The end of Jeane Kirkpatrick's ideology
Cohen, Mitchell
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever." This famous line, spoken by O'Brien to the battered Winston Smith in Orwell's 1984, embodies the fear...
...The proof of this theoretical pudding was in the historical eating...
...She told us that "because the miseries of traditional life are familiar, they are bearable to ordinary people who, growing up in society, learn to cope, as children born to untouchables in India acquire the skills and attitudes necessary for survival in the miserable roles they are to play...
...Neoconservative realpolitik has run aground on reality...
...Old Bolsheviks like Nikolai Bukharin and Christian Rakovsky, victimized in Stalin's heyday, have been exonerated...
...Authoritarians permit a certain autonomy to churches, business, and other groups, thus engendering a small public space and a small civil society such as are proscribed under totalitarianism...
...What of China...
...SPRING • 1989 • 145...
...Successful democracies, Kirkpatrick argued, are difficult to establish and maintain, partly because of the demands they make on their citizens...
...A new chapter has opened in Soviet-American relations, and a policy is emerging in Moscow that appears aimed at putting the cold war, like Leonid Brezhnev's legacy, into cold storage...
...The role of the party is to be restricted, and there have been limited competitive elections for some posts...
...Yet having insisted that the USSR was unchangeable, conservatives—old and neo —now want credit for the new winds blowing from the Kremlin...
...Most significantly, Gorbachev is promoting a shift away from totally collectivized agriculture and toward leasehold farming...
...Kirkpatrick had initially presented a critique of the Carter foreign policy in the guise of a comparative structural analysis of two types of autocracy...
...She argued, we recall, that a long, hard road must be traveled if a political culture is to develop that can support democratic institutions...
...Could it be that totalitarian regimes have become merely authoritarian...
...One might say that in the Chinese case, totalitarianism actually created the possibilities for its own demise and reform...
...Cooperative and private enterprises have been permitted in services and small industry...
...The error lay in her very mode of thinking...
...Mao, in political retreat after the great flop backward of his Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s, used the Cultural Revolution to reassert himself and— intentionally— wrecked the party and state...
...What has happened—what is happening—in Moscow and Beijing compels a rethinking of all those theories of totalitarianism that held such sway in post–World War II America...
...Nobody seems to have noticed, perhaps not even she herself...
...Let's begin with the USSR, clearly Kirkpatrick's chief target...
...Jeane Kirkpatrick urged consideration of the dangers of disrupting customary routines of life, "habitual rhythms of work and leisure, habitual patterns of residence, habitual patters of family and personal relations...
...the Soviet press engages daily in startlingly open debate...
...Andrei Sakharov and other dissidents have been freed...
...What totalitarian regime (read: left-wing dictatorship) ever transformed itself significantly...
...While the left attacked the way she distinguished between "totalitarianism" and "authoritarianism," the Reagan administration used it to justify support for an assortment of miscreants running right-wing regimes, its hysterical anticommunism (evil empire), and its bloated defense budget...
...In any event, this, too, is incomprehensible in terms of the Kirkpatrick approach...
...But now, Jeane Kirkpatrick has admitted all...
...They, with their "hard-boiled" analyses, grasped the true nature of totalitarianism...
...This much, however, is certain: The transformations have come from within the two regimes...
...They of the right understood the Russians...
...Mikhail could go the way of Nikita, and the Chinese, whose political history is prone to great lurches, have recently retrenched somewhat...
...No "theory" was more celebrated by the cold warriors than that provided by Jeane Kirkpatrick's article "Dictatorships and Double Standards," which appeared almost a decade ago in Commentary...
...Unprecedented public demonstrations now occur...
...Perestroika has led to legalization of some private businesses and cooperatives and the initiation of economic reform plans, allowing for the emergence of some market forces...
...The authority of factory directors has increased at the expense of the local party committees, and directors must now answer to the state rather than to the committees...
...Yet this wasn't supposed to happen, at least not according to Kirkpatrick's famous theory...
...Krushchev once warned Mao that atomic weapons don't obey class principles...
...Change a few words and we have a perfect response to anyone who complains that the Soviet leader hasn't turned the USSR into a Western-style * For a valuable presentation of the problems of reform, from which some of my facts and figures come, see Marshall I. Goldman and Merle Goldman, "Soviet and Chinese Economic Reform," Foreign Affairs: America and the World 1987188...
...In any event, on its reasoning, one can only conclude that Washington ought not to press the Soviets or the Chinese for further reforms...
...It was a fear born of terror...
...SPRING • 1989 • 143 Commis and Opinions Thus Jeane Kirkpatrick in 1979...
...How does her "realism" stand up to a decade of realty...
...This famous line, spoken by O'Brien to the battered Winston Smith in Orwell's 1984, embodies the fear so many felt in the aftermath of Hitler and Stalin...
...Glasnost has permitted the publication in the Soviet Union of George Orwell's 1984, along with other previously forbidden works ranging from Nadezhda Mandelstam's Hope Against Hope to Jean-Paul Sartre's Freud...
...Cold warriors could aver, with reason, that Soviet and Chinese citizens have not been really empowered through the establishment of free elections...
...Speaking of chaos, where does the Cultural Revolution fit Kirkpatrick's theory...
