BUCKLEY'S COMRADES: THE EX-COMMUNIST AS CONSERVATIVE
Diggins, John P.
When the National Review celebrates its 20th anniversary this November, conservatives may salute its editor with the toast: "You've come a long way, Buckley." Among the associate editors,...
...Obviously, the experience of Stalinism pressed like a tumor on the brain of a whole generation of writers who came of political age between 1917 and 1939...
...Henry Kissinger now recognizes what Dean Acheson could never get Americans to recognize: the reality of the status quo...
...it is a trait fairly common among ex-Communists...
...Drawing heavily upon Michael Oakeshott, Burnham clearly mistook the tradition of democratic radicalism, which had its origins in French utopianism, for the tradition of Anglo-American liberalism, which derived from the skepticism of Locke and Hume...
...380 JOHN P. DIGGINS other hand, springs from the wounds of national humiliation, builds upon power politics and the hubris of total victory, tries somehow to combine federalism and private enterprise with the warfare state, and ultimately depends upon the crimes of communism and the "suicidal" illusions of liberalism...
...Examining an 'It is a measure of their intellectual honesty that these four writers on the Right remained discontent with American conservatism as well—or as Herberg put it, "with what passes for conservatism in America...
...And McCarthy would simply ask: "Mr...
...That, it seems to me, is clearly the place for anyone who can call McCarthy a "Clear-headed patriot of freedom...
...Under Burnham's diagnosis the American liberal is doubly diseased: if he is optimistic, he is suicidal...
...More questionable still was Burnham's inability to make up his mind whether he wanted to purge liberalism from the Western tradition or save the liberal West from communism...
...When the intellectual on the Right turns to the American past, he finds that he is an antiliberal conservative who has nothing to conserve but the liberal tradition...
...and in politics and diplomacy, "the ideology of Western suicide" (Burnham...
...It is well to imagine, Dell speculated, McCarthy discovering that Eastman, one of his supporters, had criticized him, and hence summoning Eastman to appear...
...It was quite another thing to claim, in order to discredit liberalism, that Marxism itself partook of the liberal tradition, in which case the Soviet Union could be seen, not as the negation of the West, but as the extension of the Enlightenment.' Whatever the line of reasoning, Burnham faced the same difficulty that Eastman and others encountered when they attributed the success of Communist expansion to democratic socialists and their collectivist illusions: how to explain the resistance to communism in the democratic West and the receptivity to communism in the underdeveloped world...
...378 JOHN P. DIGGINS was even greater, for when he ticked off a list of Third World countries in order to dramatize their "abandonment" by the West, he implied that the West had a legitimate right to control those countries it had once possessed and had presumably "lost...
...How much earlier...
...and he then proceeds to explain why Stalin must be recognized as a "genius" who, instead of betraying the revolution as Trotsky insisted, had actually "fulfilled" it ("Lenin's Heir," Partisan Review, 1945...
...Apparently Burnham assumed that a cause must resemble its effect, for he doubtlessly presumed that liberalism and communism were similar and that the latter somehow issued from the former—if not in origin at least in expansion...
...in the Watergate affair, one sees that an administration founded on "law and order" can resort to illegal and quasi-totalitarian methods allegedly to protect the "free world...
...Buckley's comrades should have no trouble recognizing the language of inevitability, the old rhetoric of "certainty" in Communist victory...
...the goal of wiping out all social distinctions...
...But how, Dell wondered, did his old friend come to the scandalous position of supporting McCarthy, whose crimes consisted in more than what Eastman called mere "bad manners...
...You are very scornful of Rolland, Barbusse, and Joe Freeman, among others, for remaining in the Soviet fold long after you had left it...
...Burnham's thesis was more clever than convincing...
...A short memory does wonders for a clear conscience...
...National Review, I (April 25, 1956), pp...
...and as events in Asia and Latin America would demonstrate, no Marxist movement against British and American hegemony succeeded without a Leninist-modeled party dictatorship...
...But while this contraction of power was taking place, Western culture was also expanding, and it was in those very Third World countries that Burnham listed (from Afghanistan to Zanzibar) that the hegemony of the West was being challenged by leaders who claimed for their own nations political rights the West once had claimed to be universal...
...When the Bolsheviks seized power, Eastman rhapsodized Lenin's achievements in The Liberator, and after 1924 he became Trotsky's best literary translator and staunch defender...
...Eastman had indeed done more than any writer 370 of his generation to celebrate and explain communism to a hostile American public...
...After the war, he advocates military force to resist the Stalinism he had just recently described as historically inevitable, and he now calls upon Americans and Europeans to fight for democratic ideals that he had dismissed as theoretically unrealizable (The Struggle for the World, 1947...
...There was nothing disgraceful in having mistaken confidence in the revolutionary wisdom of Lenin," Dell wrote to Eastman in 1954, an 11-page letter that, at the urging of his wife, he decided not to send...
...Indeed, the early Dos Passos seems like a Weatherman-of-the-pen...
...For Burnham, the crisis of modern Western culture begins with the October Revolution...
...We stand defeated America," he later recorded in USA...
