Takes issue with Joanne Barkan's view of Dissent and the liberals
Mattson, Kevin
IT WOULD SEEM that Dissenters and others on the left have a hard time getting over the cold war. Pieces about the cold war not only filled the Summer 2006 issue but have appeared before in the...
...But my memory of him on stage keeps coming back to me in the form of a question: Do I admire all his political judgments now as I look back on them...
...Maybe that's unfair, because Barkan doesn't explain where, in her mind, the "alternative to the Democratic Party" lies (or lay, in the 1950s...
...What Barkan admires in Howe was how he held onto a socialist ideal that reached beyond the limits of liberal reform...
...When she hears "hard-boiled realism," she gets angry, but when she hears utopian ideas, she turns happy...
...This is how Barkan ends her essay, and it seems both too wispy and too tough in its political judgment...
...I heard him speak only once, but his talk stuck with me...
...Pieces about the cold war not only filled the Summer 2006 issue but have appeared before in the magazine's pages— including my own reconsideration of Arthur Schlesinger's The Vital Center (Winter 2005) and Jeffrey Isaac's brilliant defense of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (Summer 2002...
...But when I read Progressive Party arguments with cold war liberals, they sometimes sound like the utopian statements of Barkan...
...pointing out, rightfully, that Dissenters need to rethink cold war history, if only because that was the period of the magazine's gestation...
...She points out that the Democrats controlled Congress, and she's right...
...Indeed, today it seems to be the model that MoveOn uses, and though I find myself in disagreement with that organization's politics, I applaud its desire to push in a direction different from the stupidities of Ralph Nader...
...Invoking this critique—of hardboiled realism, as Schlesinger sometimes called it—Barkan not only reminds readers of Howe's differences with his fellow New York Intellectuals, who seemed to be drifting toward liberalism during the 1950s, but also of the New Left critique of liberalism found early on in the mid-1960s work of Christopher Lasch (a young intellectual whom Howe tried to recruit for Dissent...
...McCarthy's ability to play up Midwest anger against the betrayals of the liberal elite running the State Department—long before anyone had heard of something called "right-wing populism"—provided an important part of the context of cold war politics...
...And remember how close the contest between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon really was...
...If the liberals had stayed true to their principles, she argues, "we'd be living in a very different—and most likely better—world today" To which I ask, are you sure...
...I'd like to know what came of all the hopes and dreams for a third party and why we should have expected anything much from them...
...Overall, Barkan grants cold war liberals more power and influence than they actually had...
...Barkan trots out the standard interpretation of The Affluent Society at the time it was first published (and still today): that Galbraith believed that poverty had disappeared...
...Like most of our editors, I've always admired Howe...
...In the end, I don't think you need to be a partisan of the cold war liberals to understand the challenges they faced and the style of politics they upheld...
...Cold war liberalism was born out of a struggle to distinguish liberal antitotalitarianism from the politics of Henry Wallace's Progressive Party—the most recent (from the standpoint of the 1950s) and realistic attempt to create a third party in American politics...
...he thought it had become less visible, pocketed (if such a term exists) away from the mainstream of society...
...I've never bought the argument that imagining a point beyond reality—thinking in a utopian manner without allowing utopian thought to turn into fanaticism—helps your ability to analyze current problems or think better about political possibilities (Russell Jacoby has churned out this argument over and over again 108 n DISSENT / Winter 2007 in his recent books...
...Then it was clear that he saw a great deal of good in liberalism, including its willingness to compromise politically...
...I 'LL TRY NOT TO GO too far in this line of criticism...
...Again, this suggests that the line between liberalism and socialism is not as clear as Barkan might think...
...it literally followed the Soviet line...
...By contrast, when I hear the left talk up utopian dreams, I think of backlash and conservative victory...
...KEVIN MAT-rsoN's two most recent books are When America Was Great: The Fighting Faith of Postwar Liberalism and Upton Sinclair and the Other American Century...
...You don't have to ignore their mistakes...
...If the cold warriors had been as 'profoundly exacting' with themselves as Rabbi Zusya expected heaven to be with him, we'd be living in a very different— and most likely better—world today...
...She embraces Howe's idealism against the compromises made by cold war liberals...
...I remember liking what Howe said at a Democratic Socialists of America event during the late 1980s, where he suggested it was OK to be confused about politics and yet idealistic at the same time...
...But I also think that cold war liberals offer us a vision of history that recognizes complexity and compromise...
...So it's strange to hear someone suggesting that pining for an alternative to the Democratic Party is very useful when the relevant history seems so dismal...
...Judgments about utopia have a tendency to become a bit more focused when crazy people take the ideal seriously...
...It fought to change the Democratic Party platform from within—pressing for tougher stances on civil rights, civil liberties, and welfare programs...
...But it's clear that Barkan is drawn to Howe's continuing "faith" in a socialist ideal when his compatriots decided to become "realists" during the hard days of the cold war...
...There's no explanation for the harshness of this statement, I think, because there's no justification for it...
...rINALLY, A NOTE about John Kenneth Galbraith...
...There was also George Packer's fine collected set of essays (it included pieces by Dissent editors Paul Berman and Todd Gitlin) that evoked the memory of 1930s fascism and 1940s communism and made explicit linkages between cold war liberalism and the sort of liberalism that Packer hoped to recover...
