Here and Now

...I think they are best understood in terms of individual psychology...

...The fact, nevertheless, remains that the climate for such a rapprochement was created not by the non-Communist Left, which, after all, is insufficiently strong to do more than reflect cultural changes—it cannot make them—but by the dominant liberal response both to McCarthy and to the new Moscow line...

...If the shift in the Soviet line had not actually precipitated defections from the ranks, such defections might very well have been invented for the high dividends they pay in non-Communist sympathy and accessibility —and, in fact, there are those of us who are crude enough to doubt whether there have in truth been as many alienations as are now advertised...

...The same Khrushchev who opened the door to this feast of reason ordered the tanks into Budapest...

...It should have been predictable, but where was it predicted...

...The developments Mr...

...The bang of an assassin's bullet finished the life of Huey Long, but his career, too, like McCarthy's, ended with a whimper...

...While we might assume that the instincts which had supported him had not been exterminated but still lurked beneath the social surface, requiring a constant caution lest they again announce themselves, we had firm reason to be reassured that there existed in this country substantial resources for maintaining our health as a democracy...

...But it has been intense and bitter, and on the whole the victory has been markedly on the side where I am not...

...But whatever the machinations in which the Communists are now engaged, they would accomplish little were it not for the refusal of non-Communist leftists and liblisted among the officers and national committee members of this new united front are indeed Communists or non-Communist leftists, rather than liberals of, say, the ADA persuasion such as were the most vocal and passionate anti-McCarthyites—this much we can at least be grateful for...

...and he invited the rest of America to follow his example...

...Among the members of the national committee one notes such names as Dorothy Day, Stringfellow Barr, Joseph Starobin, Milton Zaslow, Charles Walker...

...And this is the political-cultural situation into which there has now arrived a new "educational" organization, the American Forum...

...The purpose of the organization is to advance "study and serious untrammeled political discussion among all elements that think of themselves as related to historic Socialist and labor traditions, values and objectives . however deep and bitter their differences have been...

...perhaps by the time this column appears in print there will have been more information...

...The relation of American liberalism to Senator McCarthy and to what we call McCarthyism has always been symbolical, and the consequences of this unreality have become even clearer since his downfall than they were in the period of his ascendancy...

...And even the confusion and dissension within the parties has been turned to excellent account in the effort toward this goal...

...Because McCarthy called people Communists who were not Communists, it became the pride of dominant American liberalism to believe that the very fact that McCarthy accused someone of being a Communist constituted prima facie evidence that the accused person was not a Communist: Correlative to McCarthy's concept of guilt by association with Communists, liberalism can be said to have created a new concept of innocence by opposition to McCarthyism...

...But we had also been permitted to witness the quick remission of these sick social symptoms once Long was dead...

...I find myself tempering bitterness with amusement by imagining what would have been the result had McCarthy advertised himself to be in a state of deep unease in his connection with the Texas oil millionaires and issued an invitation to all the disparate anti-McCarthyite elements in our population to come join him in a study group to discover their common disenchantment with democracy...

...But the anti-Communist minority was sufficient to retain the anti-Communist emphasis in its program and therefore to make the organization highly suspect in those places from which a group which wishes to work within the American cultural community must draw its moral and financial support...

...As a manifestation in American politics or in our political culture, it could be a source of worry only to hysterics infected by McCarthyism...

...As a united front, Mr...

...I think it is accurate to say, however, that it is in the non-Communist world rather than within Communist circles that the Khrushchev policy has made its greatest effect: By disavowing their responsibilities and guilts for the totalitarianism of Stalin, the Communist parties of the world have been able considerably to clear themselves of the guilt of representing a perhaps slightly different but just as totalitarian principle and practice...

...Thus, when the overture of a united front is once more made to them, we have every reason to expect they will once more rush, all innocent, to the slaughter...

...In order to mobilize itself for the effort of combat against this new threat, American liberalism had to persuade itself that McCarthy was a danger of such proportions and of such certainty of triumph that, measured against him, the forces of decency in this country were virtually impotent...

...Not by American liberals certainly, and this despite the fact that within recent memory there had been the phenomenon of Huey Long to remind us that fascist demagoguery is no new thing in American politics and that it does not carry within it the seeds of its inevitable triumph...

...The chairman of the American Forum is A. J. Muste and its vice-chairmen are Kermit Eby of the University of Chicago, Milton Mayer, John McManus of the National Guardian, Bayard Rustin of Liberation and Mulford Sibley of the University of Minnesota...

...Schwartz tells us, includes particularly bitter enemies in the past—he instances Doxey Wilkerson and Albert Blumberg of the Communist party and Farrell Dobbs, recent Trotskyite candidate for President...

...And having gone this far, it was but natural that it took the next step in illogic: If whomever McCarthy accused of being a Communist was automatically innocent of the charge, then whatever attitudes or groups McCarthy linked with the Communist threat were also innocent of the charge...

