REVIEWS
Corradi, Juan E. & Cohen, Mitchell & Eckstein, George & Fleisher, Henry C.
SALVADOR, by Joan Didion. New York: Simon & Schuster. 198 pp. $12.95. n places where life is reasonably ordered, the violence that rages in the Third World is masked by a propensity to integrate...
...But he was impressive...
...In this view, the Nazi movement was funded and directed by Big Capital...
...Two parts of Bavaria illustrate the point: Catholic Lower Bavaria showed a Nazi vote of 20 percent against 40 percent in heavily Protestant Franconia, where in some smaller towns it went as high as 83 percent...
...HOWEVER ONE MAY DIFFER with his interpretation, Hamilton's systematic analysis of big-city voting statistics sheds some light on an admittedly difficult area...
...It engulfs the whole of life: "terror is the given of the place...
...But in the years between the currency stabilization of November 1923 and the Reichstag election of 1928, Hitler's party (the NSDAP—National Socialist German Workers' Party) had dwindled to an insignificant splinter group polling 2.6 percent of the total vote...
...664 pp...
...Joan Didion depicts the foreign media in El Salvador as prone not to notice that their scoops of reality are actually artifacts already staged for an audience...
...Even the most lucid political commentary belongs only to the moment...
...The politician's speech, the journalist's story, the social scientist's account do not reach the "heart of darkness...
...things and situations are named and renamed a thousand times...
...Cadavers (from cadere, to fall) are to be found anywhere, at any time, in El Salvador—a standard feature in the landscape of fear, to remind the provisionally living that they too might fall at any moment...
...it molds attitudes to obtain servitude...
...There was much about Lyndon that wasn't pretty...
...Salvador has the unmistakable aura of true literature in its prosody, in its imagery, its testimony...
...Although these two forces were frequently allied before 1848, the revolutions of that year brought out the fundamental tension between them...
...The Path to Power, this first volume, moves from birth through LBJ's early years to the defeat in his first campaign to enter the U.S...
...To follow Bernstein's prescriptions and analyses meant accepting the "concrete data" of the national community as the arena of political activity...
...It is rarely, if ever, depicted as a terrifying impasse, as horror, a catastrophe of meaning...
...Presumably it had been "undeclared" until then...
...In the big cities, all three kinds of voting districts—upper-middle-class, mixed, and working-class—show by and large an even advance of 80-100 percent...
...Two years later, that figure jumped to an unexpected 18 percent, with the Nazis taking second place, behind the Social Democrats who had polled 24 percent...
...That is an art that has been lost since his passing, and we are suffering heavily as a result...
...numbers are used to express the ineffable...
...But, she added, "no one ever knew exactly where he stood...
...The parallel between 1937-38 and Year II (1793) of the French Revolution suggested to him "some unfathomable and inescapable law which causes revolutionary salvationist schemes to evolve into regimes of terror, and the promise of a perfect direct democracy to assume in practice the form of totalitarian dictatorship...
...Thus it became repressive when confronted by "the leveling aspirations of Messianic democracy...
...IF THIS SHORT BOOK seems bottomless, it is because Joan Didion's phrases bring forth the peculiar state of hypnotic abeyance that is the essence of terror...
...Reedy (in his student years a president of the University of Chicago Socialist Club) left a reporter's job at United Press in Washington in 1951 to join Senator Johnson's staff...
...This year, in November, it will be 20 years since the assassination of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson's ascension to the presidency, and January 22 marked the tenth anniversary of his death, at the age of 64—a frustrated and bitter political has-been living in self-imposed exile from the political scene...
...Joe McCarthy did not realize it, but his most effective shield—the argument that only "left wingers" opposed him—was removed, while he was totally oblivious to what was happening...
...There has been a tendency among many writers and political observers to minimize the importance of Johnson's career, perhaps because of its sad, downhill ending, perhaps because so many of his personal characteristics were repellent...
...Second, Hamilton speaks of the Marxist theory...
...His record is heavy with instances of toadying to superiors or those he thought could help him...
...From the immense distance of definitions, terror appears as the arbitrary use, by organs of political authority, of severe coercion against individuals or groups, the credible threat of such use, or the arbitrary liquidation of such individuals and groups...
...The only logic is that of acquiescence," she reports...
...Talmon forces history into his own inflexible universalizing scheme—exactly the problem he saw in "totalitarian democrats...
...The man who had sought, and nearly achieved, a national consensus behind his election campaign in 1964 was all too soon to see a people divided and angry...
...Talmon sees "totalitarian Messianic democracy" in competition both with "empirical liberal democracy" and "the authoritarian systems of the Right...
...It will simply have lost the opportunity to have influenced this evolution by more mature behavior befitting a great power...
...Writing at a particularly chilly moment in the cold war (1952), Talmon saw much of modern history as "a systematic preparation for the headlong collision between empirical and liberal democracy on the one hand, and totalitarian Messianic democracy on the other, in which the world crisis of today consists...
...514 pp...
...During those same four years, the share of the two conservative bourgeois parties had shrunk from 23 percent to 7 percent...
...Plainly, this runs counter to state centralism, at least in one domain of life...
...I've just met the most remarkable young man," Roosevelt said—as Caro tells us—after a day of conversation in 1937 with the new young Texas congressman while their train puffed north from Galveston to Dallas...
...Their leaders made the usual speeches of undying opposition, but there was no support for a filibuster against the bill...
...On both occasions, our society needed him desperately, and on both occasions he came through...
...Indeed, Talmon's history seems to flow from his Idea, which, like Hegel's, works itself out and is finally grasped by him as scholar, looking back...
...Legislative victory for civil rights was possible only if they were persuaded that the cost of successful obstruction would be too high...
