Up from Communism

...while Max Eastman and John Dos Passos, the novelist, strike me as two of the more colorful Bohemian figures of the interwar years...

...Relating his experience at San Francisco State as a teacher during the "state of siege" in the sixties, he describes his hope then of instilling his students with his own reverence "for the intellectual achievements of the radicals of the thirties...

...To some extent vlax Eastman is spared uch treatment because of kis fierce opposition to tralitional religion...

...Further-tore, his resistance to established author-y was not conceived as an individual and rivate witness to religious conscience...

...And though he allegedly refused "to go whoring after the young," Diggins makes no bones about having "admired the political commitment and morally inspired madness of some factions of the New Left...

...Having begun as an exercise of scholarship, it becomes more and more irrational, finally dissolving into utter nonsense, as its author yields to hysteria...

...What Hcrberg did, in several ar:les in the mid-sixties, was to show how widely King's social activism differed from that resistance to tyranny permitted by Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and other Christian teachers...

...Eastman, for example, dismayed his fellow Communists as a young man by attempting to Freudianize Marx...

...One might finally note in passing that From Our Gallery of Eminentoes le Alternative: An American Spectator April 1976 35 Diggins' terms of description often reflect his political biases...

...In my opinion, his book would have been better, had he left his four anguished intellectuals at the moment of their break with Marxism...

...In keeping with this atiiude, Diggins quite freuently tries to avoid, ather than respond to, the thrust of an unpleasant arument...

...What he ultimately charges is guilt by historical association: i.e., the failure of conservatives to abandon the Right during the McCarthy era...

...Perhaps one can also find in this metaphor a clue to the fate of Up from Communism...

...Since Diggins declares "the liberal tradition" (whatever that means in his presentation...

...Hardly a monster bent on conquering the world, Stalin was, in Diggins' eyes, a statesman whose "acquiescence in geopolitics" had helped to "keep Finland and Greece out of the Soviet orbit...

...While the National Review is described as either pompous or stridently missionary, the New York Review of Books is considered "prestigious...

...His re;ponse to their later writngs is either indignantly :ritical or conspicuously :ondescending...

...Moreover, "his definition of religion as an 'either-or' total commitment seemed perilously close to the mentality of McCarthy's anti-Communist crusade...

...it as a public display of opposition in.nded to arouse violent feelings in hers...

...Challenging his moral right to inspire such a crusade, Diggins points to The Mach:avellians, which Burnham wrote in 1943, and in which he specifically referred to liberty as an outmoded myth...

...Liberals, conversely, are made to speak for reason, sanity, and, in the last two chapters, the sick and maimed of the world...

...And why question Burnham's credentials in 1953 to defend Western liberty on the basis of thoughts which he expressed in 1943 and later reconsidered...

...We are then shown how the failing of the Communist deity pushed each of the four beyond the revolutionary fervor of his youth and into "the waiting arms of the pompous young author of God aid Man at Yale - This designation of their ultimate fateas defenders of McCarthyism and as "the respectable brain men of the National Review" tells much about the author's own view of the events in question...

...Although Diggins is generally critical of Stalin's enormities and of Communist disregard for freedom, his leftist sympathies are apparent already in the preface...

...What proof does Diggins have that Burnham was simply dissembling, when he argued in favor of freedom...

...He then indicted this leader for encouraging the kinds of subjective moral judgments and the secularization of religious life which he believed were proving fatal to Christianity...

...He, furthermore, displays a grasp of his material which stands in direct proportion to his fondness for a given topic...

...Why can't he also allow him some second thoughts on liberty during a ten-year period...

...By the same token, he denounces Cold Warriors, who advocate military force to stop Communist aggression...

...In any case, suggests Diggins, the Cold War could have been largely avoided, had only Americans understood thelimited objectives of postwar Soviet policy...

...and, citing Aquinas, he declared -kat an unjust law is a human law that is of rooted in eternal and natural law...

...Instead, )iggins throws up a smokescreen by aserting the following: "Like Augustine :ing insisted that unjust laws are no laws t all...

...In view of such sentiments, it is understandable that Diggins should treat his 34 The Alternative: An American Spectator April 1976 subjects' radical phase with more empathy than their conservative one...

