
...Havingsecond thoughts about Communism in the penultimate decade of the twentieth century struck many as just a bit too late...
...All the lessons of the past have been forgotten, he said...
...It may also have had something to do with Peretz who, when recounting his "own problems" with conservatism, referred to libertarianism as "the enthronement of greed...
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...Hilton Kramer was right about the moral damage wrought by the counterculture, yet the fact that the second thinkers were in the room listening to Kramer suggests that they realize he is right...
...It's China...
...What is really dangerous are the self-deceptions about the character of the changes in the USSR to which the American press succumbs with the regularity of a menstrual cycle...
...After a hilarious dinner speech by the inimitable P. J. O'Rourke, in which he related his experiences publishing a Baltimore underground magazine called Harry and the attempt of a nefarious Maoist cell known as the Balto Cong to take it over, the second thinkers settled in for what some evidently expected to be a series of blessings from a neoconservative "panel of elders...
...The other panelists largely seconded Kramer's remarks...
...film critic Michael Medved, former chairman of the Vietnam Moratorium of Connecticut...
...Michael Medved, for example, noted that his "second thoughts" about his role in the radical politics of the sixties began with the Yom Kippur War of 1973...
...Now he was backed into a corner, wounded by Iran-contra revelations, without money and cut off from mostof his former colleagues...
...Luncheon speakers and panelists from Nicaragua spoke of a revolution lost to the Communists and their own blind anti-Americanism...
...The attending crowd, however, was not high-charged with enthusiasm...
...What are the roles of unofficial movements and critical intellectuals in Communist regimes...
...Kramer slammed the utterly bogus air of smug moral superiority that characterized the sixties and has spread deep and wide in the culture today...
...onversion" is not an inappropriate trope for the entire weekend: Forgive us, fathers, for we have sinned...
...Doan Van Toai, the Vietnamese anti-war activist who spoke at the Second Thoughts Conference...
...The second thoughts people seemed just the opposite: relatively short on experience but full of energy...
...Were they for real...
...Strange and sometimes moving it was: a mixture of smug preening, earnest self-criticism, old-fashioned penance, self-aggrandizement, hilarity, drama, and bathos...
...It was nothing, he said, that wouldn't be cured by a week in Tehran...
...Nicaragua experts Leiken and Radosh told of their colleagues' reactions when they began to condemn the Sandinista revolution...
...A neocon "panel of elders," moderated by New Republic editor Martin Peretz, was included, apparently to provide sanctification for the procession of ex-left penitents...
...I descended a waterfall-flanked escalator...
...There were, in addition, a few halfhearted calls for greater coordination and exchange of information between the networks of dissidents and critical intellectuals...
...they introduce new concepts of pluralism and democracy, although the monopoly of centralized power has not changed at all...
...that is, a generation dangerously isolated from the world and its history, and Reaganism is the willed nightmare they do not wish to wake from...
...Organizing exiled dissidents and tapping into their knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of totalitarian societies, putting them forward as role models, sending people immunized against Potemkinitis to see Communist lands and meet with dissident groups, shaping a more critical view of glasnost—these are some possible activities for Second Thoughts organizers Horowitz and Collier and their little movement...
...writers Julius Lester and Stanley Crouch...
...But it is the post-Reagan conservative agenda, particularly its cultural aspects, where the second thinkers might aid conservatives by drawing in others of their generation...
...Behind me, the table of hard lefties, led by the twitching Englishman with a Washington Post reporter in tow, was yukking it up...
...Nicaragua experts Ronald Radosh and Robert Leikentwo gentlemen who had been hailed by 18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1988 the left when their conclusions met the radical agenda and castigated by their erstwhile allies when they later concluded that the evidence pointed toward Communist tyranny in Managua...
...A week later, I was back in New York listening to another type of intellectual—former Communists and dissidents (many exiled, some not) from the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, and various satellites of the Communist world...
...Glasnost is simply a sophisticated system of trap doors in which the good-will visitors fall from one level of fraud into another while they are offered an illusion of change, which in reality does not take place at all...
...American power, he noted, is limited by its ethical strength...
...Now he was having "third thoughts...
...Gorbachevian openness and restructuring was at the forefront of discussion...
...They believe in freedom and human rights, but assume it is their duty to meet the Russians halfway, and so they sink into the morass of their deceptive half-truths...
...I thought it took courage and a certain amount of crazed desperation to make such an announcement before such a crowd, and later I spoke to one of Cameron's friends...
...But the passion play was not over, and it was not following anybody's script...
...Are they a sign of changing attitudes in the Baby Boom generation...
...The Cuban police state stretches through every part of society and opposition forces have been destroyed...