...18.95...
...One is his definition and brief critique of the three major theories put forward by social scientists to explain the Nazi phenomenon...
...of his preoccupation with personal wealth...
...there still was the cult of "the State" as an anointed entity high above "mere" society, a cult that elevated the lowliest bureaucratic civil servant above the common citizen...
...882 pp...
...In Johnson's "own" term, however—with which none of these books is concerned—his escalation of the Vietnam War gradually destroyed the effectiveness of the presidency...
...For everyone in El Salvador is, ineluctably, a hostage...
...It still remains to be seen how disastrous the failure will become and when, if ever, the difficult, long, modest, unglamorous task of founding a history proper to the resources and idiosyncrasies of El Salvador will begin...
...Hitler, in turn, within months after coming to power in January 1933, dissolved their parties, controlled their economic organiza397 tions, and forced them to accept severe limitations on dividends and a doubling of corporate income taxes...
...She recalls an evening when she and her husband were sitting on a porch by candlelight, against a backdrop of shadowy night raiders...
...His book, he points out, is neither history nor biography but rather "an exercise in exorcism"—an effort to "get some things off my chest...
...But from the writer's notes something more ominous makes itself felt that defies all definitions: a process of corrosion that eats the soul as relentlessly as it consumes bodies...
...Talmon wants to reduce a class analysis to messianism, a "state of mind...
...From where did this tremendous increase in the Nazi vote come...
...She refuses both analysis and synthesis, she rejects abstractions and eschews conclusions...
...Her antinationalism is a logical and coherent consequence of an approach to history and society that insists on class as its sole, ultimate reference point...
...Early in the Eisenhower years, sensing that the Senate's Southern Democrats were becoming "disenchanted" with their long-time coalition with the Senate's Northern Republicans, Johnson came to believe that the Southerners would accept a reasonable legislative proposal in the area of civil rights— providing they could "decide they had been treated in good faith and would therefore go down fighting against overwhelming odds...
...She does not say it, but her book strongly implies that the American project is inevitably a failure...
...Mitchell Cohen Salvationist Hope, Terrorist Dictatorship The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of Revolution, by J. L. Talmon...
...it paralyzes the will...
...In El Salvador this process is not confined to particular kinds of behavior...
...Talmon's sympathies are evident, and in Political Messianism (1960) he insisted that "the love of freedom and the yearning for salvation" are irreconcilable...
...Consequently, its supporters recognize that politics does not consume all spheres of life...
...Because the book concentrates so heavily on detail, a casual reader may get the impression that it centers only on Johnson's ego, his crassness, his relentless ambition for popularity, wealth, and power...
...Martin Luther King, Jr., a warm supporter of LBJ when he pressed to enlarge the area of civil rights legislation, was now a sharp critic of President Johnson's military program in Vietnam...
...WHEN LYNDON JOHNSON BECAME PRESIDENT, in November 1963, succeeding John E Kennedy, "he came through" once again with an energetic campaign to persuade Congress to pass the Kennedy program, for which Kennedy himself had not been notably successful in getting approval...
...Having developed from the same abstract concepts of human rights and man as did political messianism, liberal390 ism "soon discovered the contradiction between the essentially egalitarian idea of the rights of man and the claims of concrete individuality to preserve and assert its particularity...
...Finally, liberal nationalists recoiled from their former universalist allies in the messianic left and joined the conservatives in suppressing them...
...Was he truly a liberal or rather a moneygrubbing conservative...
...It is total...
...The messianic Bolshevik defeatists were victorious because they appeared as the potential purifiers of the corrupted "authentic core," in an apparent ruse of Russian Reason: "The age-old concept of a restoration of pristine purity was replaced in the age of secularism by the image of some preordained future...
...Nowhere are these skills better seen than in Johnson's maneuvers, after a period of watchful waiting, to cut Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin down to size...
...This is followed by five and a half sketchy pages on what the party's leading theoreticians of the problem had to say about it...
...Instead, she reports on these as discursive operations performed by near and distant actors while they seek to mask, or neutralize, or routinize a truth that is everywhere in evidence but impossible to face: objective and abject, like a corpse...
...Talmon's exploration of this question first took concrete shape as he wrote The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (1952...
...It began, he tells us, in the late 1930s when, as an undergraduate, he pondered the Moscow Trials while studying the Jacobins...
...True, revolutions are not sparked by mass discussion of the theory of combined and uneven development...
...He left that post in 1965, and returned as a consultant to LBJ in the last year of his presidency...
...This certainly must rank high on any list of unprovable theorems...
...New York: Alfred A. Knopf...
...Reedy, citing Johnson's handling of this issue, points out that in his greatest moments of selfdoubt about having worked for a man as difficult and personally distasteful as LBJ, "I can always go back to the era of McCarthy and the 1957 civil rights debate, and decide that working for him was worthwhile...
...A purified and reformed Russia was called upon to fulfill the role of Messiah...
...The U.S...
...Bauer (and the short-lived Second-and-a-half International) provides an outstanding counterexample to Talmon's scheme...
...New York: W. W. Norton...
...In the final chapters, Dugger's consuming antagonism seems to extend far beyond mere political opposition...
...For Hitler, in particular, the aim of an election was not to enter into a parliamentary coalition, but rather to gain sufficient votes in order to force old President Hindenburg to name him chancellor and put him into power...
...Richard Hamilton, professor of sociology at McGill University, is attempting to do just that in raising the question, "Who voted for Hitler...
...Auerbach emphasized the difference between, in Reedy's words, "contempt proceedings as punishment, and contempt proceedings to enforce court orders...
