Not Without Honor / Red Scare or Red Menace?

...The threats and insults and bomb waving swapped by the United States and Russia...forced both into an extravagant arms race which may not have been either prudent or necessary...

...Even Bill Clinton, though less than perfectly positioned by personal history to ring this bell, rings it nonetheless...

...different from the highly intellectualized Jesuit-taught Roman Catholicism that had been an adornment to Peking's seventeenth century imperial court...

...Haynes—the co-author of a recently published collection of American Communist Party documents discovered in the KGB archives in Moscow—believes that the tactics of the anti-fascists, a group which included a fair number of Communists and their sympathizers, provoked some of the victims of "brown-smearing" to adopt similar measures against the Communists...

...As James Q. Wilson, quoted here by Samuelson, put it, "Many of the largest changes in the last century have occurred not because of popular demand but because of elite interests...

...than in the past...

...There are no permanent or entirely satisfactory conclusions, he argues, no happy ending...

...Whoever wins in 1996, spending will rise far less rapidly than if Democrats had held Congress in 1994...

...The Cold War was to endure for many years after Dr...

...The profligate spending of Rockefeller and Lindsay led to the bankruptcy of New York City and near bankruptcy of New York state in 1975—plus a huge exodus registered in a population loss of one million people in the 1970s.of entitlement but a sense of responsibility...

...American Communism and Anti-Communism in the Cold War Era John E. Haynes Ivan R. Dee /215 pages / $24.95 REVIEWED BY Arch Puddington During his tenure as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, J. William Fulbright once summoned a well-known psychiaARCH PUDDINGTON works for Freedom House in New York...

...Samuelson says this is not just mindless phrasemaking, but a genuine response to the failures of the entitlement society: "Entitlement denies choices, ignores limits, muddles accountability...

...Jerome Frank, to explain the roots of America's continuing anxiety about Communism...

...Frank averred...

...We act toward an enemy in such a way that he is moved to react toward us in a way we predicted and dreaded...

...Others found anti-Communism boring, or simply had form...

...Hong Xiuquan was born in a small town in south China, not far from Canton...

...The resultant explosion was spectacular...

...Beginning in the southwest, it spread through the country and came close to Peking itself, remaining headquartered in Nanking for more than a decade...

...Given its mass peasant base — millions had supported the "Heavenly King," as he had styled himself—the Taiping Rebellion became an object of study for a Chinese Communist Party, led by Mao Tse-tung, bent on leading a peasant-based revolution of its own...

...Although the balanced budget amendment failed by one vote, Bill Clinton as well as the Republican Congress feels compelled to explain how he will balance the budget in seven years...

...Frank's diagnosis, not surprisingly, was that anti-Communism might be the most pronounced symptom of a collective "sickness" focused on a fear of the outside world...

...Besides weakening America's global resolve, the collapse of the bipartisan anti-Communism consensus contributed to a moral confusion among the elites...

...No longer can it be said that the history of anti-Communism was written by its enemies...

...given their prominence, the Communists really did seem like a genuine Fifth Column in the postwar period...

...They exaggerated the dimensions of the menace, concocting lurid scenarios in which minuscule, impotent groups were depicted as major threats to the Republic...

...Frank's discourse on political psychology...

...Terrifying prophecies of awesome earthly destruction announce the coming of the millennium and, from time to time, people appear who try to hasten the day...

...Wherever they ruled, the rebels set about the remaking of society along recognizably collectivist, proto-socialist lines...

...they trusted only those who shared this belief...

...But he stresses the limited impact of Reaganism on the broader culture...

...He says that we don't know yet what makes for greater stability in our economy (i.e., the much smaller oscillations between recession and boom since World War II and even since the 1960's), why growth has been slower since 1973 than it was in the quarter-century before, and why incomes have become less equal in the same period...

...But at least now the playing field has been leveled a bit—and the process has begun of reclaiming an important piece of American history...

...The second strain, which Powers labels as countersubversive, represented anti-Communism's darker side: the fanatics, Red-baiters, and conspiracy aficionados whose most serious offense was to have discredited the anti-Communist idea for future generations...

...it's simply that the alternatives are almost always worse...

...Its essence is the quest for control...

...He was prepared for a conventional Protestant Revival in Manchu China The American Spectator • April 199 6 69...

...The availability of welfare," he writes, "may have promoted debilitating dependency and single parenthood...

...They honeycombed various New Deal agencies, dominated several state Democratic parties, and came close to achieving dominance over the CIO...

...They berated witnesses, demanded that names be named, and called for the removal of ideologically suspect professors...

...Not Without Honor, written by Richard Gid Powers, a City University of New York professor and the author of a highly regarded study of J. Edgar Hoover, is a narrative history of American anti-Communism from the Bolshevik Revolution to the collapse of the Evil Empire...

...And it was the tough Protestant variant, much CHARLES HORNER is senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington...