...The conservative does not begrudge that burden...
...The ideological career of Will Herberg is equally puzzling...
...An optimistic theory of human nature and history," Burnham continued, "is integral to, logically inseparable from, the whole body of liberal doctrine...
...When World War I broke out, his thoughts exploded in a Bakuninite fantasy...
...With the Cold War, Burnham emerged as a diplomatic theoretician of the Right, a leading nuclear confrontationist...
...he relishes it...
...Formerly they had scorned the impotence of liberalism, now they complained about its power or influence...
...Even the Reader's Digest, Eastman's popular medium during the war years, succumbed to these pressures...
...Eastman himself supported all-out aid to the Russian war effort in 1943...
...But the National Review's position is about as persuasive as Trotsky's appeal to the American Left at the outbreak of World War II to support Stalin's Russia in order better to defeat Stalinism...
...Eastman returned to this distinction at the end of the war in an exchange with Dwight Macdonald in Politics over communism in Greece...
...On the eve of America's entry into the war Eastman tried to formulate a distinction between the chastened exradical and the faithful socialist...
...David Caute, The Fellow- Travelers: A Postscript to the Enlightenment (New York, 1973), pp...
...The career of McCarthyism's finest creation, Richard Milhouse Nixon, indicates strongly that the ACCF intellectuals were right in saying that anticommunism in America had become an expedient political issue rather than a deep moral commitment...
...Burnham's dilemma 5In "The Ex-Communist's Conscience" (reprinted in Russia in Transition) Isaac Deutscher drew a historical parallel between Stalinism and the anti-Soviet nations on the one hand and Napoleonic France and the Holy Alliance on the other...
...Even in the early '50s no one could have predicted that the author of Judaism and Modern Man, who still defended in existential terms a "theologically grounded socialism," would align himself with Buckley, who BUCKLEY'S COMRADES 371 wanted to rescue God from the Niebuhrians and get Him back into Yale University...
...Yet the burden of the radical is lighter...
...Nor can one point to historical experience as an explanation for deradicalization...
...If, indeed, "the extremes touch," what forms the bridge between them...
...It opens with the drama of apocalypse: the West is shrinking because it is dying...
...Basically there were three issues: the debate over the means to be used in the struggle against postwar Communist totalitarianism, the McCarthyism controversy, and the residue of antiliberalism that remained in the thought of a former Leninist (Eastman), a former anarchist (Dos Passos), a former Lovestoneite (Herberg), and a former Trotskyist (Burnham...
...Eastman led a charmed life...
...It was Floyd Dell who confronted Eastman with the conscience of history...
...Previously liberalism was rejected for its inability to make a revolution, now it was repudiated for its inability to prevent one...
...I think it would be damned unreasonable of me to set the date on which I stopped making excuses for the Soviet regime as the date beyond which anyone who kept on was an infamous scoundrel...
...Buckley and Burnham supported the Greek junta because supposedly it alone was capable of resisting a Communist takeover...
...Among the associate editors, consultants, and contributors another toast might be made, this time raised, perhaps after the third glass of champagne, as a nostalgic question: "Where were you in '32...
...Over a quarter-century ago Ignazio Silone prophesied accurately the intellectual consequences of Stalinism in Crossman's collection The God That Failed: "The final struggle will be between the Communist and the ex-Communist...
...While it is true that the "message" of the French Revolution did survive the personal dictatorship of Napoleon, the Soviet Union continues as a totalitarian state long after the passing of Stalin...
...Yet while Orwell could become a severe critic of both Kremlin "doublethink" and Burnhamite Realpolitik, Dos Passos came to believe that he could be anti-Communist without questioning the warfare state created by the Cold War...
...the determination to reform all established institutions...
...American conservatives may have more difficulty discovering what will remain to be conserved...
...The radical, to be sure, may continue to follow Marx's advice and draw his "poetry" from the future, but for the conservative, knowledge of the American past is precisely the predicament...
...As events in Eastern Europe would demonstrate, no democratic movement against Soviet totalitarianism had a chance of success...
...and James Burnham, the theorist of power in a universe of protracted conflict...
...There is, in fact, a continuity of disdain for liberalism that runs through their careers like a red thread...
...Dell saw clearly the dilemma of exradicals supporting McCarthy's investigations while resisting the logic (or illogic) of McCarthyism itself...
...The same pattern of agreement and divergence is true of Dos Passos and Orwell...
...Will Herberg, the anguished theologian of moral man in immoral society...
...As a Marxist, Herberg had dismissed religion as the illusion of the oppressed...
...In the '40s he first calmly predicts the collapse of the Soviet Union and the victory of fascist Germany and Japan (The Managerial Revolution, 1941...
...As John Chamberlain explained the case, Nixon, while shifty on economic issues, possessed an "intellectual understanding of Marxism in both its theoretical and practical aspects," displayed "a clear perception of the nature of Communist dynamism in international affairs," and was, despite all the talk of "Tricky Dick," a "rather open young man with decent impulses...