...And Lenin was this Messiah's prophet, although his revolution produced, in the end, a "bastard synthesis" of messianic Russian nationalism and messianic socialist internationalism...
...Luxemburg was a political messianist, "hypnotized by the Endziel" (final goal), while for Bernstein the movement, not the final goal, was all...
...For America is not only trying to defend actions most unsavory, but worse: it is trying to protect political realities that do not exist...
...Reedy reports: Johnson began a series of huddles with the conservatives, pleading with them to drop their traditional reluctance to censure a senator for nonlegislative conduct...
...American officials try to blame a legacy of terror on Soviet arms, talk of dominoes, and grossly overstate the American stakes in the civil war...
...To those who honor revolution, it is a phase of dialectics—the birth pang of the new...
...There is a sense in which the place remains marked by the meanness and discontinuity of all frontier history, by a certain frontier proximity to the cultural zero...
...of his personal gaucheries and often foul tongue...
...We might best characterize him as a Burkean liberal, although his antimessianism contains, paradoxically, a strong messianic current—a vision of history as a conflict between the Forces of Light and the Forces of Darkness...
...n places where life is reasonably ordered, the violence that rages in the Third World is masked by a propensity to integrate it in some favorite sequence of meaning...
...In his critique of these theories, Hamilton makes several valid points...
...to all the faithful of the religion of revolution and above all to its practitioners outside Europe...
...To Didion the affliction is deep-seated, bipartisan, all-American...
...He basically agreed with the liberals," Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas said of LBJ...
...The multinational character of the Austro-Hungarian empire, in Talmon's account, was a test case for international socialism 391 that was failed by the Austrian party (which, by the turn of the century, was structured as a federation of national parties rather than a centralized organization...
...He accepts Nixon's thesis that "World War III began before World War II ended"—and he blames Johnson together with Nixon for "declaring" 393 World War III, formally and rhetorically, in the early 1950s...
...Perhaps this is so because it is closely tied to the specific historic baggage carried by the German society and the crosscurrents of post-World War I events, of which he shows an intimate knowledge: the complex struggle that led the Reich from the never acknowledged defeat in World War I and a half-hearted revolution, through the collapse of the currency and a brief spectacular recovery, to a worldwide economic crisis that was to prove fatal to an all too weakly rooted democratic republic...
...Talmon devotes some 25 dense, and valuable, pages to the nationalities problem in Austria in general and the Social Democratic party in particular...
...When Joan Didion paints the paraphernalia of terror the vehicles, uniforms, weapons, the methods of extrajudicial execution, the dumping sites, the local words that are as twisted as the bodies ("detention" for kidnapping, "incident" for massacre, "high-strung" and "youthful" for murderous, and the verb "to disappear" which, as she notes, has become transitive)—the effect is not mysterious, as in a chiaroscuro, but hyperreal...
...Throughout the last years of the Weimar Republic they believed they could tame the Nazis by setting them up in a coalition government, not realizing that Hitler— anxious by 1932 to come to power "legally"—was not willing to continue sharing it with anyone else, and that they would have to accept a severely constricted role in the totalitarian state...
...The longer view may prevail over short-term crises among local leaderships and peoples, and the United States will not be threatened in its security...
...This leaves the social origin of 15 percent-5.5 million voters—to be accounted for...
...There still were the large landowners east of the Elbe River...
...so were many of his other former adherents...
...He establishes, using available research data, that "the vote for the National Socialists [Nazis] varied inversely with the size of the communities...
...Henry C. Fleisher The Two Sides of Lyndon Johnson THE YEARS OF LYNDON JOHNSON: THE PATH TO POWER, by Robert Caro...
...Now, ten years after his death, three good books prove that LBJ still resists being easily categorized...
...Because it is written at a slight angle from more conventional discourses, because it flies too slowly, sometimes too high, some other times too low over that little nation that is smaller than San Diego county but nonetheless commands the attention of the world, this book is strangely remote from the bustle of the moment...
...395 George Eckstein Hitler's Road to Power WHO VOTED FOR HITLER...
...The consistency of Bauer's approach to socialism in general and the nationalities question in particular is evident...
...His socialism aimed to surmount reform capitalism by seeking a third path between reform and revolution—but not through messianic apocalypse or a totalitarian state...
...Of the 19 percent gain in the Nazi share of the vote not more than 4 percent can be charged to a further drop in the total conservative vote...
...There was, for instance, his successful effort to establish the Pedernales Electric Cooperative—his nursing its application for a federal Rural Electrical Administration loan, and then persuading Roosevelt to waive REA regulations that stood in its way...
...Vietnam wrecked Johnson and the Johnson administration...
...And to construe the fall of this house of cards as anything but the predictable result of a social earthquake would be an impudent form of ethnocentrism...
...the SPD would be just what its name says —the Social Democratic party of Germany, not the German section of international socialism...
...Totalitarian Messianic democrats," on the other hand, identify liberty with collective purpose, making politics the all-encompassing dimension of existence, yielding "dictatorship resting on popular enthusiasm...
...and the trade union leadership, after Hitler's takeover, offering their cooperation to the Arbeitsfront, the Nazi labor organization—an offer rudely answered by the unions' dissolution in May 1933...
...It is not, of course, quite that simple...
...Furthermore, Rousseau, whose concept of the general will embodies the "totalitarian democratic" spirit for Talmon, was at least engaged in a quest (successful or not) for a balance between individual and community, and in fact favored not a "dictatorship resting on popular enthusiasm" but an "elective" aristocracy in The Social Contract...
...The bodies are broken, disfigured, trussed and stuffed with their own organs, rearranged as if designed to carry a message...
