Liberalism and American Public Opinion

...With all my great respect for Chambers, however, I do not share his extreme pessimism, although, I must say, there are certainly reasons enough for pessimism, more now, perhaps, than when Chambers was writing...

...16 The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1976...

...Perhaps the greatest reason for hope is the fact that the older generations go their way and a new generation takes their place...

...or, to go back some thirty years, to explain the underlying reasons for what George Kennan called the "casual American acquiescence" in the appalling territorial changes made at the Tehran and Yalta Conferences, changes which were completely contrary to the national interests of the United States and to our professed war aims, devastating to the security and stability of Western Europe, and completely contrary as well to the humanitarian principles we have traditionally undertaken to stand for...

...My second quote from Kostelanetz is this: "In his sociological study of the reading preferences of American intellectuals in 1970, Charles Kadushin identifies 'an oligarchy of influence [structured around] eight journals—New York Review of Books, New Republic, Commentary, New York Times Book Review, New Yorker, Saturday Review, Partisan Review and Harper 's'—three of which are securely within the mob [the New York 'literary establishment' he described above], three more of which are very susceptible to the mob's promotions...

...As T.S...

...All except for the New Republic, I might add, are published in New York, and all except perhaps Commentary are decidedly liberal...

...I will not try to add to this except to quote something from Whittaker Chambers, who, having experienced it himself, may have better understood the attraction of Communism than most of us...

...Traditional liberalism stood for a maximum of individual responsibility and a minimum of coercion over the life of the individual, whether by the state, the ch}irch, or the force of custom and tradition...

...The entire educational system, from the elementary school in a small town to the most distinguished university, is influenced indirectly, but in a decisive way, by the dominant position of New York in American society...

...Before going any farther, I should try to make clear what I mean by liberalism...

...The career of Alger Hiss until his conviction for perjury by a federal court in New York was a spectacular success—a graduate of the Harvard Law School, he rose, after various positions in government agencies during the early days of the New Deal, to one of the most influential positions in the State Department, was a friend of Mrs...

...During the past several years, Kristol, in a series of brilliant essays, has subjected various aspects or consequences of the liberal dogma to hard, rational analysis—for example, equality, utopianism, the problems of democracy, pornography, and censorship—and a year or two ago, in a public lecture, identified himself as a "liberal conservative," which could mean about anything, of course, but was clearly intended to mean that he did not consider himself a liberal...

...as subsequent events have demonstrated, however, the media can indeed bestow prominence and influence, but the power to bestow greatness eludes them...

...But what, it is fair to ask, does all this have to do with Nixon and Watergate...

...The President of the United States, we in our country are often told, is the most powerful man in the world, but as the fate of Richard Nixon demonstrated, the "secondhand dealers in ideas" are more powerful still...

...He is opposed to coercion, but not if it is exercised by a labor union, or for some cause he favors, such as civil rights, racial integration, or equality...

...Modern American liberalism, on the other hand, is invariably on the side of the state, of public power as opposed to private power...

...As a body of Western beliefs, secular and rationalistic, the intelligentsia of the West share it, and are therefore always committed to a secret emotional complicity with Communism, of which they dislike, not the Communism, but only what, by the chances of history, Russia has specifically added to it —slave labor camps, purge, MVD et al...

...A factor which has made the media in the United States particularly subject to liberal control, in spite of the size and diversity of the country, is the extreme concentration of communications in New York and the peculiar nature of New York itself...

...the West may discover in itself or otherwise develop, forces that can justify its survival," but this was soon dissipated again by the unwillingness, or inability, of the Western nations to offer support to those willing to risk their lives in opposition...

...One more quotation will probably suffice to give you a rather clear impression of the general tenor of Mission to Moscow: "Stalin is a simple man, everyone says, but a man of tremendous singleness of purpose and capacity for work...

...It will also come to understand, we may hope, that with all his faults, man was created by God in His own image, that he is capable of much, including the creation of beauty, and that life is still a great challenge and full of possibilities...

...This, however, is really not surprising, for liberalism, which was born in opposition to the existing order, had, almost by necessity, to develop into something quite different from the position from which it started...