...Are you not in danger of doing that again...
...Especially odd is how Barkan condemns Americans for Democratic Action, the leading liberal organization of the cold war years...
...Barkan is intent on driving a wedge between cold war liberals and the original editors of Dissent—looking back, especially, to the political criticism of Irving Howe...
...And I think it hurts Barkan's argument in more ways than one...
...For Dissenters, imagining a 'world more attractive' was a useful tool for measuring political choices in the real world against the highest standards...
...Recently the Chronicle Review ran a nice piece by Carlin Romano suggesting that cold war propaganda initiatives, such as those of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, should be rehabilitated for the war against Islamic fascism...
...He was the sort of person I was searching for: intellectually even-minded and politically engaged...
...Too often, I think, utopian thought hurts your ability to make sensible political judgments...
...They also sound an awful lot like Ralph Nader's condemnation of the contemporary Democratic Party...
...Dissent is not alone, of course...
...But Barkan seems to forget this when she suggests that liberals sold out a world of political possibility...
...In fact, Galbraith's argument about poverty was really not so far from Michael Harrington's in The Other America, the work of a Dissent editor that helped energize Lyndon Johnson's Great Society...
...And this brings me back to Barkan...
...Beinart's history is too mechanical, but Barkan's utopianism isn't right, either...
...But shouldn't we examine how Dwight D. Eisenhower slaughtered Adlai Stevenson twice...
...There's something in the middle (a place where liberals find themselves a lot), and I think that Dissent is a good place to be talking about what it looks like...
...Nor should we ever forget the incredible and pernicious influence that McCarthyism had on American political culture during the cold war (the ability to use outside threats for political posturing is certainly one theme to which we should be paying more attention today...
...It operated within the realities of the American party system—instead of pining for a third party...
...While liberals hunkered down with the Democrats, "Dissenters" still "longed for a left alternative to the Democratic Party" But let's get back to history here...
...Barkan is right to say that the cold war should not be looked upon "as a model...
...Here, Barkan sounds vague about just what it is she's advocating: "The Dissent socialists," she explains, "continued to believe that imagining 'the good DISSENT / Winter 2007 n 107 ARGUMENTS society' was an intrinsically human impulse, that it probably coincided with human history— a credible intuition, I think...
...Barkan is right to say that Howe's socialism was the very opposite of totalitarianism, but it's not clear to me that the faith's content went beyond that...
...But wasn't ADA precisely the model that should be recuperated today...
...She suggests that ADA didn't push hard enough against the Democratic Party, because this "would have violated" the cold war liberal penARGUMENTS chant for being "realistic and responsible...
...Consider her strange comments on the politics of a third party...
...I can't help thinking that Barkan sounds too much like the grand dreamers of the American New Left of the 1960s...
...As I have argued elsewhere, you can't just take Arthur Schlesinger and Reinhold Niebuhr with you in current or future political battles...
...But this is wrong...
...Beinart's attempt to resuscitate the tradition mechanically (Here's a little bit of cold war liberalism that we can use here and now) doesn't work...
...On what ground does Barkan stand when she writes, "In those years, the lesser of two evils argument—don't waste your vote on a third party candidate because electing the Democrat will make a difference for many people— didn't carry much weight...
...Have you not, perhaps, overcalculated their political strength...
...DISSENT / Winter 2007 n 109...
...The similarity between Howe's vague socialist ideal and cold war liberalism became explicit during the 1960s, when Howe lambasted the excess radicalism of the New Left...
...It actually garnered votes, unlike the Green Party...
...Joanne Barkan discusses that book in her piece, "Cold War Liberals and the Birth of Dissent...
...Lasch, like Howe, hated hard-boiled realism...
...And maybe that's the key source of my disagreement...
...At the time, I was confused about my own politics, having gravitated out of the radical politics of my youth (in the 1980s peace movement) toward political ambiguity during my college days at the New School for Social Research (where I was suffering through the collected works of the Frankfurt School...
...I liked his demeanor at that talk but can't recall the content of his political arguments...
...The Progressive Party was not just strongly influenced by communists...
...It never threatened to throw elections to the Republican Party...
...This worked as long as the utopia wasn't too utopian . . . I had to scratch my head a bit at this point...
...And, of course, there was Peter Beinart's 2004 cover article in the New Republic and now a book—The Good Fight: Why Liberals—And Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again—that prompted a great deal of discussion in various publications, including the summer issue of Dissent...
...Whether or not the organizers of MoveOn know it, ADA is their predecessor...
...She seems, once again, wistful and condemning in the same breath...
...The liberals maintained that they, unlike their left critics, had serious responsibilities in the real world...
...Howe's vagueness comes back in the form of Barkan's vagueness, which leads her to speculate in strange ways...
...In my opinion, this was the weakest link in Howe's politics—precisely because, like most ideals, it was too damn vague and ill-defined...
...Indeed, Howe's recent biographer, Gerald Sorin, points out that it was difficult to distinguish Howe's socialism from the liberals' liberalism even when Howe was penning critiques of liberal compromise during the 1950s...
Vol. 54 • January 2007 • No. 1