...Within two years, in the July 1932 election, the Nazi party's share of the vote reached its zenith, with over 37 percent, surpassing the combined vote of the Social Democratic and Communist left (36 percent...
...The passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1957 was, in Reedy's view, another peak period in the chart of Johnson's political effectiveness...
...it even freezes time...
...great ironic law" 392 by which salvationist hope becomes terrorist dictatorship...
...But the message is undecipherable, beyond anything that even Kafka's Harrow could inscribe in the flesh of the inmates of the Penal Colony...
...The answers one gleans from these books are, simply, that he was all of these things, but not necessarily at the same time...
...by Richard E Hamilton...
...LYNDON B. JOHNSON: A MEMOIR, by George Reedy...
...Did he really believe in the principles of the New Deal, or was his support for FDR merely practical politics...
...Certainly not...
...Pros and cons seemed equally off the point...
...In the first place, she focuses not only on the Endziel but insists on a dialectic between means and ends: "Can we counterpose the social revolution, the transformation of the existing order, our final goal, to social reforms...
...Whatever the impact of economic and other factors, these "all-embracing attitudes" compose "the real substance of history...
...All three contribute to our understanding, though by no means do they answer all pertinent questions about Johnson...
...McCarthy demonstrated the validity of LBJ's assessment a few months later, when he attacked the venerable Senator Carl Hayden of Arizona, the "quintessential establishment Senator...
...These are the details—the models and colors of armored vehicles, the makes and calibers of weapons, the particular methods of dismemberment and decapitation used in particular instances—on which the visitor to Salvador learns immediately to concentrate, to the exclusion of past or future concerns, as in a prolonged amnesiac fugue...
...Upon landing at an airport designed to service hotels that were abandoned and tourists who would not come, Joan Didion was immediately confronted with the machinery of terror and enveloped by the atmosphere of anxiety in which it basks...
...Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press...
...Ronnie Dugger, an early member of the liberal bloc of Texas Democrats, has been since 1954 the editor and publisher of the Texas Observer—the only Texas paper that refused to support Johnson's bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960...
...Joan Didion tells us something about terror that escapes other accounts and most analyses, namely, that it is obscene, for obscene is anybody and anything that has lost distance, perspective, a sense of its own limits, something exiled from its natural conditions of meaning, radically out of context...
...She achieves this effect through the careful notation of detail and the unabated watchfulness over language...
...The author stresses the nefarious role of the officers' corps that was still largely recruited from the aristocracy...
...IN HIS BOOK The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of Revolution, Talmon carries his argument to its conclusion through an examination of the relation between nationalism and socialism from Marx's time through the rise of fascism...
...Since in Germany adherence to both Catholicism and Protestantism is spread across all social classes, this proves that class alone was not the decisive factor, and that religion, or rather the Catholic religion, seems to have provided an effective antidote to nazism in many places...
...Kant's imperative is hardly a pragmatic, and certainly not an empirical principle...
...Talmon's failure to discuss the relation between Leninism and Stalinism here is glaring...
...Johnson's most important quality, Reedy avers, . . . was that he knew how to make our form of government work...
...Among our presidents, he should be rated as the master tactician of all times...
...Had he more fully analyzed the writings of Bauer, for example, and integrated them into his analysis of Bauer's politics as a whole, Talmon would have found his own theoretical scaffolding threatened...
...the social revolution its aim...
...The Nazi movement initially had peaked in 1923, the chaotic year of astronomic inflation, with the failed Bierkeller putsch in Munich...
...Third, Hamilton outlines the "Mass Society" theory, characterized by "phrases [such as] uprooted population, atomization of society...
...But is he right, and to what extent...
...This presupposes a market socialism rather than a centralized economy with an all-powerful state...
...hence his use of the term "totalitarian democracy...
...But he also sheds light on the way Johnson functioned in the public interest...
...Talmon's conclusions indeed speak of an "unfathomable and inescapable...
...In The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy he wrote that his concern was with "a pattern of mental, emotional, and behavioristic elements best compared to the set of attitudes engendered by a religion...
...To call this accretion of time "history" would be to grace it with a unifying meaning that it lacks...
...These other truths are most unpleasant to contemplate, but there are glimpses of them throughout...
...In this light all arguments tended to trail off...
...In his hands, they would be shaped into programs of action...
...Rather, the critical factor was "a special frame of mind" rooted in the vision of Holy Russia—a Holy Russia profaned by the Czar himself by this time...
...She keeps the narrative on a plane where incidents and objects multiply and cram the space...
...Their relationship to the Nazis, as Hamilton makes clear, was far from the Marxists' master/servant image...
...but if social-economic doctrines don't galvanize, what about social-economic realities...
...These figures alone speak against Hamilton's assumption, for in the small communities, the lower-middle class is numerically predominant...
...From Joan Didion's angle of vision, the American predicament in El Salvador is ultimately sad...
...As late as December 1932, a vast majority of prominent business leaders refused to sign an appeal to President Hindenburg to appoint Hitler to the chancellorship...
...19.95...
...The arguments were effective...
...They moved senator after senator to the antiMcCarthy camp...
...Early in 1954, Reedy reports, Johnson confided to a few intimates that Jumpin' Joe had "gotten too big for his britches...
...Otherwise, Dugger's book is marked by a sober, if consistently critical, view of Johnson's career...
...George Reedy's book reflects his close working relationship with LBJ throughout much of Johnson's senatorial career, as well as at the beginning and the end of his presidency...
...If "human history," he writes, manages to survive a future atomic war, "the global American hawkery of the Johnson period will be understood as a principal cause for World War IV...
...War and its dislocations as well as the corruption of the Czarist regime are insufficient, he asserts, to explain the regime's collapse and the Bolshevik victory...