...he is repelled by their brutality and ruthlessness, but is overwhelmed, nevertheless, by the apparent grandeur of the overall conception of Communism, of the completely planned, rational society, where everyone is equal, and where each has his place and purpose...

...Watergate gave the media a perfect opportunity to destroy him, but the ruthlessness of the liberal assault on Nixon and his Administration can only be explained by the Hiss case, the key role Nixon played in it, and its significance to the liberal position...

...The liberal favors democracy, regards democracy, in 14 The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1976 fact, as the only legitimate form of government, but consistently defends, even welcomes, every left-wing dictator who appears on the scene, whether Lumumba, Nkrumah, Castro, or Allende, so long as he makes the proper democratic protestations...

...He prefers planning to spontaneous development, and equality to a society of classes and differentiated responsibilities...

...Nixon's own behavior during the whole miserable Watergate episode is no doubt also related to his psychological reaction to the constant, unremitting criticism, if not calumny, he has been subjected to by the press during the greater part of his public life...

...Stalin as the clear-minded statesman who looks at East and West—both ways at once...

...A striking, but by no means isolated example of the state of mind which led to the "casual American acquiescence" in the decisions made at Yalta and Tehran is the book Mission to Moscow by the American Ambassador to Russia from 1937 to 1938, Joseph E. Davies, and parThe Alternative: An American Spectator March 1976 15 ticularly the uncritical acclaim with which it was received by the liberal press...

...The following is from one of his reports to Washington on the trials, which is reprinted in the book: "On the face of the record in this case it would be difficult for me to conceive of any court, in any jurisdiction, doing other than adjudging the defendants guilty of violations of the law as set forth in the indictments and as defined in the statutes...

...The book by Kostelanetz itself is an indication of it, and the work of Irving Kristol, one of the most intelligent, clearheaded social critics we have, is another...

...Book publishing is largely centered in New York as are the news services, nearly all the national magazines are published in New York, by far the most influential newspaper, the "newspaper of record," is published in New York, the control of the great foundations—Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Guggenheim—is concentrated in New York, The New York Times can largely determine the fate of any trade book published in the United States, the careers of professors in all the universities are influenced by the awarding or withholding of grants by the foundations, and the reputation and income of writers by what the New York critics say about them...

...There are other expressions of opinion than those of liberalism, there are other writers and critics than those Kostelanetz includes in his New York "mob," and there are other magazines, expressing quite different points of view, than the eight which were correctly described as an "oligarchy of influence...

...The reasons for the seemingly irresistible attraction of Communism to the liberal intellectual have been discussed and thought about by many people—there is a most interesting and illuminating article on the subject, for example, in the November 1973 issue of Encounter, "The Ideological Pilgrims" by Paul Hollander...

...The book was bad enough, but Davies, after all, was an utterly superficial, ambitious man whose only claim to distinction was a very rich wife, and in his reports from Moscow and in his book he was only serving the purpose for which the President had sent him to Moscow...

...Davies arrived in Moscow early in 1937, at the time when the great purges were getting under way, which he attended as an observer...

...In the early 1930s, American liberals were largely pacifist in their attitudes and took a leading part in the writing of the "revisionist" histories of American intervention in World War I, which they came to blame on the international bankers and munitions makers, the "merchants of death," as they came to be called...

...Both Hayek and Schumpeter call such people "intellectuals," Hayek defining them as "secondhand dealers in ideas," and Schumpeter as "people who wield the power of the spoken and written word" without having responsibility for practical affairs...

...Liberalism has become an ideology, and one of the characteristics of an ideology is that it is impervious to reason and experience...

...How accurately Duranty was in the habit of judging may be surmised from the following, which was quoted in Time, February 115, 1943: "I see Mr...

...Heniy Regnery Liberalism and American Public Opinion It is my purpose in what follows to describe an existing state of affairs, with the hope that in so doing I can make a little_ more understandable decisions and actions by some of my countrymen which must, on the face of it, appear utterly inexplicable, if not irrational...

...Roosevelt and an advisor to the President at the Yalta Conference, and became Secretary of the San Francisco Conference, where the United Nations Charter was adopted...

...After leaving the State Department he became Executive Secretary of the Carnegie Endowment...

