Takes issue with Joanne Barkan's view of Dissent and the liberals: Replies
Barkan, Joanne
C ALL THIS A RECKLESS CLAIM, but I know I made the main point of my article clear—that is, Dissent magazine's editors and writers in the 1950s didn't criticize the liberals for not being...
...I find myself cheering the passion with which the magazine tried to safeguard liberal values...
...So, a useful reply would have demonstrated that the liberals had, in fact, taken principled positions on those occasions or that they had no choice but to surrender or that I had misinterpreted Dissent's position or perhaps a combination of all three...
...What's all this got to do with the price of cheese...
...3. I admired many things about Irving Howe— a dear friend and comrade (that's more Old Lefty than New Lefty)—in addition to "how he held onto a socialist ideal...
...Did the liberals really have no choice but to accept a treaty with Spain's fascist dictator...
...But in this article, I make only one statement of unequivocal admiration: "The voice of Dissent in the 1950s on civil liberties, civil rights, social justice, and foreign policy sounds first-rate to me—uncompromising and pointed...
...2. Howe's socialist ideal was not very different from liberalism, and when he "lambasted the excess radicalism of the New Left" in the 1960s, it then became "clear that he saw a great deal of good in liberalism...
...The debate on what the liberals actually did during the 1950s has gone nowhere...
...In his nearly two-thousand-word reply to my article, he devotes one paragraph to the relevant issue, stating that I grant the liberals more power than they had and that I seem to forget the "pernicious influence that McCarthyism had on American political culture...
...Did the Americans for Democratic Action really have to equivocate on the Humphrey Communist Control Act...
...Suppose I was in utero in the 1960s or in Tahiti or suppose I'm an octogenarian reflecting on the years of my young adulthood...
...DISSENT / Winter 2007 n 111...
...Because there's no reason to repeat what I've written above, I'll throw in—just because I like it— something that Irving said to me more than once...
...I purposely limited my article to Dissent's early years, 1954 to 1959, to give the cold war liberals their best shot—before they took the United States deep into the war in Vietnam...
...5. If Mattson had attended to specific actions of the cold war liberals, he might have come up with a persuasive argument that I'm unrealistic about what they could have done in certain instances...
...3. "What Barkan admires in Howe was how he held onto a socialist ideal that reached beyond the limits of liberal reform...
...It was a reasonable expectation, which, alas, went unmet too often...
...JOANNE BARKAN writes and edits in Truro, Massachusetts, and New York City...
...Isn't he engaging in "political profiling"— all detractors of the cold war liberals please get out of line and join the utopians...
...Such an analysis would have added something to the debate about how to evaluate cold war liberalism...
...In my article, I make a point of stating my position on utopianism, and, surprise, it's the same as that of the cold war liberals: "They [the cold war liberals] were entirely right to worry about the link between utopia-building—be it super-race empire or worldwide cooperative of equals—and totalitarianism...
...it's about mechanisms and institutions...
...Couldn't I look askance at the cold war liberals for reasons other than acute 1960s dream syndrome...
...Mattson ignores all the specifics and simply says the liberals couldn't have done better...
...4. "[T]he line between liberalism and socialism is not as clear as Barkan might think...
...6. Finally, here's something from Mattson's piece that I can endorse: he truly "can't help thinking" that I sound like a grand dreamer of the New Left—despite what I've actually written...
...C ALL THIS A RECKLESS CLAIM, but I know I made the main point of my article clear—that is, Dissent magazine's editors and writers in the 1950s didn't criticize the liberals for not being socialists...
...But, of course, I didn't forget, which is why I wrote, "The witch-hunting atmosphere did create constant pressure to conform, but that didn't excuse the public intellectuals, whose only job was to speak out, or politicians, whose job was to lead...
...5. Utopian thought "hurts Barkan's argument in more ways than one...
...What mattered to Dissenters, and to my argument, were the many instances when liberals caved on civil rights, civil liberties, and foreign policy...
...But this utopian business is just a segue he's created to his New-Left pet peeve...
...Actions mattered, so did public stands, and Kevin Mattson has nothing to say about them...
...What does it mean to be a liberal during an illiberal time if you don't stand up and shout...
...6. According to Mattson, the "key source" of his disagreement may be, "I can't help thinking that Barkan sounds too much like the grand dreamers of the American New Left of the 1960s...
...4. I know the relationship between liberalism and democratic socialism...
...But it didn't take long for it to fall into place: Mattson saw an article critical of the cold war liberals and sprang onto his eek!-it's-another-New-Left-utopian hobbyhorse...
...Historically, the road between them had run straight...
...0 n DISSENT / Winter 2007 So what about the other 90 percent of Mattson's piece...
...Was Reinhold Niebuhr upholding liberal principles as best he could when he counseled patience to African Americans in the nascent civil rights movement...
...In many instances, he could have made exactly the same criticisms if he had been a principled Republican, let alone a good liberal—and when the occasional Republican did speak up to defend the Constitution in the 1950s, Dissent applauded...
...I say they could . . . and that's that...
...Mattson doesn't seem to know the defining characteristic of the democratic socialism embraced by Dissent's founders: it took liberal values as its foundation and looked for policies and programs to actualize those values...
...But criticizing the 1950s liberals for not defending their principles adequately doesn't make the early Dissenters or me socialists, New Lefties, utopians, or Trekkies...
...Did Mattson notice that I never mention the 1960s or the New Left...
...they criticized liberals for not defending liberal principles vigorously enough, for compromising those principles too often...
...I thought as I started going through Mattson's piece...
...Liberals standing firm, even leading the way, for civil rights and civil liberties in the 1950s when both were under siege at home and abroad—that wasn't a grand dream...
...Are my values any better than a serious liberal's, say, Isaiah Berlin's...
...ARGUMENTS I'll close with a brief response to each of Mattson's assertions above: 1. Howe's socialism—inspiring or awful—has nothing to do with the subject at hand, that is, his disagreements with the liberals...
...Schlesinger's comment in The Vital Center about nineteenth-century utopians applies to utopians in general...
...Socialism isn't a set of values...
...He devotes it to a convoluted argument—perhaps it's better described as a group of awkward arguments—that makes the following points: 1. Irving Howe's faith in the socialist ideal "was the weakest link" in his politics because "it was too damn vague and ill-defined...
...2. No one had to wait for Howe to lambaste the New Left in order to realize "that he saw a great deal of good in liberalism...
Vol. 54 • January 2007 • No. 1