...Terror shapes behavior to exact obedience...
...Still, the difference in the Nazis' share of the vote between predominantly Catholic and heavily Protestant cities runs 10-15 percent...
...Similarly, Bauer stridently opposed identifying socialism with etatism: his Der Weg zum Sozialismus (1919) envisioned a socialized economy in which branches of industry are run by councils composed of representatives of the workers, the consumers and, to insure the broader collective interest, the state...
...Hamilton correctly assesses the ambiguous role of the leading industrialists...
...His preface makes clear his understanding of the first half of this century: The Bolshevik Revolution came to serve as the new inspiration and model, and Russia as the Promethean guide...
...After a lengthy examination of the Russian revolutionary tradition, Talmon asks how a "defeatist" internationalist revolutionism could sweep aside "the deep-seated instinctive patriotism" of the Russian people at a time of national emergency in 1917...
...Consequently, while The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of Revolution is a work that students of modern history and socialism cannot bypass, its author's method, categories, and presuppositions raise at least as many questions about themselves as they provide answers to the questions he poses...
...The struggle for reforms is its means...
...Undoubtedly, this rise in the Nazi vote was bolstered by defections from the working class, especially from among the unemployed...
...she asks in Reform or Revolution...
...Hamilton correctly describes the spirit of the workers' organizations in the final months: the dispirited Social Democratic leadership giving up Prussia, its last political bastion, without a fight...
...Johnson would have liked that remark...
...that share drops to 32 percent in cities with a population of over 100,000 while in some smaller towns and villages it reached the 80 percent range...
...Hamilton questions the common assumption that it was primarily cast by the lowermiddle class, and he sets out to prove that its bulk was cast by the upper and upper-middle classes...
...of mixed workers/lower-middle class...
...Indeed, "the pathos of revolution" is one of Talmon's great fears...
...In the Johnson White House, he became press secretary...
...These three new books all seek to make this complex, fiercely energetic man more comprehensible...
...A lengthy discussion of Marx's and Engels's views on nationalism opens the book, arriving at the (in my view correct) conclusion that the two never came to grips with the phenomenon...
...The answer to this question, in my view, is no, and this because Talmon misconstrues Luxemburg on several accounts...
...There is a linguistic supplement to this plethora of abjections: it is comprised of fragments from the discourse of the actors—fragments from President Magafla and from President Reagan, from present Ambassador Hinton and former Ambassador White, from embassy officials, Salvadoran officers, from the grandson of a legendary dictator, from nuns and priests and university professors...
...The reason was, of course, that he was busy elsewhere, in the Washington and Texas corridors of power where, he correctly felt, he could accomplish much more, for himself and for his constituents...
...His book focuses on the socialist split into reformist and revolutionary wings, claiming that it was caused by "the difference between, and acceptance of, the historic national community as the natural political-social framework and the vision of a socialist world society achieved by a universal revolutionary breakthrough...
...The former views politics as a very human process of trial and error and defines liberty in terms of human spontaneity and the lack of coercion...
...Since the assumption is that "allembracing attitudes," such as political messianism, are the substance of history, it is hardly surprising that one can read Talmon's account unaware that something called capitalism, for example, might have had an impact on what he is analyzing...
...By failing to insist on a plausible political approach, Washington in fact acquiesces to the brutal tactics of the most violent Salvadorans, and paints itself into the corner of an endless war...
...Senate in 1941...
...He did not accept "the historic national community as the natural political-social framework" while simultaneously insisting on the potent and permanent reality of nationalities and the necessity of working within the parameters of Austria, for example...
...And again: Talmon wants to counterpose a "pragmatic," "empirical," Bernstein to an abstract, visionary Luxemburg...
...Messianic nationalists and messianic socialists, Talmon notes, frequently employed the same vocabulary, but with one using "the people," while the other used "the proletariat...
...The official language of El Salvador, and the official language of Washington on El Salvador, is the language of advertising—the obsessive insistence on making things look right, like turning hoodlums into good guys, terror into nascent democracy, social putrescence into new life—"which is part of the place's pervasive obscenity...
...During the next two years, up to the July 1932 Reichstag election, the picture changes rapidly...
...This does not mean, however, that all radical theory, including that with varying degrees of messianic impulse, can be explained in terms of a vague, yet apparently all-encompassing "state of mind...
...the other, Protestantism...
...Memories of those wartime years tend to bleach the older memories of his many accomplishments...
...Bauer argued for transcending the dichotomy between reform and revolution, asserting that each possessed something urgent: the need 389 to salvage the positive conquests of bourgeois civilization, "the irreplaceable cultural values of individual rights, of intellectual freedom, of the collective right of self-determination, of humanism," on the one hand and the recognition that capitalism had to be surmounted and not just made palatable, on the other...
...So by 1920 the schism is complete: the Socialist International was composed of devotees of "the nation-state based on democratic reformism" while the Comintern believed "in a Messianic revolution through a violent breakthrough...
...Only 25 percent in Catholic Munich...
...His ideas were simplistic and amounted to little more than placing economic floors under wages, farm prices and business incomes, plus universal education and medical care and cheap electric power...
...What emerges clearly is Johnson's hatred of the meanness and cruelty wrought by poverty...
...It was a peculiar quality in that it had its limitations...
...TALMON'S EMPHASIS on "frames of mind" reveals the idealist essence of his approach to history and politics...
...He finds potential for totalitarianism inherent in mass political mobilization itself...
...Nothing came of this, but I did not forget the sensation of having been in a single instant demoralized, undone, humiliated by fear, which is what I meant when I said that I came to understand in El Salvador the mechanism of terror...
...Indeed, his real concern is not democracy but the contrast between his notion of liberalism and totalitarianism...