...To illustrate what I have been saying about the overwhelming influence of New York on what is thought, read, and believed in every part of our country, I quote the following from the recent book The End of Intelligent Writing by Richard Kostelanetz, who, however, I should add, sees it all from quite a different standpoint than I do: "What began in the thirties as a collection of ambitious young writers became, by the sixties, the most powerful establishment ever seen in literary America...

...Finally, it should be mentioned that Mission to Moscow was a selection of the Book-ofthe-Month Club, which assured it, wide circulation, and was made into a much publicized movie—it enjoyed, therefore,the complete, unequivocal support of the entire liberal apparatus...

...He goes on to say: "The prosecutor [Vyshinsky] conducted the case calmly and generally with admirable restraint...

...Whatever the ideologues may say, they have made it clear by their acts that man is a flawed creature, that governments are not to be trusted, that politics cannot provide the final answer, that absolute power does corrupt absolutely...

...The liberal, to put it briefly, does not accept man as God made him, the human condition as it is, nor society as it has come down to us, but believes that all are capable of immediate and rapid improvement, especially if liberal recipes are followed...

...New York, as the intellectual and communications center of the United States, exerts a strong influence on the opinions expressed in every newspaper in the country, on the books chosen by every librarian and sold in every bookstore...

...The uprisings in Berlin, Poland, and Hungary gave him hope, for a time, hope that "out of the struggle...

...the Saturday Review of Literature as "...one of the most significant books of our time...

...By demonstrating that the media can destroy a President, Watergate has weakened the Presidency and thereby the legitimate authority of government...

...He is decent and clean-living...

...I will try to show why, fore example, the American press took such obvious delight in the destruction of a President, without regard for the effect their actions may have had on the stability of our institutions or on the American position in the world...

...George Kennan, who attended the trials as Ambassador Davies' interpreter, spoke of "Vyshinsky's thundering brutalities," but Davies saw him differently: "The Attorney General is a man of about 60 and is much like Homer Cummings [the American Attorney General at the time...

...There are also signs that within the New York intellectual community itself there are stirrings of originality, of dissent -from the rigid control the New York literary establishment has exercised...

...From this fact stems the attitude of the liberal press toward Nixon...

...Nixon was the first man since the 1930s to become President .in defiance of the media, but the media were able, admittedly with his help, to destroy him...

...Modern American liberalism—the kind I refer to—superficially seems to have little in common with European liberalism of the nineteenth century, from which, however, it is a perfectly logical development...

...How well Davies understood, and how accurately he judged...

...from Chambers, and is reprinted in the book Odyssey of a Friend: "It is a Western body of beliefs that now threatens the West from Russia...

...The following is from a letter to William F. Buckley, Jr...

...And that, not because Western intellectuals find them unjustifiable, but because they are afraid of being caught in them...

...With the outbreak of the European war in 1939, however, and especially after Hitler's attack on Russia, the liberals vociferously clamored for American intervention, maligned any expression of opposition to their position, and supported and furthered every aspect of the Roosevelt foreign policy, from Unconditional Surrender to the war crimes trials...

...He conducted the treason trial in a manner that won my respect and admiration as a lawyer...

...the criminal is not to be blamed for his crime, but society...

...The effectiveness of the control which the liberal establishment has been able to exercise in our immense country, without re-course, it should be said, to force or any sort of government action, was made possible by the extent to which those in a position to influence opinion—the journalists, critics, writers, teachers—adhere to a single set of ideas and beliefs, by the nature of modern communications, and by the utter incapacity of those of contrary opinions to comprehend what was going on...

...He rejects the idea of original sin—except, perhaps, in the case of Richard Nixon—but believes instead that whatever tendency toward evil man shows is a result of social- influences rather than any innate human flaw...

...the Congress has demonstrated that if is unable or unwilling to face the political consequences of curbingeither inflation or the bureaucracy...

...He holds the situation in hand...

...If they could have Communism without the brutalities of ruling that the Russian experience bred, they have only marginal objections...

...Without the enormous barrage of publicity the combined forces of press, TV, and radio were able to concentrate on Watergate, it would have made no greater impact on public opinion than, say, the Bobby Baker case during the Administration of Lyndon Johnson...

