Second Thoughts/Stuffed Heads

...There were other such modulated insights from men in their forties who'd spent their youthful ardor in the antiwar movement, only to have their hearts broken by piles of corpses made by the Communists —and contemptuously dismissed, they claimed, by the American left—in Vietnam, Cambodia, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan...

...there was and is a "hate-America left," but socialist leader Norman Thomas admonished protesters not to burn the flag but to cleanse it, and many of us who never romped with Peter Collier's and David Horowitz's Ramparts hated the Best and the Brightest out of love for this violated land...

...I was a radical, but I am not a conservative...

...The differences between liberals and conservatives, between free marketeers, welfare staters, and social democrats, are minuscule compared with the titanic struggle—yes, the Manichaean struggle—between democracy and communism...

...Poor pilgrims...

...Unless, that is, the new patriots wish to argue that American banks and diplomats who held Polish totalitarianism's hand throughout the sixteen breathtaking months of Solidarity's ascendancy were protecting the American experiment from its enemies, or that Jacobo Timerman's Argentine military torturers better served American interests than democratic President Raid Alfonsin...

...I would like you to name those movements and countries...

...But Neuhaus himself was having it both ways by conflating two streams of protest...

...We have to understand why people embrace communism in the first place, and that requires intellectual work...

...Toai would not...

...for doing so, it was vilified several times in Ramparts...

...To help you complete your eloquent testimony," crooned Decter from the floor, "I have a question that is short to ask and short to answer...

...Don't rest with these politically sterile, damaging ideas about social democracy and liberalism . . . but continue on to where logic leads...

...Instead, they suggested there may be reasons, endemic even to "America" with a "c," why the United States backs Asian and Latin American dictators and terrorists of the right against indigenous anticommunist democrats like themselves...

...American leftists are steeped in a tradition of conspiracy and deceit whose instruments are secret 'vanguards' and 'popular fronts,' through which basic commitments are regularly concealed and important agendas are always covert at the same time that charges of 'red-baiting' and `McCarthyism' are invoked to shield the underlying allegiances from the scrutiny they deserve," succinctly wrote the conference organizers, ex-radical Ramparts magazine editors David Horowitz and Peter Collier, in a Commentary essay distributed as a manifesto for the movement they hoped to start with the weekend's recantations...

...I see a desperate effort by some speakers to cling to the idea of themselves as men of the left...

...Or was it the case, as Peter Steinfels recalls, that many on the left like himself who would have signed the "Appeal" were never invited...

...But they emphasized that they remain Democrats, even liberals, on many domestic matters and cautioned that defending the "fragile American experiment" means challenging its putative right-wing champions...

...the stock market's Black Monday was but forty-eight hours away...

...Kristol, as usual, was the incarnation of worldweariness...

...In the eighties you are on the inside ruining the institutions...

...As a love that dared not speak its name and then refused to shut up, homosexuality was officially superseded last October by the breathless, embattled new patriotism of former "Movement" radicals who met in Washington to burst together out of the closet of "repressive anti-Americanism" that had imprisoned them since the 1960s...

...As the drift of his answer became clear, Decter turned her back on him, and, chin defiantly aloft, sailed back to her seat...

...So do opponents of Reagan's foreign policies today...

...Those for whom second thoughts amount to something more than psychodrama would be well-advised to reconsider again their disillusionment with the left, as did Jeffrey Herf in asserting, to grumbles from the pit, that "there is room in this country for a vital democratic left...

...But was Joan Baez really "isolated" for criticizing Vietnam...

...We've been hearing second thoughts ever since the French Revolution imported utopianism into politics...

...I don't want to overestimate other resistance movements...

...But Muravchik's counsel came too late, and, in any case, was sadly misguided...

...At the closing session, former Young People's Socialist League president Joshua Muravchik urged "maximum tolerance within the democratic camp...

...To go from communism to anticommunism is not enough...