...and Eastman, in his debates with Sidney Hook over Hegelianism, uncovered epistemological problems in Marxism that would be faced a quarter-century later by such important European philosophers as Louis Althusser and Jurgen Habermas...
...Eastman's own commitment to cultural freedom and his distinction between means and ends collapsed under the burden of McCarthyism...
...For without such a Left as an opposition force, the lesson the National Review must ponder is this: if there is one historical experience rarer than a right-wing dictatorship achieving the genuine social progress necessary to defeat communism, it is a right-wing dictatorship transforming itself into a genuine democracy...
...The irony is compounded when one considers that detente itself is an exercise in the very Machiavellian power politics that Burnham had once believed essential to the defeat of the Communist world...
...in philosophy and theology, the ethical relativism that poisoned authentic religion (Herberg...
...Better to face the chance of being dead," wrote Buckley, "than the certainty of being Red...
...John Dos Passos, the novelist of anarcho-individualist sensibilities...
...for the anti-Communist conservative it is the Berlin Wall...
...He attempted to reconcile Marxism and Einstein's relativity physics, correct Edmund Wilson's views on proletarian literature, and argue with Sidney Hook over the textual validity of Marx's ambivalent position on revolution...
...cow negotiations of July 1974, one sees why a chief of state who tried to silence the American press can stand idly by while Soviet authorities pull the cables on American journalists trying to report on Russian dissidents...
...He conceived his mission as that of the philosopher who would hasten the revolution by explicating the meaning of dialectical materialism and the theory of Leninism...
...Eastman, Burnham, Herberg, and Dos Passos were all convinced that liberals feared congressional investigations and tried to fabricate "hysteria" about McCarthyism because they themselves had been "implicated in the selling out of the world to totalitarian Communism...
...The liberal critique of Soviet communism was, then, an essential ingredient in the legacy of the Old Left, and the neoconservatives had no alternative but to resort to it during the Cold War...
...4 Burnham's Suicide of the West: The Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism best expresses, in tones of Spenglerian doom, the conservative case against the modern liberal mind...
...But while Burnham maintained that Bolshevism repudiated the West, he also claimed that the contraction of Western civilization was the result of a series of Soviet advances, a movement that drew its ideological strength from the attitudes that liberals and Marxists held in common...
...We die...
...Like the Jews at their wailing place, the Liberals cover their heads with their robes of integrity and wail, wail, wail—God, I'm tired of wailing...
...The burden of demonstrating how undemocratic means can lead to democratic ends—the very challenge that Dewey put to BUCKLEY'S COMRADES 373 Trotsky in 1938—must now be assumed by the ex-Communist conservative...
...This was but the first of a series of surprising turns in Burnham's political career that left both admirers and critics dumbfounded...
...To change earlier was giddy frivolity...
...Both writers went through almost exactly the same trial of faith on the battlefields of Spain, and each came away convinced more than ever that the language of politics must be rescued from the enemies of freedom...
...On the contrary, Herberg tried to assimilate quantum physics and dialectical materialism before the European Left dared touch the subject...
...That perhaps is the main thing that separates me from these liberBUCKLEY'S COMRADES 375 als who think that `McCarthyism is a worse danger than Communism...
...The caricature of liberalism that emerges in Suicide of the West reads like a parody of intellectual history...
...If our four neoconservatives cannot be characterized as superficial intellects, neither can they be categorized as distinctive psychological types whose politics reflect "personality needs...
...McCarthyism, Buckley and L. Brent Bozell argued in McCarthy and His Enemies, represented a "consensus," a widely shared conviction that communism posed a threat to American values and that therefore Communists and Communist sympathizers should be ostracized from public life and liberals should be exposed as "atheistic, soft-headed, [and] anti-anti-Communist...
...In the Cold War the conservative intellectual rises to the defense of the liberal values of freedom and political justice, and the National Review writers find themselves in the awkward position of advocating liberalism in the communist world while ridiculing it in the liberal world...
...Were the democratic Mensheviks, the peasant-based Social Revolutionaries, the liberal Kadets, and the Kronstadt anarchists any less the victims of Bolshevik terrorism that Eastman had once accepted as inevitable...
...They gave absolution for crimes as yet uncommitted...
...What would Jefferson say, who regarded "man as a destroyer," a predator of his own species, "the only animal which levied war against its kind...
...Cromwell said to Parliament: "I beseech you, brethren, in the bowells of Christ, to conceive it possible that you may be mistaken...
...W IV e need only compare the dilemmas of the Left and the Right in America to understand why liberalism is seen as the common enemy...
...To you it seems quite excusable to have adored Lenin, and quite inexcusable to have tolerated Stalin...
...but while Russell, after World War II, went on to become a fiery critic of America's postwar anti-Communist interventions...
...The author wishes to thank the Newberry Library for permission to quote from these materials...
...the stress on science...
...Against Castro and Allende the CIA served the historical function of Lenin's "vanguard," the conspiratorial will of the counterrevolution...
...In truth, the real question was not whether 374 JOHN P. DIGGINS communism posed a threat to American values—clearly the position of the ACCFbut whether McCarthyism was merely a matter of posture rather than principle, a stance that enabled the politician to be against liberalism without necessarily being against real communism...