...Terror disorients...
...This, definitely, does not apply for the decisive period after 1930...
...Descent into the culture of fear is abrupt...
...has become a hostage to its mythology and tied to the last gasp of a shabby local power structure that has irretrievably lost all legitimacy and even an image of itself, whose only historic project is to procure weapons and a fabricated political identity from the North...
...On the other hand, he tends to overlook or neglect some of the important ways in which the old societal structures had been left untouched by the revolution and the Weimar Republic...
...But compliance is no guarantee of security...
...Surveying the condition of international socialism two decades after it was sundered by World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution, the Austro-Marxist Otto Bauer wrote of the need to unite "the ethos of democratic socialism and the pathos of revolutionary socialism...
...Only a writer in full command of her craft can recreate it on the page...
...A natural order of human fulfillment was posited, based ultimately on an "irrational faith" in Rational Man...
...The basis for compromise was provided, according to Reedy, by an article in the New Leader by Professor Carl Auerbach of the University of Minnesota Law School...
...the Communist party, in the vain hope of gaining new adherents from the Nazis' radical wing, making common cause with them in order to bring down the center-left Prussian government, turning in the end to a crudely nationalist and anti-Semitic campaign...
...However, since democracy and mass mobilization are by no means the same thing, his attempt to counterpose "liberal" and "totalitarian" democracies serves to make the very meaning of the word "democracy" obscure...
...35.00...
...Johnson was quickly accepted into the circle of brilliant young men in the upper echelons of the New Deal staff...
...But as the combined total of the Social Democratic and Communist vote dropped only slightly, even increased in some of the larger cities, the bulk of the Nazis' gains in the July 1932 election (and probably already in some measure in the election of September 1930) can only be explained by their appeal to nonvoters, most likely members of the lower-middle class then politicized by the economic crisis...
...We agreed on so many of the big issues...
...In order to find an answer, he painstakingly analyzed and compared the election results of the Weimar period, particularly those of the three key elections to the Reichstag (Germany's parliament) after the onset of the Great Depression—those of September 1930, July 1932, and November 1932...
...Strange that after the passage of half a century and the publication of over a hundred books, there still should be something factually new to say about Adolf Hitler's road to power...
...THIS BRINGS US to Talmon's rich, if again problematic, discussion of Russia...
...HAMILTON'S OWN THEORY, unfortunately, seems somewhat diffuse and eclectic...
...Dugger had many opportunities to talk with Johnson, face-to-face...
...there was the survival of the authoritarian spirit and of class segregation in the educational system as well as, perhaps worst of all, in the judicial system, which systematically backed the Nazi leaders and their hoodlums...
...Didion places the quotations side by side, or next to the brute facts of life and death, so skillfully that, without recourse to commentary, they testify to the mendacious loquacity of a condition where language is called upon, most of the time, not to illuminate truth but to dream it as it ought to be, to improve its appearance, to formulate ramshackle mythologies, to lure us into the realm of shadowboxing, of pure symbolic action...
...Historically, they were not opposed to liberal individualism...
...THE POLITICIAN: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF LYNDON JOHNSON, by Ronnie Dugger...
...His book has other values too...
...But Dugger goes further...
...Concentrating on the contrast between Rosa Luxemburg and Eduard Bernstein, Talmon then presents a remarkable and original rereading of the debate over reform and revolution within German social democracy in light of the national question...
...rather, they could not stand imperfection in its realization...
...LOOKING AT THE OVERALL RECORD Of those years, Hamilton's diagnosis, at best, can be said to apply 396 to the period of the initial rise of the Nazi vote, from May 1928 to September 1930...
...Caro has prepared a rich bouillabaisse of a story—full of revelations of tasty and obscure facts and anecdotes...
...The only rule that governs situations seems to be the lewd proliferation of the lurid...
...Cadavers are produced by a government that is little more than a deranged killing machine (Didion reports that American 387 bureaucratese tries helplessly to obscure, in Washington and in situ, "what is taken for granted in El Salvador, that government forces do most of the killing...
...Indeed, from May 1928 to July 1932, voter participation had increased from 75 percent to 84 percent...
...Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982...
...Where 18th-century "totalitarian democrats" thought of men as atomized individuals, their 19th-century "Romantic Messianic" heirs focused on collectivities...
...He tries to segregate voting districts by class: districts of workers...
...During a lifetime career in public service, he parlayed an investment of $17,000, obtained from Lady Bird Johnson's father as an advance on her inheritance, into an Austin radio station and a series of other enterprises that gave him wealth estimated at over $20 million at the time of his death...
...They are mere tokens that saturate the environment, suggesting that life at some point became the stuff of an obscure and debased coinage...
...One Hundred Years of Solitude will be read long after scientific and journalistic texts of the same cohort will have faded into the oblivion of an archive or a newspaper morgue...
...How, he asked himself, did great evil emerge from the promise of universal salvation...
...statistics only add a veneer of verisimilitude to the absurd...
...Was he prolabor or antilabor...
...But I should like to suggest that, in the end, this is beside the point...
...For those beholden to a vision of gradual progress, such violence is a temporary sickness, a malady of growth...
...Between social reforms and revolution there exists for social democracy an indissoluble tie...
...One of them is the perversity and incoherence of underdevelopment the centuries of exactions, dependencies, humiliations, insensate ambitions that contributed to the making of El Salvador...
...During her two-week stay, Didion's every move was colored by an apprehension that, like pain, became at moments excruciating...
...To distinguish factual from wishful statements becomes impossible—a realization that leads her to see the Latin American writer Garcia Marquez "in a new light, as a social realist...
...of bullying and often savage tirades against subordinates...