...The new generation has evidence enough of all this, and, we may hope, is beginning to comprehend it...

...And this problem is far beyond the competence of politics to cope with...

...The New York intellectuals' they began to call themselves...

...His essay "About Equality," which appeared in the November 1972 issue of Commentary, ends with the sentence, which only a mature, wise man could have written: "It is not too much to say that it is the death of God, not the emergence of any new social or economic trends, that haunts bourgeois society...

...Before going any farther it might be worth mentioning that the New York Times greeted the Tehran Declaration with the assertion that it "laid the foundations for a new and better order in the world," .and that Time magazine called the Yalta Agreement "a great achievement...

...Pacific Affairs described it as " ...a book of exceptional importance...

...calm, dispassionate, intellectual, and able and wise...

...Foreign Affairs commended it as "...one of the best informed books to appear in recent years on Soviet Russia...

...Liberalism is not a coherent, consistent body of ideas, as the positions taken by liberals over the years clearly show...

...The liberal media have regarded Nixon with implacable hatred ever since the Hiss case, the deeper significance of which the liberal intellectuals understood far better than the ordinary, uncomplicated American...

...Evil, for the liberal, is not an existential, fact but a social problem, and like all social problems, subject to solution...

...and Walter Duranty, who for many years had been the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times, proclaimed in the pages of the New Republic: "To me the charm of this book is first of all its acuteness...

...In all this the New York intellectual, the "secondhand dealer in ideas," as Hayek calls him, plays an influential, if not to say dominant role...

...It has been pointed out before, by Hayek, Schumpeter, and Schelsky, among others, that modern communications—the mass press, television, and radio—have given the "scribblers," as they were once called, the people who dominate the popular dissemination of ideas and information and presume to speak for us, unprecedented power and influence...

...it has endowed public power, in fact, as Ronald Berman puts it, "with a kind of immaculateness that has theistic reverberations...

...Most discouraging of all, perhaps, is the fact that communications are still largely controlled by the liberals, and that the liberals have learned nothing—to curb inflation, they tell us, nothing more is necessary than price and wage controls, they talk about detente with Russia as though nothing had happened during the past thirty years, and they still believe that all social problems, from crime in the streets to inadequate education, can be solved by the simple expedient of government programs, or, perhaps, "participatory democracy...

...Eliotput it, in The Idea of a Christian Society: "By destroying traditional social habits of the people, by dissolving their collective consciousness into individual constituents...

...By giving him the enormous apparatus of communications, technology and business organization have made the intellectual one of the most influential members of modern society...

...by licensing the opinions of the most foolish, by substituting instruction for education, by encouraging cleverness rather than wisdom, the upstart rather than the qualified...

...Chambers, I might add, was utterly pessimistic: when he left the Communist Party, he wrote in his book, Witness, he felt that he was leaving the winning side to go over to the losing side, and to the end of his life he saw no reason to change his mind...

...and they dominated thescene as it had never been dominated before...

...He is violently opposed to any form of dictatorship on the Right, whatever the circumstances that brought it about, but Communist dictatorships have an almost irresistible attraction for him...

...liberalism can prepare the way for that which is its own negation: the artificial, mechanised or brutalised control which is a desperate remedy for its chaos...

...Granting all this, there is still reason to look to the future with at least a modicum of hope and confidence...

...Much worse- than the book was its uncritical, thoroughly irresponsible reception by the liberal claque...

...It is my thesis that public opinion in the United States, and, therefore, public policy, are strongly influenced, if not dominated, by liberalism, and that this has been the case for the past forty years...

...The liberal media, on the other hand, can make such men as Adlai Stevenson or Willy Brandt, whose only claim to distinction was rhetorical skill of a high order, into world figures...

...However defined, we all know pretty well who they are and what they do...

...To offer evidence that a man with such credentials as a member of the liberal establishment was also an active member of the Communist underground, as Whittaker Chambers did, was to attack the credibility of the whole liberal position, as none understood better than the liberals themselves, and without the intervention of Nixon, then a member of Congress, at a critical point in the proceedings, it is doubtful that Hiss would ever have been convicted...