...To avoid the embarrassment, Russell Kirk may take the readers of The Conservative Mind abroad in order to bring home Burke and Coleridge by way of Adams and Calhoun...
...But," he added, "if there is a `right time' for all good men to quit, all I can feel is that it ought to have been 376 JOHN P. DIGGINS `earlier...
...What communism does is to carry the liberal principles to their logical and practical extreme: the secularism, the rejection of tradition and custom...
...372 JOHN P. DIGGINS ham was fascinated by it...
...Only a year later Burnham himself broke with Trotsky, repudiated Marxism, and pronounced the socialist revolution a foolish daydream...
...What would Trotsky say, who railed against the New Deal and dubbed liberalism the "banality" of "common sense...
...The young Whittaker Chambers and Joseph Freeman, Dell noted, were persuaded by our "eloquent articles" in the Masses and the Liberator...
...Herberg became a Marxist revolutionary, youth organizer, and Daily Worker contributor in the early '20s when the Communist party was being hounded by the forces of law and order...
...13-14...
...And Roosevelt's New Deal...
...If in the '30s the very fragility of liberal ideology made fascism possible in Germany and Italy, in the postwar period it was, presumably, only the timidity of a powerful Western liberalism that made Stalinism possible in Eastern Europe...
...The ex-Communist may have revised his "means" for "emancipating" society from oppression, and doubtless Eastman originally was urging the Left to see the imperative of democratic processes and the disaster of "proletarian dictatorships...
...You seem to think that any generous-souled person was excusable for staying in as long as you did, but those who came in or stayed in later were utterly contemptible...
...the belief in the welfare state carried to its ultimate form in the totalitarian state...
...This misconception may explain why Burnham could not come to grips with the major antagonist of his book, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and his book The Vital Center...
...It is the cruelest irony of the Cold War that Nixon did more than any other modem statesman to bestow legitimacy on Communist China and Russia...
...all right, we are two nations...
...Thus if Macdonald's dream could not be realized, neither could Eastman's distinction be maintained...
...When the four writers became conservatives, an ironic twist emerged in their indictment...
...In economics, liberalism meant the death of free enterprise (Eastman...
...BUCKLEY'S COMRADES 377 atlas of the world as it was in 1914, and comparing it to a map of 1964, Burnham leaves no doubt in the reader's mind that half of the world was lost owing to the collapse of Europe's monarchical dynasties and the spread of communism after World War I. The contraction of the West, Burnham was convinced, had its origins in an internal malaise...
...The choice of strategy was indeed crucial, but looking back, the entire history of the subsequent Cold War casts some doubt on both propositions...
...One may do so, Buckley and Burnham have been arguing recently in the National Review, because it is far more likely that a national populace can rise against and topple a right-wing autocracy than a left-wing dictatorship...
...But Burnham could not have it both ways...
...The career of James Burnham represents an equally strange odyssey...
...The reasons we gave for loyalty to the Soviet regime were splendidly broad, Max...
...America and Europe have lost "the will to survive," and this atrophy of nerve springs from liberalism, the ideology of a sick political culture...
...To be a conservative means to become aware of the historical dimension of knowledge, to nurture, revere and defend those values and institutions that belong to the past...
...In Nixon's heralded detente with Russia and China, one sees that a politician nurtured on McCarthyism can be anti-Communist without being antitotalitarian...
...And I abjure you in the same spirit...
...Indeed, if one surveys the heritage of McCarthyism in the 1970s, one finds a disturbing consistency between the past tactic of McCarthyite slander and the present strategy of Moscow summit, between the old witch-hunter and the new fellowtraveler...
...With this knowledge haunting his mind, Dell made a plea for humility...
...When East"Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Boston, 1960), pp...
...8 Eastman was aware of the Katyn atrocity and of the "Gulag camp" during the war, but he was advised, by Polish authorities and by Russian emigres like Boris Nicolaevsky, not to publicize the stories for fear of jeopardizing the Russo-American alliance...
...People like Max Eastman don't give a damn about cultural freedom...
...The flamboyant Eastman embodied the adventurous innocence of flesh and spirit that has characterized various generations of American rebels...
...You are not alone in this selfrighteousness...
...And if the National Review supports a rightwing regime that has as its aim the suppression of the democratic Left, one can only conclude, by the magazine's own logic and by Eastman's distinction between being "loyal to the aim" rather than to the means, that the conservative is on the wrong side of the barricades...
...If by democratic standards fascism and communism were equally repugnant, why did "conservatives" who advocated American intervention to save Poland from Gomulka not advocate similar measures a decade earlier to save Poland from Pilsudski...
...In Christian morality, too, there is the idea that the sinner who repenteth late should be forgiven no less heartily than the sinner who repenteth early...
...the internationalism...
...Dos Passos looked upon liberal intellectuals as a "milky lot" armed only with "tea-table convictions...
...Whether radical or conservative, the enemy remained the same...
