COMMENTS: From Ramparts to Reagan
Rosenberg, Bernard
In mid-March the Washington Post Magazine featured an article by Peter Collier and David Horowitz, best known nowadays for their encomium to Camelot, a bestseller called The Kennedys: An...
...The Soviet rape of Afghanistan bothers them...
...They tell us why Two Influential Radicals from the '60s Voted for Reagan...
...I have done as much...
...Those who have leaped from infantile politics to premature Alzheimer's have other ideas...
...Collier and Horowitz had bleeding hearts until, at just the right moment, they developed hard hearts...
...anyone over 40 who is a socialist has no brain...
...And not uncommon...
...Gentlemen of the infantile left and right: that is what happened—in a so far less-than-fatal form, when Reagan replaced Carter...
...It's as if Carter, on account of Afghanistan, had not terminated and Reagan had not resumed shipments of wheat to the Soviets...
...We've been reading extensive analyses of such acrobatics...
...did not recoil from voting for Walter Mondale, who never was enamored of dictators, left or right...
...Writing chiefly about Cuba, Collier and Horowitz reflect on the left's revolutionary enthusiasms of the last 25 years...
...For those writers do attack him, and us, attack all leftists—and leftists in their lexicon encompass just about everyone to the left of Reagan...
...Quite a swing...
...Let the compliment now be repaid: Collier and Horowitz do not work for the CIA...
...In those perfervid days when Ramparts was riding high and running wild, its editors printed an article—memorable because we were so grateful for the absolution—announcing that Dissent, all socialist and democratic appearances to the contrary, was not subsidized by the CIA...
...Apropos of all this, I can hardly forget a comment made long ago by Irving Howe...
...Nothing less than this...
...But this explanation comes from the horses' mouths...
...We leftists who disdained Castro when you shouted "Venceremos...
...But, dear adversaries, do not despair...
...What have they learned from those aberrations...
...He said that he had seldom been attacked by someone on the left who did not end up attacking him from the right...
...Their conversion is based on foreign policy...
...we live in an imperfect world that is bettered only with great difficulty and easily made worse—much worse...
...So does Jimmy Carter, a leftist they congratulate themselves on never having been able to stand...
...Plus ca change...
...But like Yippies who turned into Yuppies, these red-hot revolutionaries of yesteryear now support Ronald Reagan...
...The mindlessness and heartlessness they display are quite their own...
...The late Paul Jacobs wrote that piece, but not, one may be confident, without first doing exhaustive research...
...Their embrace of Ronald Reagan does not quite surprise me or anyone else long associated with Dissent...
...272...
...The first condition led them into such a delirium that they assail their youthful follies with more savagery than we, who did not admire the Viet Cong or pore endlessly over Mao's Little Red Book, could possibly summon...
...The winds will shift, your hearts may soften, your minds could clear—and we social democratic ogres can look forward to one more tentative clearance allowing us to go about our moderate business in this "imperfect world...
...Their action has dismayed their former comrades, whom they defiantly confront with an old adage: "Anyone under 40 who isn't a socialist has no heart...
...In mid-March the Washington Post Magazine featured an article by Peter Collier and David Horowitz, best known nowadays for their encomium to Camelot, a bestseller called The Kennedys: An American Drama, wherein they lovingly explore every weakness of that villainous family...
...An eon ago, that is in the '60s, meaning the '60s at their worst, these men were editors of Ramparts, a learned journal that purveyed snippets of Marxist-Leninist-MaoistFidelist Thought...
Vol. 32 • July 1985 • No. 3
