The Rise and Fall of the American Left, by John Patrick Diggins
Kazin, Michael
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE AMERICAN LEFT, by John Patrick Diggins. Norton, 1992. 288 pp. $22.95. John Diggins has written an irritating but provocative book. First, the annoyances: He calls the...
...Proclaiming a new ethic of gaiety and sensuality," writes Diggins, "the Lyrical rebels proudly declared themselves to be reckless and irresponsible...
...Had the depression-era left jettisoned the cult of historical inevitability and adopted Hook's (and John Dewey's) instrumentalist humanism, Diggins implies, it could have avoided the theoretical and political dead ends represented by Stalin and Trotsky...
...Diggins's polemic, however, shares the same political space and makes the same types of exaggerated claims...
...But he does capture something of equal importance —the failure of the left as a whole in this period to adapt to the swiftly changing realities of power, both national and foreign...
...But here, as throughout the book, Diggins's focus on intellectual disputes obscures more significant reasons why the left failed...
...Diggins is on firmer, if less original, ground when he writes about the original promise of the New Left and its eventual retreat into hyperrevolutionary delusion...
...labor history through the single, sentimental lens of "republicanism" —is hardly what bothers Dinesh D'Souza and company...
...But soon the triumphant Bolsheviks SPRING • 1992 • 285 built the romantic fire of revolution to unequaled heights...
...He says almost nothing about the labor movement, but devotes close to a hundred pages to bashing radical academics in the 1980s...
...For Diggins, the history of the American Left essentially begins in Greenwich Village, c. 1912...
...Reading Diggins, one would never know that the writings of Edward Bellamy and Henry George, whom he simply labels "utopians," converted many more Americans to the left than those of Marx, or that the following of moderate socialists like Victor Berger and Maurice Hillquit dwarfed that of all the Village intellectuals combined...
...At first glance, the Old Left, dominated by the Communist party (CP), would seem to have cured this penchant for fuzzy-minded idealism...
...Perhaps it takes a sardonic liberal centrist in love with ideas to make despairing leftists confront a major fault line in our troubling heritage...
...A stimulating book deserved a better conclusion...
...Bohemianism and revolution were joined...
...Neither Berger nor Reed understood or accepted the collapse of the Marxian dream, the triumph of the gods of industrial efficiency and nationalist blood-letting over proletarian solidarity...
...Yet this is a book to argue with as well as against...
...He mocks the left's failure to convert the working class but scorns the Popular Front and contemporary social historians for hyping a tradition of farmers and workers who viewed their conflicts with wealth and power as patriotic...
...Such New York writers as Floyd Dell and Claude McKay, Max Eastman and Crystal Eastman, John Reed and Randolph Bourne composed what he calls the Lyrical Left...
...Diggins describes his own position as "to the right of the Left and to the left of the Right...
...Do most left historians believe that "The world can be changed by writing about it...
...While Diggins adds little to the astute accounts by James Miller and Todd Gitlin, he does craft a few memorable lines: "The young, who had inherited the nuclear bombs as a child inherits an incurable disease...
...By writing mainly about the parts of the left that interest him, Diggins is able to focus on a significant issue: the attempt of radical intellectuals both to nurture an alienated, romantic vision and somehow to win "the people" to their side...
...They downplayed or denied their organizational commitment...
...They championed the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) and the left wing of the Socialist party (SP), published the splendidly original Masses, and articulated the unpopular wisdom of racial and sexual equality...
...Moreover, the wistful iconoclasm of the Masses was reflected across the left spectrum...
...Granted, socialism is a hazy concept for many of these organizers (a confusion most intellectuals share...
...Is support for affirmative action an example of radical professors who "lectured on egalitarianism while practicing elitism...
...But his fullthrottled rush to judgment lacks their careful attention to detail and difference...
...He points, however, to quixotic aspects of the CP that helped it recruit followers yet also encouraged most Americans to view it as a mysterious, alien force: the worship of a foreign country populated "by grim-jawed Russian men with enormous biceps and smiling peasant girls with big, honest calves" and the conviction that, as a leaflet put it, "dialectical materialism" was the "solution to all problems...
...He also fails to notice that radical professors have not been the only ones talking about and organizing for traditional left concerns during the past two decades...
...both movements sought to transform daily life and not merely to grab the levers of power...