...The basic issue was whether, as Macdonald and the remaining Old Left had hoped, there existed the possibility of a mass alternative to both Stalinism and capitalism, or whether, as Eastman believed, popular, democratic movements stood a better chance of success struggling within spheres of the British and American empires...
...If he had read Jefferson, Madison, and John Adams," Dos Passos said of Milovan Djilas in the New Leader in 1959, "he would definitely have something to offer...
...The postwar conservative indictment of liberalism drew its spleen from the sins of the 1930s generation: the Popular Front, the Moscow trials seen as "progressive" and Stalin as "Uncle Joe," isolationism at the outbreak of World War II, silence on the Katyn Forest massacres the Wallace "peace" campaign of 1948, Alger Hiss, the censure of McCarthy...
...Ostensibly writing about liberalism and "civilization," Burnham was actually thinking about imperialism and power...
...My only hope is in revolution—in wholesale assassination of all statesmen, capitalists, war-mongers, jingoists, inventors, scientists...
...Even Burnham, the exponent of Realpolitik, has recently protested the Nixon administration's indifference to civil liberties in the Soviet Union when Kissinger was negotiating the detente...
...At one time or another Buckley's stable of editors and contributors included former members of the Communist party (Frank Meyer and William Schlamm), crypto-Communists and notorious socialists (Whittaker Chambers and J. B. Matthews), banished Lovestoneites and half-way Shachtmanites (Will Herberg and James Burnham), early supporters of the Soviet Union (William H. Chamberlin and Eugene Lyons), radical novelists and Marxist literary theoreticians (John Dos Passos and Eliseo Vivas), fellow-travelers and Greenwich Village Leninists (Freda Utley and Max Eastman), Trotsky sympathizers (Suzanne LaFollette and Morrie Ryskind), little-known radical partisans (Frank Chodorov and Ralph de Toledano), and well-known radical critics of native American progressivism (John Chamberlain and Henry L. Hazlitt...
...Published in 1964, the year Goldwater captured the Republican party, the book became a gospel of prophecy for the Right in America...
...I was for six years alone in America in supporting the Left Opposition...
...Here all sense of historical understanding breaks down under the weight of causal explanation...
...Forty years ago it was the Stalinists who extolled the virtues of "discipline" in Russia while Eastman was renouncing the Soviet Union because of its betrayal of those social reforms and cultural freedoms that had inspired the Greenwich Village Left: education, prison reform, public health, women's freedom, sex and family relations, birth control, prostitution, yellow journalism, drug addiction, alcohol, rights of national minorities, elimination of anti-Semitism, mental hygiene, administration of justice, peace, war and patriotism...
...250-66...
...No one was more puzzled by Dos Passos's conservative positions than the great literary critic Edmund Wilson, who tried to sum up the meaning of his friend's career in a simple couplet: On account of Soviet knavery He favors restoring slavery...
...The tragic fate of Jan Masaryk foreshadowed the equally tragic fate of Salvatore Allende...
...Burnham developed the theory of managerial domination long before Milovan Djilas discovered the "new class" and C. Wright Mills the "power elite...
...Yet two decades later the man who had once claimed to be the "Left Opposition" was the very person William F. Buckley turned to for advice in starting a national magazine to champion the conservative cause...
...Or was he another Alexander I with a Slavophilic resistance to Western liberalism...
...Dell himself would never "repent" the sentiments that earlier brought him into the revolutionary movement...
...in social life, the disease of bureaucracy (Dos Passos...
...It was one thing to claim that Soviet diplomatic victories were caused by the illusions of fellow travelers, in which case he could indict a specific liberal mentality...
...If communism "as it developed" turned out to be a "worse danger" than fascism, would not the opposite have been true had the Soviet Union been defeated in the war...
...I can understand the reluctance of Hook and some of the other founding members to allow this to happen, but I think it would be really an excellent thing...
...As his critics noted, one of the major premises of the book was the questionable equation of civilization with military and political boundaries...
...I want to assassinate...
...Buckley claimed that McCarthy's enemies were "soft" on communism, but it was McCarthy's friends who would fear the Red presumably under the bed more than the Red who was actually in it...
...Liberalism is infected with communism in the quite precise sense that communism and liberalism share most of their basic axioms and principles, and many of their values and sentiments...
...The "message" of Marx still lies in ruins behind the Iron Curtain...
...But, Max, there were those who got out of the fold earlier than you did and who had found in the Soviet regime under Lenin and Trotsky all the hideously objectionable things that you found existent under Stalin...
...In "Intellectuals in Retreat," an essay in a 1939 issue of the New International, Burnham and Max Shachtman scrupulously analyzed the presuppositions of every important American writer who had turned away from revolutionary Marxism...
...Burnham acknowledged that Schlesinger's book was thick with references to Kierkegaard, Dostoevski, Nietzsche, Proust, and other contemporary anti-Enlightenment voices...
...9 Cold War conservatism, on the 9 For the conservative "humanist" position, see Peter Berger's "Two Paradoxes," National Review, XXIV (May 12, 1972), pp...