...To begin with, liberal anti-Communism derived as much from a perception that domestic Communism posed a danger to New Deal reform as from a fear that Communist subversion might weaken the Cold War effort...

...trist, Dr...

...For while Powers is sharply critical of the extremists, demagogues, and crackpots who brought disrepute to the cause, he believes that responsible anti-Communists played an important and thoroughly honorable role in democracy's triumph over Leninist totalitarianism...

...Furthermore, many secret Communists engaged in espionage for the Soviets during the war, and others clearly would have if asked...

...The Taiping Rebellion, led by a Chinese man who had come to think of himself as the younger brother of Jesus Christ, raged for fifteen years, until it petered out in the late 1866s...

...Powers does not put forward a grand theory to account for the liberal abandonment of the anti-Communist idea, a suicidal gesture from which the Democratic Party has never fully recovered...

...America, he says, "could not achieve the consensus needed for the Cold War commitment while accommodating...a political movement that adhered to the ideology and promoted the interests of the Cold War enemy...

...In the mid-nineteenth century, when China was crumbling under a welter of foreign and domestic pressures, there intruded into the home-grown tradition of Buddhist millenarian violence the militant Western doctrine of Christianity...

...It is a disciplinary tool whose very crudeness makes it comprehensible to the ordinary citizen and therefore effective...

...His basic thesis is that there were two strains of anti-Communism...

...And the notion of anti-Communism as an episode in mass psychosis was to endure as well, at least in the dominant liberal culture...

...While the right continued to fret over the threat of domestic Communist subversion long after the party was defanged, liberals recognized the American party's impotence without losing sight of Communism as a global menace...

...They smeared their opponents by labeling all isolationists (including the American Legion and Reader's Digest) as fascists or crypto-Nazis...

...It was suppressed at a cost of tens of millions of lives...

...He has long advocated a balanced budget, even though it may not be the best adaptation to every macroeconomic circumstance...

...As for greater stability, surely some part of that is explained by computers and the information revolution, which allow people in the marketplace to adjust more quickly and nimbly to economic cues...

...Finally, and perhaps most importantly, many liberals came to view Communist social "reforms" as unobjectionable, even desirable, and certainly preferable to the unbridled capitalism which anti-Communists allegedly advocated...

...My view is that the answers to the last two questions are implicit in Samuelson's narrative—that (relatively) egalitarian incomes were a product of the wartime regime of big government, big business, and big labor...

...The debate over the Cold War will, no doubt, continue...

...But it wouldn't be long before liberals began to come to terms with Communist power abroad, whether in Eastern Europe or, especially, in the post-colonial world...

...One can detect in the early reviews of Powers's Not Without Honor a sense of shame at the intellectually shallow and morally bankrupt writings of revisionist historians about the Cold War...

...In the country that organized the grand alliance against Communism," he writes, "anti-Communism was hardly remembered except in the nightmares of civil libertarians...

...It ranks among the essential works about the domestic ramifications of the Cold War, and should set the standard for anti-Communism studies for the foreseeable future...

...And they became downright snappish when Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn chided the West for its lack of resolve in confronting the Soviet challenge...

...Some came to agree with Senator Fulbright that obsessive anti-Communism had led America to perpetual war abroad and unrest at home...

...These are fighting words, but I suspect that the response of critics from the academic left will be more measured God's Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan Jonathan D. Spence Norton /400 pages / $27.50 REVIEWED BY Charles Horner Though we associate Chinese religion with gentleness, passivity, and deep contemplation, it has its bloodcurdling elements...

...and that growth was unusually rapid in the quarter-century after 1945 because pent-up demand was let loose...

...For all its sporadic ugliness, excesses, and silliness, the anti-Communism of the 1940's and 1950's was an understandable and rational response to a real danger to American democracy...

...Interestingly, Powers gives the Kennedy administration—with its contempt for ideology and penchant for hard-eyed realism — much of the blame for the erosion of anti-Communism...

...0 n the other hand, there will always be some in America who will keep the flame of anti-fascism alive, whether fascism exists or not...

...What we need is not sophisticated policy-makers but simple rules, not a sense Not Without Honor: The History of American Anti-Communism Richard Gid Powers Free Press /554 pages / $30 Red Scare or Red Menace...

...Unlike the fascists, with their paltry memberships and political impotence, the Communists held positions of real influence within New Deal America...

...The demise of liberal anti-Communism effectively meant the end of anti-Communism as a positive theme of American culture...

...So we ought to stop caterwauling about a system that mostly works well, appreciate its strengths, even as we remain alert for its weaknesses, remain skeptical of advocates of complex policies that promise unalloyed happy results, and look for simple rules that can minimize irreversible damage...

...Though he wants balanced budgets and an end to affirmative action, Samuelson is characteristically cautious on many policies...

...And, with few exceptions, the Communists who held influential positions in the broader political world kept their party affiliation secret...

