Ten Years After 1989
Cohen, Mitchell
TEN YEARS AGO I was quite unsure as to what would happen in the communist bloc. I certainly did not predict how vast the transformation would be. I did believe that it was a moment of...
...This was partly due to my experiences covering the events of 1989 - 1990 for Dissent...
...The answer: one must sometimes suffer in the short term for the sake of the long run...
...Recall Jeane Kirkpatrick's claim—made half a decade before Gorbachev's rise and just as Deng's reforms were beginning—that since communist regimes remade every nook, cranny, and brain cell in their societies, change could never emerge from within them...
...Memo to devotees of such theories: European communism collapsed but China's communists have remained in power, remaking their country so radically that its society and economy are today unrecognizable by Maoist standards...
...Whether or not the left can find open horizons is still an open question...
...Francis Fukuyama submitted after 1989 that the triumph of "the Western Idea" (his own, actually) precluded alternative thinking in general...
...Such "toughmindedness" provided the intellectual justification for a great deal of foreign policy in the Reagan era...
...Jeane Kirkpatrick proposed before 1989 that totalitarianism precluded the emergence of alternatives from within communist societies...
...If social pain accompanied these measures, well, sufferers were told to bear it for the sake of the long term—a formula curiously like that once used by communists to rationalize their policies...
...MITCHELL COHEN iS co-editor of Dissent...
...Such was my hope, but I wasn't all that hopeful...
...The second dimension was the will to imitation—mostly of capitalism's consumer culture...
...Alas, reality changed, even though it was not supposed to do so...
...Yet now our conservatives were proponents of radical measures rather than measured reforms...
...Anyone bludgeoned by an ideology for a half century is apt to embrace its opposite...
...Our conservatives have an obvious answer: the Kremlin did not go far or fast enough in the 1990s...
...In fact, these revo10 DISSENT / Fall 1999 lutions had two dimensions...
...Pretend I'm a worker in a Budapest factory, not a professor from New York," I asked one of them, "Explain why I should back your plans for radical marketization...
...As a famous reactionary once put it, you can't make an omelet without breaking the eggs...
...I can make these statements only because I did not (and do not) think like the conservative cold warriors...
...Beginning in the 1970s global economic and technological transformations posed weighty challenges to left-wing thinking in general...
...Tough-mindedness" also led many conservatives to advocate economic "shock therapy" for postcommunist lands...
...These same folks had long argued against anything anywhere that might be called "radical" (especially if the aim was some sort of social redress...
...But Kirkpatrick had simply taken a (sometimes useful) conceptual tool, the ideal-type of totalitarianism, and declared it to be reality...
...And unless you really do believe in historical necessity—and that Boris Yeltsin incarnates the Western Idea—then you must admit that alternative possibilities (some positive, some awful) might also have materialized in Europe...
...Imagination aside, it was exhilarating to watch them fall...
...I hoped then that communism would end in Eastern and Central Europe and that a rebirth of social democracy would ensue...
...I recognized all this a decade ago but failed to make an essential connection...
...So 1989 marked the end of Jeane Kirkpatrick's ideology...
...Not all conservatives believed postcommunist history needed a push...
...Nineteen-eighty-nine and 1990 were not contingency-free years...
...If history achieved its telos with communism's fall, no nudge was needed, not to mention imagination...
...In Hungary, for instance, I watched a reborn Social Democratic Party self-destruct with embarrassing rapidity...
...First, there was the dismantling of one-party police states...
...Glorious as 1989 was, the revolutions against communism were "revolutions without imagination," as another dissident intellectual commented to me in 1990...
...Hardly inspiring, but not so surprising given Eastern bloc living conditions and Western enticements...
...Why have things gone so badly in some places—like Russia...
...I hoped for the emergence of an inventive democratic left, liberated from the Leninist albatross, freed from the (spurious) identification of social egalitarianism with corrupt notions like "democratic dictatorship...
...Rend them and unintended consequences, apparently always bad, will follow...
...Societies are complex tissues, they warned...
...Regrettably, the left did not rise to them in compelling ways...
...Why should there have been social democratic imagination in the East when there had been so little in the West...
...I did believe that it was a moment of contingencies and possibilities...
...Portals from communism were, happily, found...
...We know we want to go out, but we don't know exactly where the door is...
...One part of today's left, the "third wayers," talks only of "adjusting" to these changes, while another part rails against them without offering programmatic alternatives...
...I listened to some of the country's bravest opposition intellectuals—often members of the liberal Alliance of Free Democrats—sound like Bolshevik apostles of Milton Friedman...
...If Kirkpatrick took an ideal-type for reality, Fukuyama took immediate events for Eternal Historical Reason...
...In this era of globalizing capitalism, the left's situation brings to mind a remark I heard in June 1989 (again in Budapest), when it was clear that big events were afoot, but their consequences very uncertain: "We are moving and thinking in a dark room and we don't know where the walls are...
Vol. 46 • September 1999 • No. 4