...they then maintained that the collapse of the junta proves that the Right is responsive to popular pressures and therefore preferable to the Left, even though the collapse then risks what the Right set out to prevent—a Communist seizure of power...
...Thirty years after Dos Passos uttered these thoughts he was given a "Freedom Award" along with Senator Strom Thurmond, economist Ludwig Von Mises, actor John Wayne, and other messiahs of the new American Right...
...The latter theme—best expressed in the "New Humanism" of the 1920s—is more a sensibility than a political ideology, concerned primarily with the virtues of the good, the true, and the beautiful, with the prudence born of metaphysical skepticism, and with what Peter Berger calls the "humanism of compassion...
...Similar questions can be asked of Dos Passos, the angry young novelist who once, as a gentle, shy undergraduate, advocated blowing up the Widener Library and the Harvard Business School...
...In domestic matters modern liberalism was also seen as a curse that has crept over the nation and produced the welfare state, the eclipse of moral authority, the decline of educational standards, and the corruption of the young...
...Here we have, then, four gifted but diverse men who made the peculiar migration from the revolutionary Left to the militant Right, without so much as pausing at the "Vital Center...
...3 "Nor was there anything disgraceful in your becoming a too devoted partisan defender of Trotsky...
...The National Review thus must look to a radical Left to prove by the strength of its insurrectionary actions why a conservative Right cannot become a permanent dictatorship...
...Czechoslovak democracy was "subverted," Chilean democracy "destabilized...
...One image engenders faith in the dream of moral community, the other engenders fear of the reality of "permanent revolution" (Trotsky's dream became Burnham's nightmare...
...Both the militant radical and conservative must recognize that liberalism has not only been the dominant American ideology, it has also nurtured deeply conservative instincts based on property and individual natural rights...
...Buckley's comrades have also come a long way...
...The inspiring symbol of the philosophical conservative might be John Adams's Republic of Virtue or Henry Adams's Cathedral of Chartres...
...This is sheer "fantasy," for McCarthy would probably reduce you to helplessness as he had other witnesses...
...You mention Bertrand Russell, and you give him as little credit as you can for changing his mind so quickly...
...When the man on the Left turns his face bravely toward the future, he assumes that the heritage of liberalism will be transcended as a necessary stage in historical development...
...T III his issue of McCarthyism leads us to a deeper issue that divided the intellectuals of the New Right from the veteran intellectuals of the Old Left...
...to change later was obsequious servility...
...All these tensions culminate in what might be called, to use the quaint language of the Old Left, the "final contradiction," which is the National Review itself...
...When he now spoke as a conservative, God came alive in almost every utterance...
...One finds, first of all, the vulgar equation of liberalism and perfectionism in order to identify both with communism...
...Deutscher's categories play havoc with the historical imagination...
...We provided "defenses of Stalinism in advance...
...But as the Cold War spread to the Third World, conservative anticommunism became an end in itself, to be realized by any means possible, even by the despots and juntas of the "free world" whom Dos Passos defended just before he died in 1970...
...History never caught up with him the way it did with the Old Left, and as a result the psychological terror of McCarthyism never touched him...
...He also became one of Nixon's staunchest supporters during the Vietnam War, informing his daughter that the President "deserves acclaim" for "having the courage" to order the invasion of Cambodia...
...At the time of the Korean War, his writings had considerable influence in the State Department, the Pentagon, and the Central Intelligence Agency, especially among those officials who sought to oppose the policy of containment with a new strategy of "liberation-rollback...
...507-11...
...This was the same James Burnham whom Lionel Abel, Dwight Macdonald, and George Orwell had described in the '40s as "Stalin's advocate...
...and in the Mos'John Chamberlain, "What's Wrong With Nixon...
...However much we may cavil at the Communists," he wrote in 1932, "they mean it when they say they are fighting for socialism, i.e., the cooperative commonwealth...
...Dell believed that Eastman's anticommunism, while intellectually prescient, had rendered him morally insensitive and politically arrogant...
...They could have called you, and perhaps they did, a lackey, a high priest, etc...
...Dos Passos wrote the masterpiece USA, hailed by Sartre as the first modern literary effort to anatomize the totality of industrial society and to capture, through the "indeterminancy of detail," the disassociation of experience...
...All this suggests that Marxists and conservatives share a peculiar understanding of liberalism, as do political "realists" and neoorthodox theologians...
...293-94...
...He also discerned an even greater truth—that one generation cannot rebuke the next for repeating its own mistakes...
...the confidence in the possibility of molding human beings...
...No doubt you would, Dell chided Eastman, proudly tell the Committee about all the anti-Communist books you have written...
...Buckley's National Review supported Nixon as Eisenhower's choice to stay on as vice-president in the election of 1956, and that support was based on the single-minded conviction that Nixon was an authentic anti-Communist and nothing else really matters...
...Is Eastman's career a case of La trahison des clercs, or can a man who moved from Left to Right still be fighting the same fight...
...You $This letter, and Dell's 19-page critique of Eastman's manuscript, Reflections on the Failure of Socialism, are in the Newberry Library...
...he next sets out to prove that democracy and freedom are "myths" (The Machiavellians, 1943...
