A response
Katznelson, Ira
Adam Michnik's introspective and witty "Gray is Beautiful" characteristically possesses broader significance than its putative subject, the shift from "tests of captivity" to "tests of freedom"...
...He scrutinizes the limits of the civil-society-oriented dreams of his fellow dissidents in the political rough and tumble after 1989 and grapples with the responsibilities that come with democratic politics...
...But he underestimates how the dynamic, provisional politics he prefers also requires a degree of steady principle to give order to competing packages of ideas and policies...
...After 1989, Michnik notes, the opposition coalition among religious traditionalists, laissez-faire advocates, and democratic socialists fell apart...
...He is correct, of course, to remind us not only about the seductive power of past antiliberal ideologies, but also that new and yet-unnamed combinations of red and brown threaten today to overwhelm decent liberal regimes, especially those still young and fragile...
...The communists knew otherwise...
...The utopian Bolshevik version—the one he experienced in and out of prison—suppressed freedom, produced social injustice, despised cultural difference, and violated liberalism's most cherished values...
...Alas, liberal democracies lacking in color are also vulnerable...
...I find myself in agreement with most of what he has written, but wish to raise a gentle "internal protest" of my own about one or two aspects of his piece...
...Liberal democracy needs ideology if its politics is to have meaningful "brand differentiation" and if policy debates are to be motivated by more than technical fixes...
...Otherwise, politics reduces to voracious cupidity by the political class...
...As one child of 1968, he may think it prudent to set the socialist tradition entirely aside as so bruised by totalitarianism that it no longer has anything to offer...
...Near the end of his lecture, Michnik recognizes that a "normal politics" socialism of this kind (which he describes too narrowly as "care for the poorest" rather than as a programmatic approach to the management of market economies inside liberal institutions) can contribute shape and color to an otherwise gray democracy...
...20 • DISSENT...
...Though the obverse of communist zealotry, Michnik's determinedly pragmatic orientation to politics ironically may be illsuited to withstand just the assaults on democracy he fears...
...He seems less disquieted by the risks of technocratic problemsolving...
...But is it really possible to imagine "radical democracy" without such a "socialism," whatever we might choose to call it...
...Surely against his own intentions, however, Michnik presents this version of totalitarianism with a posthumous victory: the sole possession of the socialist legacy...
...Ideologies flashing very bright colors, he rightly advises, can kill democracy...
...Michnik addresses as "the source of many arguments with my American friends" his refusal to define himself, as he and fellow opposition leaders once had, as "socialists and people of the left...
...Indeed not, because the liberal socialism such leaders as Olof Palme and Willy Brandt sought to advance inside parliamentary and market institutions differed profoundly from bolshevism...
...not just to the demagoguery of the anti-liberal right or left, but to mass cynicism when party politics does not seem to matter...
...As another, I worry that unless we keep the highest ideals of the left alive inside the liberal political tradition, liberal democracy itself will be drained of its promise...
...It is no surprise that Michnik is uneasy with "socialism" as legacy or guide...
...Michnik reduces conservatism, liberalism, and socialism to values that must be present inside each policy debate, making experimentation and inconsistency possible...
...Michnik's conflation of totalitarian and liberal socialism makes it difficult for him to elaborate the content of his "gray is beautiful" politics...
...It unequivocally accepted the separation of the zones of property and sovereignty, while seeking to utilize government instruments to compensate capitalism's propertyless...
...Adam Michnik's introspective and witty "Gray is Beautiful" characteristically possesses broader significance than its putative subject, the shift from "tests of captivity" to "tests of freedom" in postcommunist Europe...
...He has turned instead to a framework of "radical democracy...
...He challenges the children of 1968, including himself, to reconsider our ideological heritage and develop a keener awareness of the dangers of fanaticism and the burdens of liberal democracy...
...It gave up the SPRING • 1997 • 19 Politics Abroad impossible dream of a future beyond scarcity and settled for meliorative, but still considerable, egalitarian goals...
...Advancing a perfectionist morality, it justified the worst horrors by appeals to a radiant future...
...He worries that some of its members will become obsessed with retribution against their former oppressors and thus unwittingly promote fanaticism...
...The Great Soviet Encyclopedia's entry on "Reformism" upbraided social democracy for its allegiance to parliamentary politics, and claimed that governing socialists in the West "could not establish the type of equality demanded by socialism...
Vol. 44 • April 1997 • No. 2