...this position was represented by such figures as Sidney Hook, John Dewey, Eugene Lyons, Isaac Don Levine, William F. Buckley, Jr., George Meany, and Norman Podhoretz...

...At the start of the Cold War, the liberals had the better of the argument...

...Toughening welfare eligibility might reverse those trends, but even those who believe that doubt the effect would be instant or dramatic...

...They used congressional investigatory committees to intimidate fascists and non-fascists alike...

...As John Earl Haynes points out in Red Scare or Red Menace...

...Though rooted in its leader's close examination of Christian doctrine, the Taiping Rebellion—the term means "Great Peace"—also came to embody a social program...

...Entitlement is a mirage," Samuelson believes...

...During the thirties, antifascists claimed that relatively weak pro-Hitler forces represented a dangerous Fifth Column within America...

...Lamar Alexander does this best, but other Republicans chime in...

...Chinese history is punctuated with mass uprisings and rebellions directed against reigning dynasties, and suppressed only after sustained repression and wide-scale destruction...

...Beyond any of this, the Rebellion makes for a great story, springing as it does from an under-appreciated event in modem history...

...04 A Sure Sign of Sanity Samuelson does not claim to know all the answers...

...Similarly, in this year's political campaign, you hear candidates calling over and over for "personal responsibility...

...Not the vision thing candidates try to display on the campaign trail, perhaps—but not bad advice...

...the anti-fascist movement of the thirties pioneered many of the tactics that the hard anti-Commu68 April 1996 The American Spectator nists expropriated, and were condemned for, a decade or so later...

...Powers sees this as a thoroughly lamentable development...

...More important, however, was the Communists' behavior during the New Deal and the war...

...Liberal intellectuals ignored the warnings of the titans of democratic dissent, like Havel, Sakharov, and Solzhenitsyn, when they began describing their own societies in the language of traditional intellectual anti-Communism...

...He has, however, few regrets about the anti-Communist course adopted by America during the early Cold War...

...The first was based on an intellectual grasp of the nature of Communism and a moral revulsion against its oppressiveness...

...Among Chinese Buddhists, for example, there were believers in the imminent coming of Maitreya Buddha, whose rule on earth would be preceded by a cosmic holocaust, itself prefigured by societal purification on a grand scale...

...The Cold War had evolved into a "self-fulfilling prophecy," Dr...

...Powers gives credit both to Ronald Reagan and prominent neoconservatives for having injected a measure of anti-Communism into American foreign policy during the 1980's...

...Like Powers, Haynes is harshly critical of McCarthyism, and he regrets the partisan uses to which anti-Communism was put by the Republicans...

...Even as the The American Spectator • Apr i 1199 6 67 Berlin Wall crumbled and Communism lay exposed as a failure and a fraud, anti-Communists were routinely portrayed as cynics, knaves, and paranoids—part Joe McCarthy, part Robert Welch, part Curtis LeMay...

...There is none of Newt Gingrich's chiliastic certainty here, but then Samuelson does not run in packs...

...The binge that sapped America's economy was the binge of the 1970's, when liberals including Richard Nixon, Nelson Rockefeller, John Lindsay, and Michael Dukakis spent other people's money profligately, producing a permanently bloated public sector, sometimes to bursting—Richard Nixon and Wilbur Mills's Social Security bill of 1972 created the entitlements problem of today even as the system had to be refinanced in 1977 and 1983...

...Thus, both in style and substance, God's Chinese Son is an outstanding advance in the West's understanding of China...

...In retrospect, America went on a binge, but it was not the binge of the 1980's that liberals like Hillary Rodham Clinton described —the so-called age of greed, of Michael Milken and leveraged buyouts, of Wall Street and The Predators' Ball...

...The liberals who formed the Americans for Democratic Action, the key institution of liberal anti-Communism in the early Cold War years, were motivated by self-interest as well, in response to the threat Henry Wallace's Popular Front forces represented to control of the Democratic Party's left wing...

...On the evidence presented in Not Without Honor, however, the answer is more likely to lie in the nature of liberalism than in a reaction to McCarthyism and the far right.44 The tactics of the antifascists provoked some of the victims of "brownsmearing" to adopt similar measures against the Communists...

...These liberals believed that only a democratic left could form an effective alternative to Marxism worldwide, and in the U.S...

...He also believes that the left was successful in linking anti-Communism with right-wing extremism in the public's mind, citing as one example the John Birch Society, whose influence, Powers argues, was much exaggerated...

...Some moved sharply to the left, and concluded that America's obsession with Communism stood as an impediment to social justice in the poverty-stricken Third World...

...Responsibility poses choices, recognizes limits, clarifies accountability...

...It is thus of some significance that we have two new studies that treat anti-Communism as a normal subject for historical investigation and anti-Communists as, with some obvious exceptions, normal and even admirable Americans...