...This situation"--Israel's deep losses in the opening days of the war—"forced me to confront a fact that I had never before been willing to accept: that freedom, security, and ultimately survival depend on military power...
...and a host of others, including gonzo conservative P. J. O'Rourke and former Saigon anti-war activist Doan Van Toai...
...The Soviet power elite has never ceased to think in terms of their own monopoly of power...
...A rough poll of the speakers indicated some optimism about the longterm outlook for Communism's collapse (in, say, 100 years) and strong pessimism about the chances for significant reform in the short term...
...Some young conservatives are already getting a first-hand look at the situation in Nicaragua...
...He was not perturbed...
...Nothing had changed, no modulation, no sense of reality and its tragic constraints had entered into their thinking...
...novelist Jerzy Kosinski...
...The only difference is in the regrettable circumstance that the investigative (imaginative) reporters are suffering from premenstrual syndrome permanently...
...But like many of his colleagues at the conference, the true turning point came a couple of years later, as Saigon fell, insanity was unleashed in Cambodia, and millions fled the region: I couldn't accept the notion that [the refugees] were all guilty pro-Western collaborators, or foolish victims of CIA propaganda...
...Steve H. Hanke "...the President will have to tell the American people an untold tale, one in which the Americans, not the Japanese, are cast as the villains...
...Soviet workers, Svitak wrote in a paper prepared for the conference, "are supposed to accept abstinence and unemployment as a new triumph on the road to Communism, sponsored by Western bankers...
...Forgiveness was not in the air...
...Crouch said he was surprised to find out that conservatives are fun and lively people, not just "the humorless drones you see on TV...
...The idea is not as far-fetched as it might first appear...
...Yes, he said, he had indeed been out of a job for over two years, but now he had one...
...The conference was, primarily, an exchange of inside-views of Communist states and thoughts about the future...
...Why not do a little restructuring of our own and add to these models...
...More trouble came with the Nicaragua panels...
...The problem, of course, is that 99 percent of the generation of the second thinkers apparently doesn't give a damn about anything...
...Communist economics, it was agreed, was viewed in ruling circles as a flop...
...20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1988 ferent way, and that all the rulers were bent on preserving the central power of the police state while attempting to improve economic performance...
...There was, for example, the appearance of Stanley Crouch, a black writer and critic whose work is featured in the left-wing Village Voice...
...Apparently never having heard of Jack Kemp, he said that conservatives needed an "outreach policy" that would engage the black and Hispanic communities, a policy that worked against "defeatist cynicism" and helped people "engage themselves in their own fate...
...Among the participants were Carlos Franqui, author of Family Portrait with Fidel and a former buddy of the Cuban dictator...
...that fighting the African wars was growing increasingly unpopular...
...The New York conference of the Foreign Policy Research Institute dealt not with shifts in personal political outlooks but with changes in the Communist world...
...Sweating and nervous, Cameron said the contras should be viewed in the same light as the RENAMO guerrillas fighting the government of Mozambique—in other words, as a brutal, murderous band of thugs created and supplied by an outside power...
...The folks at my table were not comfortable...
...Humberto Belli, former editorial page editor of La Prensa and an important figure in Nicaragua until his break with Sandinismo...
...The counterculture had been "morally catastrophic...
...the very people pilloried by the New Lefties at a time when they had never thought about having a second thought...
...The lefties behind me soon recovered their balance and hurled sneers and snickers at random moments...
...He had worked closely with Spitz Channell and 011ie North on contra aid, and he had staked his personal credibility on the issue...
...Also present was Fausto Amador, the founder, along with his half-brother Carlos Fonseca, of the Sandinista Front...
...A great wealth of information about the nature and methods of Communist oppression exists among dissidents in this country...
...They were visibly agitated by Kramer's remarks, although this may have had as much (or more) to do with the tone of his comments as with the content...
...Participants at the Second Thoughts Conference, a project of the National Forum Foundation, included conference organizers Peter Collier and David Horowitz, former co-editors of Ramparts, the leading New Left publication of the sixties...
...Restructuring, or the lack of it, was considered in the cases of other Communist countries, particularly China...
...Some nerve...
...The way the Communists fought the war in Vietnam, for example...
...author Joshua Muravchik, in another life the national chairman of the Young People's Socialist League...
...Noteworthy among the press covering the conference was a cabal of hard left journalists which delivered itself of much snickering and guffaws during the proceedings and was, in turn, occasionally pilloried by the panelists and booed by the audience...
...Looking around the meeting room twenty-six floors over New York City, I thought: Well, here are their heroes...
...T he neocon panel was not the last 1 unexpected twist in the weekend...
...Why not draw on the cunning of the exiles, and non-government funds, to see if glasnost is real or a facade...
