Responses

...Eugene Genovese's essay is an uneasy mixture of expiation and accusation, and so it elicits a mixed response...

...What are we to make of the feminist radical Elizabeth Cady Stanton...

...SUMMER • 1994 • 385...

...I can practically hear Irving Howe's icy retort: "Exactly what do you mean by we, Professor Genovese...

...Throughout history, he avers, radical egalitarianism and egalitarians have repeatedly (and, he implies, inevitably) wound up justifying mass murder and despotism...

...to call a Communist a Communist, even matteroffactly, was to indulge in red-baiting...

...And as long as we are getting down to cases, what about this magazine...

...So far as I know, these did not include complicity in mass murder...

...Genovese, in his confession, tries to confront that mentality, and that is all to the good...

...Still, to linger on a self-righteous note would be foolish...

...Genovese blends these assertions with a highly questionable, schematic account of the past...

...Genovese has renounced his procommunism, yet he retains some of his old antipathies...

...Like Genovese, the founding editors and writers of Dissent learned early on the essential truth about Bolshevism— but that knowledge led them to draw moral and political conclusions very different from his, and to act accordingly...

...Genovese's old movement may be dead (although not without some frightening exceptions, principally in China and North Korea...

...Genovese has raised some of the most difficult and painful questions about morality, human frailty, and what it means to be an American leftist...

...Here he has dissolved his old intellectual ties less thoroughly than he suggests...

...Ask at random any three editors of Dissent what we mean by socialism, and you are likely to receive at least three different answers...

...In contrast, the democratic socialist movement can claim, at best, to be moribund, as it has been for many years...

...In challenging American leftists to face up to an overdue reckoning with history and morality, he says some things that badly need saying...

...Since then, Dissent has been steadfastly anticommunist (not merely "antiStalinist"), skeptical of third world revolutionism, and critical of the kind of doughface progressivism that Genovese now ridicules...

...But what, then, are we to make of the greatest radical egalitarian of the eighteenth century, Thomas Paine, who helped foment an American Revolution that brought no Reign of Terror, and who risked the guillotine in proclaiming his opposition to the regicidal French Jacobin tyranny...

...I remember an argument I had a few years back with a young leftist editor, who angrily took me to task for referring, in draft, to a well-known scholar and member of the Communist party as a Communist...

...In subtle and not-so-subtle ways, the intellectual fallout of the communist movement (and of its apologists and offshoots) lives on in large portions of the American left, including portions supported and led by professed anti-Stalinists and by people born after Stalin's death...

...We all know the evidence in support of this view...

...Remarkably, he has switched sides but kept many of the same enemies...

...Old Leftist," I learned, was the approved term...

...According to the communist left, important currents of radical egalitarianism, particularly those that stress individualism and personal freedom from an overweening state, are best understood as objectively reactionary —deviationist, crypto-bourgeois, and otherwise lacking in sufficient revolutionary clarity, ardor, and discipline...

...Now I wonder if, in outraged reaction to the more baleful tendencies of contemporary leftism, he is becoming at heart largely a southern conservative (minus, of course, the traditional racism)—which, on reflection, may not mark so great a transformation as one might have thought...

...From what he has written, however, I doubt that I would find Genovese's ideal social order at all agreeable—for it strikes me that although he has at long last renounced Stalin, he may be moving rather too hastily from supporting one form of authoritarian organicism, communism, toward supporting another...

...The difference is that all of the radical egalitarians whom his old movement grouped among the betrayers of revolutionary leftism now get grouped among the tyrants of revolutionary leftism, or among the apologists for tyranny...

...It was a minor episode (and as I recall I eventually got my way), but it was not and is not unusual...

...Agreeing with Genovese's explanation for this syndrome, especially his blanket condemnation of radical egalitarianism, is another matter...

...Those questions deserve answers...

...Like all political leaders, Eugene V. Debs and Norman Thomas made their share of political mistakes...

...Nor is it likely to end the confusion about fundamental ideas, including what socialism even means anymore...

...The editor's anger was indicative of a larger syndrome of evasion, euphemism, and selfdelusion— a sort of doughface mentality—that continues to afflict many American "progressives" on the subject of communism, past and present...

...For its troubles, Dissent and its friends have been treated to the continuing hostility of the tone-setting radical pundits and "theoreticians" of the Old Left, the New Left, and the Multicultural Left...

...Genovese— who in his former self was among the hostile—says nothing about this, which is a shame...

...Does the shade of totalitarianism really lurk behind her 384 • DISSENT The Responses attacks on organized Christianity or her celebrations of the solitude of self...

...Contrary to some wishful thinking early on, Soviet communism's demise has not led the people of the world to rush headlong toward the true light of social democracy...

...What that other form is remains vague, but his essay contains some hints: his passing praise of Burkean traditionalism (with no mention of its monarchical and aristocratic foundations), his conflation of all forms of radical egalitarianism with perfectionist tyranny...

...Let us acknowledge that, in his pro-Soviet days, Genovese's politics, with their chilling defects, helped him to elucidate brilliantly the southern conservative critiques of liberalism, individualism, and capitalism...

...Quite the reverse: And waxing prideful about an honorable anticommunist record will not change the situation...

...May he stick around to argue about them...