...Robert Frost said he never was a radical in his youth because he didn't want to be a conservative in old age," the black Jewish writer and former black power activist Julius Lester told the conference...

...for something Manichaean had already unfolded within the right-wing patriotism of the conference itself...

...The gentler second-thoughters decamped from Washington shaken but, one hopes, wiser about the multiplicity of perils to all who love America...

...Toai elaborated his principle for former human rights lobbyist Bruce Cameron, who was agonizing over having convinced Congress to withdraw aid to the Thieu-Ky regime: "It was just going to the pockets of the generals," Toai said...

...Not that some conference-goers wouldn't have fobbed all that off on the American Civil Liberties Union, rent control, and socialism's coddling of a lazy underclass...

...The most resonant statement about the New Left I ever heard came from SDS's Carl Oglesby at a 1965 antiwar march: 'This war broke my American heart.' Most people felt it was something deeply American in them that rose up against the war...

...If you want to support any anticommunist movement, you must be sure the people created and support it and want to fight...

...Counting the bodies, they'd been driven to the conclusion that America's constitutional revolution—so hobbled, so dishearteningly incremental to young idealists—is the only one that delivers freedom because it's based on a full accounting of human frailty and faction, while the beauty of the left's utopian poetry masks the terror that is the essence of spiritual greed...

...You say we should support national liberation movements against communism...

...The American policy of uncritical support for anti-guerrilla wars was hopeless under such conditions...

...All but Peretz and Glazer unloaded on Hawk, Ifshin, Herf, and the others, whose conversions were judged self-indulgent, incomplete, uninteresting, and at the same time insidious...

...I've rejected at least fifty articles on second thoughts over the years from people who broke with the Communist party and thought they had stories to tell...

...Should it be any different now that we have the Worst and the Dimmest...

...Surely Neuhaus & Co...

...and Attorney General Edwin Meese was proposing to save the American experiment from leftist pollution with the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Douglas Ginsburg (it wasn't yet clear that the "left" had gotten to Ginsburg first...

...Gitlin asked...

...Unlike gays, who've accurately identified the sources of their peril, second thoughters spent their weekend shadow-boxing with the phantasms of a "hate-America left" that they think has plunged the country into guilt and self-loathing, distorting the economy, and crippling the moral application of American power abroad...

...Every generation goes through the same bloody game, finding the world not just unsatisfying but intolerable, and we have to figure out why this is so...

...An ingratiating Martin Peretz moderated a tribunal of New Criterion editor Hilton Kramer, Commentary editor Podhoretz, Partisan Review editor William Phillips, and Public Interest editors Irving Kristol and Nathan Glazer...

...Gosh, it's tough to love America...

...Even as a faintly pompous Rev...

...It's all so familiar...

...I can't remember a time when there was so much uncritical Soviet-loving as there is today," he complained...

...She told a neighbor that Toai—who has been imprisoned by three Vietnamese regimes for his democratic convictions—was afraid to name names because he lives in Berkeley and would be subject to reprisals...

...A few speakers said they were not ashamed of what they did in the sixties," rasped Kramer...

...Fortunately, it was broken unexpectedly by two groups of speakers, but, oh, how sad was their fate at the hands of a hundred-odd true believers...

...We are all now paying the price...

...One such moment of truth came in a muted confrontation between Doan Van Toai, a Vietnamese intellectual who'd led a student democratic "third force" against Diem and Thieu as well as against the Viet Cong, and Midge Decter, director of the modestly-named Committee for the Free World, whose mission seems to be to convince Americans that anything short of military intervention in defense of freedom is no virtue...

...Even before the end of the war, Dissent had the temerity to grope for a "third force" option in Vietnam...

...Richard John Neuhaus told conferees that "America is a rather fragile and audacious experiment and the ideas on which it is premised have enemies" and that "one has to join the small band truly committed to its defense," the congressional Iran-Contra committee was preparing its account of the rompings of one such self-appointed small band...