...Al-lough there is a long-standing theologial sanction for opposition to tyranny, it is oubtful whether the state whose laws ing scorned, fitted the traditional Chris-an definition of tyranny: forcing its sub:cts to do ungodly acts while allowing no eaceful redress of grievances...

...Nonetheless, Diggins chides Herberg too for having treated McCarthy simply as the latest representative of the increasing vulgarity of American politics...

...to be the only significant political and social force in America since the Founding Fathers, the Right is, by implication, anti-American...

...Since people like Buckley and Burnham on the other side believe in "martyrdom for the sake of machismo" (the result of their male chauvinism and Cold War strategy), they have abandoned the weak to pursue their vision of nuclear holocaust...

...Although Diggins implicates all his subjects in the "hysteria of McCarthyism," he does not bother to demonstrate a personal involvement on the part of any of them with McCarthy or his committee...

...When he :xplains their polemics, it s usually to demonstrate he superior ethics, or logic, ,f their liberal and radical pponents...

...Hence he shines in explaining the early historical and philosophical tracts of his two most learned subjects, Burnham and Herberg...

...Another attractive aspect of Up from Communism is the engrossing scholarship on the doctrinal struggles which beset American Marxism during the twen- ties and thirties...

...Nonetheess, almost all regular conributors to National Reiew except Garry Wills are nade to seem intellectually -responsible...

...For example, he ever does justice to Will lerberg's contention that lartin Luther King's tatcs for social change were angerously incompatible 'ith traditional Christianity...

...still the maverick forty years later, he would lecture his fellow conservatives on the virtues of atheism...

...He shows disgust for Burn-ham's avowed intent to rally the West to a defense of freedom even in areas then under Communist domination...

...So much for Stalin's "acquiescence in geopolitics...

...On the contrary, the Russians did intervene in Greece—indirectly through Yugoslavia and more directly through Bulgaria—and, as Burnham points out, they refused to raise the stakes only when they encountered stiff Greek resistance and risked a confrontation with a then more powerful America...

...Herberg creates problems, since he actually denounced McCarthy as a crude and "swashbuckling demagogue" while still writing for liberal journals in the early fifties...

...Examining the latter's Containment or Liberation?, published in 1953, Diggins seems horrified by its dominant theme: namely, that the American government should actively support Eastern European resistance to Soviet rule...

...By so doing, as well as by mocking,any comparison between the Senator and totalitarian leaders, Herberg was supposedly aiding the forces of reaction...

...James Burnham, author of Suicide of the West, is my favorite analyst of international relations...

...On the evidence I can only bow to Her-berg's documented appeal to traditional theology as against King's (and Diggins') rhapsodies to "higher laws" emptied of any specific religious content...

...The author is even more adamant in denying a fair hearing to Burnham's views on the Cold War...

...Conservatives are almost always hysterical: whence their affinity for the "hysteria of McCarthy...

...As for Finland, Diggins conveniently forgets that the Soviets seized (or reseized) much of its territory after the War and that they still control Finnish foreign policy...

...And in revealing the origins and continuity of the socialist controversies in which both were steeped, he draws on his impressive knowledge of Marxist scholarship, both European and American...

...Book Review/Paul Gottfried The Scholarship That Failed • • Because of its appealing subject matter —the transformation of four Communist intellectuals into conservatives—up from Communism held my interest from beginning to end...

...Will Herberg, the theologian and sociologist of religion, is a friend I admire...

...Examining the psycho-logical effects on the American Communists of the bitter fight between Stalin and Trotsky, the Purges, and finally the Soviet-Nazi pact in 1939, Diggins makes copious use of memoirs and journals in dramatizing the crises faced by the Old Up from Communism by John P. Diggins Harper & Row Outrageously expensive Left, quoting them in great detail to analyze how these four young radicals lost their Marxist faith...

...The four personalities it explores, moreover, have always intrigued me...

...After all, he is willing to concede the authenticity of the same man's pilgrimage from Trotskyism to an implacable form of anti-Communism...

...For, in the proct:ss of following them down From Communism into the apparent morass of conserrative folly, Diggins quickly ;uccumbs to his own ideoogical blindness...

...Burnham, for instance, is castigated for having referred to himself as "an anti anti-McCanhyite," while Dos Passos and Eastman have milder indiscretions brought up against them...