...In the end, this served as a humanist justification for antihuman politics...
...It would be a disservice to Joan Didion's real achievement to reduce her statements to even the most reasoned critical analyses of the current political situation in El Salvador...
...Reedy's book recognizes and pays tribute to what he perceives as Johnson's greatness, although his admiration for his boss eventually soured into dislike and distaste...
...Cloth $50.00...
...In order to make his theory fit this fact, he resorts to the rather lame argument that in these small towns, lower-class people followed the lead of upper-class "opinion makers...
...And he maintains that the "Mass Society" theory fails insofar as it targets the urban masses, while the big Nazi inroads were made in small towns and villages, places rather safe from urban anomie and uprootedness...
...a latent civil war in which the Nazis' paramilitary organizations, protected by the courts, had the upper hand over their counterparts on the left...
...Although not directly concerned with Bauer and primarily an examination of two of the most potent forces in modern history—nationalism and revolution the late J. L. Talmon's The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of Revolution ultimately seeks to deny the possibility of an alternative to social democracy and bolshevism as formulated by Bauer...
...As Johnson had foreseen, his Southern colleagues could surrender honorably to "overwhelming force" in the legislative process...
...The upshot has been an acute fragmentation of group life, purpose, and experience...
...He made a great deal of money, and also, at various times and above the call of routine duty, he worked hard and skillfully to help the poor...
...And so, under President Johnson's guidance, in 1964, the historic Civil Rights Act was passed, and the Great Society and War on Poverty programs brought about many domestic social improvements...
...He became increasingly expert at the game of trading, maneuvering, bargaining, cajoling, promising, compromising—and then regrouping for the next effort...
...The meaning of elections, under such circumstances, became symbolic rather than political...
...Using this approach, an amendment to the voting rights bill, drafted by Dean Acheson and his staff, provided for jury trials in criminal contempt proceedings involving the provisions of the proposed law, but civil contempt proceedings would be enforced, in accord with past practice, by the courts without use of juries...
...Questioning the Marxists' simplistic picture of fascism as the tool of Big Capital, he cites the evident reluctance of leading industrialists to put Hitler in charge...
...What he labels the "Centrist" theory essentially sees the source of nazism in the structural changes within advanced capitalist societies, with their particularly damaging effect on the lower-middle class, including the proletarization of white-collar employees...
...paper $16.50...
...Lenin, on the one hand, and fascism, on the other, proposed two different messages of redemption to compensate for the war, creating what Talmon calls "bastard" syntheses of nationalism and internationalism...
...Talmon almost admits the defeat of his own enterprise here...
...He was not a man of grand design...
...instead of her antinationalism being the function of her total commitment to revolutionary internationalism...
...Caro notes disapprovingly that Johnson threw few legislative bills into the congressional hopper and made few speeches on the floor of either the House or Senate...
...she continues...
...Yet ethnocentrism is the main tool with the help of which, by Joan Didion's reckoning, Americans seek to reshape the political and social rubble of El Salvador...
...It thus hints at other truths than those we negotiate and ingest every day...
...The reaction of these groups to such changes was exacerbated by the economic crisis, by hurt national pride, hatred of the Jews, and threats to established cultural values...
...urbanization and consequent anomie . . . loneliness...
...Outside in the parking lot there were a number of wrecked or impounded cars, many of them shot up, upholstery chewed by bullets, windshield shattered, thick pastes of congealed blood on pearlized hoods...
...New York and Kansas City: Andrew & McNeel...
...Her reflections are worth quoting at some length, for they do transcend the necessary but shifting polemics of the moment: 388 That we had been drawn, both by a misapprehension of the local rhetoric and by the manipulation of our own rhetorical weaknesses, into a game we did not understand, a play of power in a political tropic alien to us, seemed apparent, and yet there we remained...
...of making friends too easily with yesterday's enemy and making an enemy of yesterday's friend...
...Some of it he himself had suffered in his youth, and he spent the rest of his life ensuring that never again would he or his family be subjected to poverty...
...And, Caro continues, FDR told Tommy (The Cork) Corcoran, a chief aide, "I like this boy, and you're going to help him with anything you can...
...Talmon never tells us what in given historical conditions makes people receptive to messianism or nationalism or socialism...
...632 pp...
...A good book belongs to literature and, as such, survives, triumphs over the occasion of its production...
...of mixed upper/ upper-middle class...
...Political messianists—among whom are to be counted Saint-Simon, Marx, Michelet, and Mazzini—share "the totalitarian-democratic expectation" of universal regeneration, "of some preordained, all-embracing and exclusive scheme of things, which was presumed to represent the better selves, the true interests, the genuine will, and the real freedom of men...
...The second key factor affecting Nazi strength— religious affiliation or, rather, Protestantism—also was strongest in small communities, with their more uniform religious structure, but is also noticeable in big cities...
...With this assurance to the Southern legislators that in the field of voting rights "they can't brand you as a criminal now without a trial before a jury of your 394 fellow citizens," the Southern senators had a concept they could live with...
...The book fails, however, to convey fully the chaotic conditions that characterized the republic's last years: government rule by decree under the last three chancellors...
...At the other pole, the specter of revolutionary internationalism combined with other stimuli to goad the resentful and frightened devotees of warring integral nationalism in the defeated and discontented nations [after World War I] into totalitarian fascism and racist nazism...
...He therefore fails to consider that not only the Terror of Year II and the Moscow Trials followed from the promise of universal redemption, but that the "pragmatic" and "empirical" liberal democracy of England emerged from a bloody century of civil war replete with its own messianists...
...it deprives us of the opportunity to foresee the consequences of our actions...