...These preoccupations left second thoughters piteously exposed to such real threats to honest patriotism as the Reagan administration and the cultural contradictions of capitalism, whose relentless marketings of decadence and greed are subverting republican virtue at a speed that leaves the left as helpless and appalled a spectator as the Junior League...

...The silence from conference organizers on such matters was deafening...

...Having balanced myself on the left leg for so long, I know that if I shift to the right leg, it, too, will get weary...

...Todd Gitlin, a sympathetic chronicler of the Movement, did implicitly challenge such notions of peril from the left in an exchange with Neuhaus about anti-Americanism in the 1960s...

...How and when to support them we should discuss, because some support is counterproductive...

...Not to mention braving the scorn of the Washington Post's Sidney Blumenthal, whose caricature of the conferencegoers sustained their wildest nightmares of liberal media treason...

...Second thoughts tend to be very boring...

...It is a national shame for us that no South Vietnamese leaders stayed to die for the cause they'd made others fight for...

...Breaking with old friends over politics is painful, of course...

...Coming out" as a patriot, warned speaker after speaker at the "Second Thoughts" Conference, would mean losing one's friends, one's social standing, even one's job...

...Podhoretz condemned the moral relativism of ex-Communist contributors to The God That Failed— "They refused to say a kind word about [the West,] the only alternative to the system they were afraid of...

...What moral vanity...

...In the sixties you were all having such a wonderful time being young and stupid...

...The first group, democratic refugees from the communists in Vietnam and Nicaragua, were trundled out like so many props from WPA proletarian theater, yet they refused to read their pro-contra scripts...

...Neuhaus's response was instructive...

...One wanted to ask Neuhaus and neoconservative elders like Norman Podhoretz, Hilton Kramer, and Midge Decter what kind of patriot doesn't feel sickened, violated, and outraged by such government, or how the left can be blamed for television that spews trivialized sex and bloodshed or for urban nights closed by muggers and the cries of the homeless to carefree strolling and freedom of assembly...

...28 • DISSENT...

...What tribunals are we now to set up to say what's genuinely 'American...

...He seemed to forget that most conference speakers had been kind to America, indeed...

...The role of the intellectual is to ask good questions, to have second thoughts, but you cannot do that if you feel guilty about being an intellectual...

...they hadn't yet reckoned with the fury and contempt of the neoconservative elders, who on Saturday night took to the dais to exercise their well-known penchant for eating the young...

...Several speakers described as a turning point their disgust with the isolation Joan Baez experienced after signing "An Appeal to the Conscience of Vietnam...

...Former Amnesty International director David Hawk, former National Student Association president David Ifshin (in 1984 the counsel to Walter Mondale's campaign), former foreign editor of the Marxist newspaper the Guardian Barry Rubin, and former SDS leader Jeffrey Herf recounted their sense of betrayal when old Movement friends vilified them for questioning the New Left's wisdom on the Khmer Rouge, the PLO, American missile deployments, and domestic black nationalists and their sycophantic white apologists...

...miss Reaganism's penultimate lesson: that if not all who protest are sincere, neither are all who purport to defend America truly serving freedom...

...Kristol said he hadn't a clue...

...Many who said they were fighting America in its own name were disingenuous because, at the same time, they were claiming that the war was endemic to 26 • DISSENT 'Amerika' with a 'lc.' Well, one can't have it both ways...

...Toai was telling the conference how he'd tried to welcome the victorious Communists in the name of national reconciliation, only to be imprisoned for declining to work on a plan to confiscate all private property...

...I nearly repatriated one leftist to America at the reception last night," Collier exulted, to applause, at the opening panel...

...Fausto Amador, a Nicaraguan social activist now leading a poor people's movement in Costa Rica after fleeing the Sandinistas, was particularly eloquent in his refusal to defend the contras...

...You were all immoralists...

...The second group to doubt the integrity of right-wing anticommunism consisted of several Movement veterans whose renunciations of New Left folly hadn't thrown them into Ronald Reagan's arms...