...Democratic political culture is a long time in the making, and, according to the Kirkpatrick doctrine, it can never emerge from totalitarian regimes precisely because of their totalizing nature...
...the world had never before seen anything quite like the dictatorships in Berlin and Moscow...
...Jimmy Carter's great flaw was to push reforms on dictators who ruled societies unprepared for democracy...
...Since Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, just three years ago: • The restructuring of the Soviet regime has been proposed...
...Political ideas in the form of a novel are one thing, a theoretical argument purporting to explain political realities is another...
...Conclusion: Woe to Uncle Sam should he push democracy and wimpy liberal notions of human rights on authoritarian regimes...
...his picture was held aloft by millions of chanting Red Guards who sought to penetrate every nook and cranny of Chinese life with his quotations...
...The assumption that the Soviet Union would not, in principle could not, change lay behind the shrill claims of cold warriors, in the 1950s as in the 1980s...
...A good starting point was provided when Michael Walzer criticized Kirkpatrick some years ago for mistaking ideal-types for reality...
...Who knows what chaos might ensue...
...Her concept of "totalitarianism" presented "a picture of horrifying perfection never quite achieved in fact...
...144 • DISSENT • China has facilitated a wide array of joint ventures with foreign capital...
...She did it last summer, at the Republican National Convention, when she declared: "We all hope for liberalization and reform of the Soviet Union...
...If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever...
...The Cultural Revolution was, among other things, the result of a struggle between two factions within Chinese communism—that of Mao and that of Liu Shaoqui and Deng Xiaoping...
...Where Gorbachev pursues his program against opposition from long-entrenched party and government machineries, the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath partly cleared Beijing's bureaucratic decks...
...Between the early 1970s and the early 1980s the percentage of China's GNP spent on the military dropped from 13 percent to 8.6 percent, and half a million soldiers have been demobilized...
...Surely it represents the heights of totalitarianism for her: The deified Chairman was dictator over the proletariat...
...As a work of political fiction, 1984 was a warning, and it is as a warning that it retains its force...
...now Gorbachev has declared that the danger of nuclear war is more urgent than traditional Leninist canons...
...It imagined a world of total domination, a political no exit in which history stops...
...Underlying this is the problem of democratic political culture...
...Yet it can come out of authoritarian regimes because they do allow that little bit of elbow room...
...Consequently, sometimes, some authoritarian states transform themselves for the better...
...The role of the party has been curtailed on the level of basic production...
...The future is, of course, uncertain...
...In the decade since Deng Xiaoping (re)consolidated his power: • Agriculture has been significantly decollectivized in a country where some 80 percent of the population is rural...
...In the end, his great totalitarian moment created the very preconditions for Deng's later success at reform...
...Such recalcitrants apparently haven't read Jeane Kirkpatrick with care...
...The Soviets have begun an exit from Afghanistan and have even allowed a consular team from the Zionist devil-state to come to Moscow...
...What is essential is this: As of 1989 more than one path lies before the Soviet Union, and China is well along a road unrecognizable by Maoist standards...
...Its victory consequently meant the establishment of a system unalterable from within...
...Plain folks won't know who—or how —to obey anymore, and our "friends," the good ol' boys, will lose their grip...
...Yet only the blindest of the blind could insist that what Gorbachev and Deng have brought forth is merely incidental...
...Well, it's a flexible theory...
...None, she said, contrasting this with the reality of authoritarian regimes, that is, with traditionalist — right-wing, pro-American—autocracies run by good ol' boys and their personal mafias for dictatorial pleasure and personal profit . . . but with no intention of "remaking society" as leftists do...
...The Chinese party and state had to be reconstructed in the 1970s, and this was one factor that paved the way for Deng's innovations...
...The USSR now seeks Western investment and will permit foreigners to hold controlling interests in joint ventures...
...These winds are, we're supposed to believe, the result of the "no-nonsense" posture of the Reagan administration...
...The Shanghai Stock Exchange, closed in 1949, has reopened...
...Totalitarianism, she asserted, was something new in the world of political domination, and this because of its totalistic claims—it aimed to control and to penetrate every aspect of society...
...I personally take Mikhail Gorbachev's desire for economic reform seriously and also his understanding that internal changes are required to achieve it...
...Ironically, her logic could make equally great fodder for the antiperestroika - party conservatives in Moscow or Beijing...
...In 1987 Premier Zhao Ziyang declared that in a few years only 30 percent of the Chinese economy would be planned.* Now, none of these reforms establishes democracy, either of the Jeffersonian or the Eugene V. Debsian style...
...Did they...
...But instead of using it as an analytic tool for comparing existing tyrannies, in the same way "capitalism" can be used as a standard for examining the multiplicity of existing capitalisms, Kirkpatrick, who revels in her "realism," replaced actuality with the model and then divided up the world into totalitarians and nontotalitarians on this basis...
...With these words Kirkpatrick pronounced an epitaph for her intellectual claim to fame...
...Consequently, there is the possibility of some pluralism and change...
...It disrupts "traditional" patterns of life...
...Comments and Opinions democracy overnight...
...After all, they are citizens, not subjects...
Vol. 36 • April 1989 • No. 2