...Intellectual history was at the mercy of politics...
...Thus liberalism has preempted the historical role of conservatism by bearing the values of the past, and it has thwarted the historical "mission" of radicalism by mocking all classless visions of the future...
...At one time antiliberal radicals, the four writers became antiliberal conservatives, equally frustrated by the liberal consensus of American life...
...More than anything else it was the McCarthy controversy that split the ranks of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, dividing the militant anti-Communist from the liberal intelligentsia...
...T II he New Left was inclined to look upon the Old Left as shallow "Marxists-of-the-heart" whose reluctance to go to the root of things represented a generational failure of nerve.' The charge that the American Left is politically feeble because it is intellectually sterile cannot serve as an explanation for either the failure of the Left or its deradicalization...
...But whether weak or strong, liberalism was still held responsible for all that had gone wrong in the modern world...
...Once they had accused liberals of being intolerant of communism, now they attacked them for being too tolerant...
...Conservatives put liberalism on trial, but could they themselves repudiate liberalism and at the same time oppose totalitarianism...
...For the goal of cultural freedom or even political freedom had nothing to do with the issue of McCarthyism, which was not about freedom but "conformity...
...Yet his position was as vulnerable as that of the liberals...
...And President nonelect Gerald Ford can tell students at Ohio State University what no liberal president would think of mentioning: that Red China deserves America's respect because of the regime's "discipline...
...Bertrand Russell and Eastman, for example, both repudiated Soviet communism for its philosophical dogmatism and political despotism and in turn supported their own democratic governments...
...And if we die...
...Eastman, when you wrote those books, were you under instructions from the Communist party to write them as a coverup for subversive activities...
...For the same country that failed to produce a revolutionary proletariat failed to produce a conservative intellectual aristocracy...
...Such a reading of history might serve to expunge Marxism from Western culture and explain the Soviet state as an outgrowth of Slavic institutions and character...
...As an ambulance driver on the Italian front, Dos Passos saw the war as a "ridiculous farce" that only the "progressives" took seriously as a noble cause...
...Burnham could argue that Western dominion had been cut to half of what it was in 1914 by tracing the recession of the lines of political sovereignty and physical force on his atlas...
...There are no common character traits among them: Dos Passos feared power, Burn' Cristiano Camporesi, Ii marxismo teorico negli USA, 1900-1945 (Milan, 1973...
...At the beginning of the Cold War the distinction had some plausibility...
...Philosophical conservatism suggests the American mind, antiCommunist conservatism the American will...
...My only refuge from the deepest depression is in dreams of vengeful guillotines...
...Eastman became a Cold War militant...
...Eastman, Dos Passos, Herberg, and Burnham may have been uncomfortable with McCarthy's "methods," but they felt strongly that the Senator saw communism in its proper perspective— not as a response to economic backwardness but as an internal conspiracy of assassins...
...If quality of mind, psychological temperament, and historical experience do not serve as explanations, what then separated the ex-Communist who would become a conservative from those who would become or remain antiStalinist liberals and social democrats...
...in 1952], but I also know that taking the position would result in a split of some sort...
...The Bolsheviks "broke totally away" from the West and the new Russian empire "became not merely altogether separate from Western civilization but directly hostile to it in all these senses, in the moral, philosophical and religious as well as the material, political and social dimensions...
...The upshot of it," he told Edmund Wilson the following year, "is that you and I and the Forgotten Man are going to get fucked plenty...
...THE SECOND ISSUE which separated the antiCommunist conservative from the anti-Stalinist liberal or socialist was McCarthyism...
...But he dismissed Schlesinger's existential liberalism as "intellectually stylish," and as for Schlesinger's Niebuhrian denials of the liberating power of knowledge and morality, Burnham exclaimed: "But the denials are like Peter's...
...When Buckley published his manifesto in 1959, he wrought better than he knew in choosing the title Up From Liberalism...
...and genuine philosophical conservatism, which is too contemplative and intellectually demanding for Buckley's public and too academic for Burnham's diplomatic causes...
...If American Communist sympathizers were "implicated in selling out" Eastern Europe to Stalinist totalitarianism after World War II, did not Eastman do much the same after World War I when he hailed the triumph of Lenin in speech and in verse...
...Although Dos Passos never joined the Communist party, he lent his name to its causes and participated in Communist-led strikes...
...BUCKLEY'S COMRADES 379 man attacked Soviet Russia in Harper's in 1937, he made a plea for freedom based essentially on the liberal ideals of equality and justice, and he applauded John Dewey when the American liberal philosopher criticized Trotsky's Hegelian justification of proletarian dictatorship as the means of freedom...
...if pessimistic, insincere...
...Buckley's journal represents an attempt to integrate two incompatible themes in modern American intellectual history: anti-Communist conservatism, which turns out to be more Lockean than Burkean...
...Was Stalin a modem Napoleon trying to bring the Russian "Enlightenment" into Czechoslovakia...
...I supported every step [he boasted to Trotsky in 1933] taken by the Bolshevik party and by you and Lenin from the seizure of power and the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly (horrible to all other American editors) to the condemnation of the Social Revolutionaries...