...He cited the National Endowment for Democracy and the need to expand its budget and activities...
...Americans won't support long, Communist-type war strategies—the fighting that grinds slowly on for years, draining the resources of the society, wrecking the economy, starving the people...
...For instance, you can find yourself out of a job...
...Bruce Cameron, past legislative director of Americans for Democratic Action...
...Glasnost is an ideology of reform without actual reforms, while the perestroika is just the old Stalinism, polished on the surface to provide Western acceptance for the Politburo of Potemkins, who conceal the flaws in their imperial ambitions as skillfully as their Czarist master teacher two centuries ago...
...Unlike the Soviet Union, it was pointed out, in China the economic reforms have been more or less locked into place and the country is moving fast down an uncertain path...
...After all, these were the very people who had been on the liberal-left a generation or more earlier, who had warned of Communism and blind anti-Americanism, who had taken a dim view of the antics of the counterculture and written about the damage it was causing...
...You were all immoralists, and we are all paying theprice for the agenda you let loose...
...If so, how much...
...The contras, he had come to conclude, were a U.S...
...Harvard's Glenn Loury...
...They seem awfully proud of themselves," one person remarked after hearing a few born-again tales...
...was quite sure where the ideologically rag-tag bunch could be slotted on the political spectrum of the eighties...
...Many of the participants warned the West about Gorbo's new policies...
...If Gorbachev is intent on appearing to change the rules of the game with openness and restructuring, why should the West continue to use only the old models for protesting human rights abuses...
...The man in that house, I thought, was a shock from which the liberal-left never really recovered, even after seven years...
...Colin S. Gray "A potentially very serious, even terminal, political problem lurks in the realm of 'burden sharing...
...I was sitting toward the back, at a table of libertarians who had come to observe the odd behavior of their East Coast cousins...
...Luckily, the sod veered out of my path...
...The second thoughts people can make an important contribution to those debates, and that's one reason why they should be welcomed...
...Zinoviev, the great Soviet writer, castigated the West for its delight with glasnost...
...Moving against the liberal-left mainstream has consequences, Leiken warned...
...The already established young conservative groups would be a good starting point for our college-age kids, Baby Boomers latent with second-thinking, and the exiled dissidents...
...He felt that North and Channell had lied to him, manipulated him, betrayed him...
...Martin Peretz was moderator...
...I remember interviewing an Israeli officer during the Lebanon War and asking him about the many American liberals who were publicly rending their garments over Israel's actions...
...D oan Van Toai talked in New York about the opportunities for fighting Communism and the restraints the U.S operated under...
...The question then becomes, can they be roused to fight for freedom...
...Listening to Doan Van Toai, I recalled some of the remarks of the second thinkers...
...they militarize their society in an unprecedented way, but offer peaceful, even pacifist initiatives...
...His parenthetical remark was that he now worked as a lobbyist on behalf of the People's Republic of Mozambique...
...New Left had to say...
...As the Reagan years become a thing of the past maybe the enormous denial triggered by the conservative movie star from California will fade too, leaving more room for second thoughts...
...THE NATIONAL INTEREST WINTER IS SUE Ze'ev Schiff "...among Israeli leaders, and more specifically in the bureaucracy, there are those who take U.S.-Israeli relations for granted, something that needs no nurturing or care...
...Did this disturb the American-born officer...
...that the U.S.-sponsored Radio Marti broadcasts posed a serious problem for Cuba's domestic propaganda efforts...
...I had spent most of the Reagan years, from 1980 to 1985, outside the United States and when I returned it seemed that nearly all of my friends were repeating "They seem awfully proud of themselves," one person remarked after hearing a few born-again tales...
...Those damn New Yorkers, a woman at the table exclaimed, they never get out to see how the rest of the country thinks...
...It promises a book based on the weekend's presentations and offers as well a number of interesting and timely publications: 3508 Market Street, Science Center/Philadelphia, PA 19104...
...Box 3000, Dept...
...However, the most important trap is designed for the trusting liberals of the West, who are ready to cooperate in their own suicide...
...The Foreign Policy Research Institute has recently embarked on several ambitious projects under its energetic new director, Daniel Pipes...
...Were they conservatives, neo or otherwise...
...that the aging of the Cuban leadership circle foreshadowed an uncertain future...
...and Alexander Zinoviev, the Soviet novelist and philosopher...
...that Cuban dependence on Soviet subsidies was a disaster...
...Ivan Svitak, a Czech philosopher whose ideas played a role in inspiring the Prague Spring, called glasnost and perestroika "new concealed trap doors built into other trap doors...
...Do they bring a message to conservatives in America...
...Still, Montaner was not optimistic about the future...
Vol. 21 • January 1988 • No. 1