...The Salvadoran power holders know only too well that American aid will continue, and that the present Administration will continue to certify the unbelievable —that progress is somehow taking place in this carnage...
...Those with less than 25,000 inhabitants (accounting for one-half of the total vote in the key election of July 1932) show the heaviest share of the Nazi vote, 41 percent...
...If McCarthy was willing to attack Hayden, he would be willing to attack the Senate itself...
...Curiously, America complies...
...Bauer's Die Nationalitatenfrage and die Sozialdemokratie (1907) argued for a cultural and nonterritorial concept of nationality, allowing for the autonomy of many nationalities within a given set of borders...
...If he were right, a substantial revision of our theories about fascism would be in order...
...Countering the "Centrists'" assumption that structural changes have resulted in widespread loss of social position, he points to a mixed pattern of crosscurrents—such as impoverished peasants leaving the countryside for better jobs in the city, or new opportunities for whitecollar employees in the growing organizational sector...
...In those two years, the drop in the upper/upper-middle-class vote for the two conservative bourgeois parties covers three-quarters of the Nazi gain...
...In his attempt to determine the social locus of the Nazi vote in the largest cities, Hamilton subjects the voting records of some of them, insofar as available, to a detailed analysis...
...NO DOUBT, SOCIALIST HISTORY has its share of riders of the apocalypse...
...She does not give us a plot to unravel, an interpretive key to unlock the horror, a solution: "This was a story that would perhaps not be illuminated at all...
...The "most vital" example of this, in Talmon's judgment, is Marxism...
...But he could take ideas from other men and women who were totally incapable of putting them into effect...
...He does...
...Robert Caro, also the author of a biography of Robert Moses (1974), has spent a good deal of time in Texas gathering material for a trilogy on the life on Lyndon B. Johnson...
...More than anyone else, Johnson brought electricity and alleviation of their miserable working and living conditions to the farmers scratching out an existence from the thin soil in the Texas hill country that was part of his congressional district...
...159 pp...
...In their despair and anxiety, according to this argument, the masses tend to follow demagogues promising easy solutions...
...Talmon argues that for Luxemburg the real problem with revisionism was that it ultimately pitted "national local histories against universal history...
...In the larger cities, generally, the substantial workers' vote for the two major parties of the left, the Social Democrats and the Communists, changes the picture somewhat...
...She depicts the local actors as persons who seek to solve a problem by changing its name...
...Talmon's book, published posthumously, is the third of a trilogy that represents his life's project...
...But in fact Caro pays tribute to Johnson's dedication and hard work, and to his genius for the art of politics...
...It also centers on the role of the lower-middle class, and sees it as unable to act, except as adjunct to either the working class or the capitalist class...
...THERE IS MUCH in this book that will provide ammunition to thoughtful critics of the Reagan administration's policies in Central America...
...America's fate is to be mocked by its protégés and accused by everyone else...
...Yet what then comes of Bernstein's (mis)appropriation of Kant's categorical imperative as a replacement for Hegelian and Marxist dialectics...
...Joan Didion's Salvador, a lean and splendid book, pierces ideological fictions and takes us to the outer and almost unbearable limits of what we call "politics," "society," and "culture"—to the point where those rational notions turn into terror, obscenity, and hallucination...
...Hence, after discussing how the notions of la patrie and la revolution merged in the French Revolution, he contends that in modern revolutions (Bolshevik, Chinese, Cuban, and so on) the memories of preceding revolutionary struggles "have proved to be far more potent and more cohesive influences than social-economic doctrines and innovating aspirations...
...At the heart of the American effort there was something of the familiar, ineffable, as if it were taking place not in El Salvador but in a mirage of El Salvador, the mirage of a society not unlike our own but "sick," a temporarily fevered republic in which the antibodies of democracy needed only to be encouraged, in which words had stable meanings north and south ("election," say, and "Marxist") and in which there existed, waiting to be tapped by our support, some latent good will...
...Taking into account all these circumstances, I find it difficult to accept Hamilton's thesis of upper-middle-class predominance in the Nazi vote...
...Whatever power we grant to her messianic impulses, she was not simply the "poet" of the general strike, which Talmon calls her...
...Where the figures allow sufficient interpretation, Hamilton detects a fairly uniform picture: the Nazi vote reached its highest share in the upper-middle-class areas, while in most lower-middle and working-class districts (often inseparably intermingled) it tended to stay below the city average...
...Hamilton defines two key factors contributing to Nazi strength that have long been known, if not always fully appreciated: one, Germany's smalltown and village communities...
...Was not Rosa's passionate aversion to nationalism," asks Talmon rhetorically, "the mainspring of her vision of the oneness of history...
...The problem with Talmon's approach is best illustrated by his treatment of the Austro-Marxists, among whom Otto Bauer and Karl Renner developed perhaps the most sophisticated Marxist analyses of nationalism...
...Here he proposed that two radically contrasting variants of democratic thought, "liberal democratic" and "totalitarian democratic," emerged from the 18th century...
...Similarly, to call the pseudomorphic city of San Salvador, the broken Indian customs, the borrowed crafts, the short span of expectations, the dim memory of deranged patriarchs "tradition" would be a travesty...
...His book makes clear that he considers LBJ at best a fallen liberal and that he distrusted and disliked the man...
...Nothing escapes the rhetoric of the obscene: accurate information is almost impossible to get...
...Although he is clearly an advocate of "pragmatic" and "empirical" liberalism, he nevertheless employs an idealist method of examining history and politics, yielding—after three books and some 1,500 suggestive pages— something ironic, inescapable, and unfathomable...
...After that, it would not take him long to establish totalitarian control...
...And did he mean what he said...
Vol. 30 • July 1983 • No. 3