...The Cold War is the great moral drama of our time, and the choice of allies the test of integrity...
...Although diverse minds and personalities, Eastman, Dos Passos, Herberg, and Burnham had one thing in common—contempt for liberalism...
...Less than a decade later this same writer would be explicating fervently the meaning of sin, despair, Angst, and dread, the existential anxiety of "finitude" and the tragedy of the "human condition...
...Recent events in Portugal and Greece, when compared to the total political and cultural suppression of Eastern Europe and China, suggest that the conservative argument has some historical validity...
...Buckley is quite prepared, if we can believe what he has written in The Jeweler's Eye, to risk destruction of the Cathedral to bring down the Wall by a sheer act of will power...
...On what grounds, then, can the conservative defend an undemocratic regime that violates the principles of free government...
...I was the Left Opposition...
...Among the writers who made the journey from one end of the political spectrum to the other, four in particular stand out as ideological curiosities: Max Eastman, the poet-philosopher of lyrical rebellion and scientific experiment...
...Here the same problem of American "exceptionalism" that confronted the Old Left in the 1930s confronted the New Right in the 'SOs...
...On the Left, Eastman criticized the polite liberal reformer who could not see the "beauty" of the revolutionary deed...
...The rate at which you changed your mind was the right rate...
...The writers who found their way to Buckley's National Review all supported McCarthy's inquisition and the efforts of congressional committees to purge former Russian sympathizers and Fifth Amendment witnesses...
...boast, Dell wrote Eastman, that if called before the McCarthy Committee you would "bust the senator in the nose" as you wanted General Zwicker to do...
...and Burnham saw liberalism as a philosophy of hope without a philosophy of power...
...I am fairly well convinced that most of the committee members are willing to take a firm position on McCarthyism [wrote Richard Rovere to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...
...Ironically, both the radical and the conservative suffer from the same frustrations of liberal society: one cannot make a revolution and the other cannot create a tradition...
...He was the "fair-haired apostle" of the Greenwich Village Left, the cultural rebellion that invoked the Dionysian spirit of youth, love, poetry, and heroism...
...The latter heritage was "a philosophy of sobriety, born in fear, nourished in disenchantment, and prone to believe that the human condition was and was likely to remain one of pain and anxiety.' s In the '30s, it is true, many American Soviet sympathizers were seized by a fit of absentmindedness as they wrote what David Caute has called a "postscript to the Enlightenment," abandoning Anglo-American skepticism and affirming the classical French utopian worship of reason, science, and progress.' But fellow-traveling liberalism represented a brief, wayward episode in modern progressivism that Schlesinger himself repudiated in The Vital Center...
...I think," Eastman wrote to Floyd Dell, "that Communism as it developed is both worse at home and more dangerous abroad than Hitlerism was...
...Herberg dismissed liberal pragmatism as the ideology of the bourgeoisie...
...What common impulses or reactions underlie their flight from one extreme to the other...
...It is remarkable how many of the National Review writers are "twice-born" ideologues, conservative minds haunted by radical memories...
...An intense, learned young philosophy student, Herberg devoted his entire being to the world of ideas, rising to every intellectual challenge at a time when theoretical matters were usually settled by a cablegram from Moscow...
...However Eastman might have responded to Rovere's private letter, the young Buckley would have agreed...
...2 All this might suggest that conservatives need to choose their comrades a little more carefully...
...Dos Passos's rebellious fury reemerged again in 1927, when the Sacco-Vanzetti execution left him reeling with horror and indignation...
...Abandoning revolution for revelation, Herberg found his way to the National Review by way of Buber and Niebuhr...
...Toward the end of the decade, when many radical intellectuals began to sense a "crisis in Marxism," Burnham admonished them for faltering in their belief...
...His intellectual home is the Freeman...
...The real difference between us and you, in my opinion, is this," he stated in a debate with James T. Farrell in Partisan Review: "In a period when certain means we had all agreed upon for emancipating the working class, and therewith all society, have proved to lead in the opposite direction, we have remained loyal to the aim, you to the means...
...Eastman claimed that "lust is sacred" and scorned all religions (including Buckley's Catholicism), while Herberg wanted most to be delivered from sin...
...Although Dell could not answer this question, he was aware that the exradical must not mistake his change of mind for the unique moment of truth...
...But his effort is no more convincing than Staughton Lynd's, who asks readers of the Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism to import Marx by way of Thoreau...
...Reminding the exradicals of the dilemmas of their intellectual predecessors, he then maintained that Jefferson, Goethe, and Shelley saw that the "message" of the French Revolution lived on to echo powerfully throughout the 19th century, and hence they looked upon the Holy Alliance and the anti-Jacobin cause as "vicious, ridiculous anachronisms...
...In the '30s he became one of the leading intellectual exponents of Leon Trotsky, absorbing the doctrine of permanent revolution, reformism as "petty-bourgeois impotence," and the Fourth International as the true embodiment of the October Revolution...
Vol. 22 • September 1975 • No. 4