...Their alienation from what Richard Nixon would call "Middle America" was a continuing thread from the peaceful optimism of Port Huron and Mississippi Summer to the violent bravado of the Weathermen and the Black Panthers...
...At the time, that was smart, if dishonest, politics, though it backfired once the cold war began...
...But Hook's difficult essays, no matter how challenging they may have been to some "students and young radicals," were not written in a language ordinary leftists spoke...
...After closing out the 1960s, Diggins detours into his own apocalypse...
...There were more socialists in the Oklahoma and Texas Bible belt, per capita, than in New York state...
...Meant as a general comment, it applies best to the period when Eugene Debs pleaded with American workers to love and trust one another but could not convert applause into electoral votes...
...Diggins, who views "the idea of freedom" as the desired core of any left, seems to approve this Whitmanesque purpose...
...But he also points out that the orgiastic, antitechnological vision shared by the New Left and the counterculture violated "the political lesson of radical life in modern industrial society: Don't mess with the middle class...
...First, the annoyances: He calls the work a history of the left in the United States but slights everyone but intellectuals...
...that of the New Left, the poverty of abundance...
...Since the early 1920s, the CP's moral opportunism, secretiveness, and pristine loyalty to the USSR had been unattractive to most of the people the party was trying to reach...
...Without radical activists, there would have been no Rainbow Coalition, Citizen Action, National Organization for Women, ACT-UP, Greenpeace, or Nuclear Freeze...
...In this section Diggins pays more attention to theoretical antecedents (especially Hegel and Gramsci) than do conservative critics of the same phenomenon...
...Both SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) were founded by bright college students engaged with philosophical issues as articulated by such writers as Camus, Sartre, C. Wright Mills, and Paul Goodman...
...Against the arcane naiveté of the academic left, Diggins means to reassert the hard-headed ironies of Tocqueville, Niebuhr, and Hartz...
...Diggins does not minimize the appeal of this view, which took on particular significance with the rise of Nazi Germany...
...He praises Max Eastman and Sidney Hook for attacking the CP's Marxism on pragmatic grounds, for blowing away the Hegelian miasma to reveal the totalitarian impulse within...
...But that is no reason to neglect their commitment to radical democracy and equality and their search for solutions that make sense in a postindustrial society...
...It was a conflagration some Lyricists like John Reed did not survive...
...Even had they reached a wider audience, the attempt to marry Dewey and Marx would have done little to change the minds of most CP members—whose interest in theory was not much greater than that of adherents to other American political parties...
...This is not an adequate account of the fate of the left as a political movement in the first quarter of this century...
...And what irks him most— the attempt by radical historians to view U.S...
...This yields a number of insights and gives some force and continuity to a rather undisciplined work...
...A habit of dogmatism, argues Diggins, was fundamental to the failure of the Old Left...
...Have the working class and middle class really been "increasingly indistinguishable" since the age of Jackson...
...During its golden age the SP was an ethnic and doctrinal quilt of remarkable heterogeneity, the first and last organization on the left to include a cross-section of the white working and lower middle classes (blacks and other minorities were rare, it being an age of legal and informal apartheid...
...The history of the left, he argues, is now ending in a muddle of poststructuralist, "politically correct," self-referential writings that hardly anyone but professors and their captive students actually reads...
...Radicals in the 1930s (depending on faction) admired Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin as masterful, ruthless strategists...
...Recent historians of communism (whose work Diggins belittles) have shown that many rank-andfile CP activists understood this and so concentrated on the immediate tasks at hand (organizing unions, advocating black rights, raising funds for Loyalist Spain, and so on...
...Diggins fails, except for a few kind words about recent feminists, to acknowledge when radicals were successful: notably, in the CIO during the late 1930s and early forties and in the movement that helped end the Vietnam War...
...The idyllic bubble burst when most of America, including many left-wing intellectuals, went off, physically or spiritually, to fight the kaiser...
...By missing this fact, Diggins misses the tragedy of the SP's downfall...
...And he sees the resemblance of radical students in the sixties to the Lyrical Left of half a century before...
...The left, writes Diggins, "has been something of a spontaneous moral impulse, mercurial and sporadic, suspicious of power and distrustful of politics...
...The historical context of the Old Left was 286 • DISSENT the abundance of poverty...
...This is a refreshing way to account for the persistent marginality of Marxism in America—even during the depression years when public recognition of class differences was unusually high...
Vol. 39 • April 1992 • No. 2