...The recent closing down of the offices of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom is perhaps the most striking demonstration of the defeat of those few of us who have all along supposed, and who continue to suppose, that freedom of culture in this country still has much lo fear from the incursions of Communist totalitarianism...

...But by the time McCarthy appeared on the scene, this knowledge seemed to have been wholly lost...

...Both here and abroad, many people left the ranks and even among those who stayed on there has been a significant amount of dissension and new alignments of power...

...Schwartz goes on to comment: "The new organization is essentially a response to the drastic change in leftist thinking caused by developments in the Soviet Union and elsewhere in the last year and a half...

...Precisely in the degree that liberal opinion has exaggerated the significance of his victories and the nature of the crisis into which it felt that McCarthy had propelled us, it has exposed itself to damage in the real cultural and political world...

...Indeed, Communism itself was no threat except on the international front...

...Obviously, I am not saying that the same liberals who feared and fought McCarthy are now participants in the American Forum...

...The group, Mr...

...Are the anti-Communist intellectuals and students of Hungary enjoying their "serious, untrammeled political discussion" with Kadar and his colleagues...

...To contemplate the American Forum while my memory of Hungary is still so raw is not easily supportable...

...There was coined the term "anti-anti-Communist" to describe the large, impassioned mobilization of liberal sentiment against that small band of liberals, among whom I proudly number myself, who, however fierce in their opposition to McCarthy, still continued to insist that there ivas a threat from Communism in this country for the single reason that so long as Soviet totalitarianism continued to be a power in the world it must necessarily threaten our democratic culture (this is not a question merely of how many members there are in the Communist party of the United States) and that it had to be guarded against as firmly as we guarded against the threat of fascism, though by methods quite other than those of McCarthy...

...Surely at the height of his powers it should have been predictable of Senator McCarthy that his career would end with a whimper rather than a bang...

...The same Communist party with which we are now supposed to sit down and talk things over in America is now firmly in control in Hungary...

...The conflict, in this last decade, between the anti-Communist liberal and the anti-anti-Communist liberals has not always been overt...

...He left behind him no organization or heir to his leadership, and no demand for organization and leadership on the part of his followers...

...General liberal opinion in America not only rejected McCarthy and his methods of hunting down Communists...

...By its overesti-mation of the menace of McCarthy, by its refusal to admit that there was any possibility of a new Communist assault upon the political culture of America, and by its blind, wishful eagerness to believe that the end of Stalinism meant the end of Communist totalitarianism—anyerals to look the Communist reality full in the face, and this is where the dominant liberal attitude to McCarthy-ism bears its fruit in the formation of the American Forum...

...it let itself be pushed to the point where it virtually rejected the proposition that there ever had been or could be Communists in America, or a Communist danger...

...Instead of saying, "We don't like the way McCarthy fights Communism and we don't like McCarthy, but there is the continuing danger of Communist infiltration and influence in America," American liberals did their best to persuade us and themselves that there was no danger of Communist influence and penetration, and by extension that Communism itself was nothing to fear except in terms of global war...

...And so, to persist in one's anti-Communism, even in total disassociation from McCarthy, came to be seen as the validation not of one's commitment to democracy but of one's commitment to fantasy...

...Schwartz points out, it represents "the broadest spectrum of such political thought since the Progressive party of 1948...

...Playing his own game with the undue fears to which people are prey, McCarthy invoked the image of a gross Communist threat to our security...

...Are no mementi mori to be carried through our halls...

...Among the developments of the last year and a half to which this new organization is a response, is the massacre of the Hungarian freedom fighters to be included...

...In his assumed role of leader in the anti-Communist crusade, he lied, cheated, hurt innocent individuals and violated the precious rules of democratic tradition...

...In Long we had seen a power-personality of rather more gruesome aspect than Senator McCarthy attract to himself and give political formulation to various of the darker social impulses...

...It is just possible, of course, that some of these withdrawals were conveniently arranged, or even pre-arranged before Khrushchev's speech, in order to distribute Communist agents in places where they would otherwise not be welcomed and ensnare a new generation of fellow-travelers...

...While a normal amount of fear is useful and even necessary for self-protection, an undue fear carries conduct outside the limits of reality into a world of symbolic action where we operate only at the risk of defeating ourselves in the very areas of reality which we had proposed to safeguard...

...The appeal for discussion of their "problems' is the best possible appeal which Communists can make to non-Communist leftists: nothing is more attractive to the leftist intellect than the illusion that there is a rift within the Communist party of which he can now take a reasonable advantage...

...I take my knowledge of this new enterprise from Harry Schwartz's report in the New York Times of May 13...

...And what is, of course, most remarkable and disheartening is that this penetration could take place in the spring of 1957, just six short months after Hungary...

...But these few anti-Communist intellectuals—so few that one could name them—who accepted McCarthy's way of meeting the Communist danger scarcely constituted even a minority response, available to cultural analysis...

...It had to intoxicate itself with the idea that American democracy was on the brink of annihilation...

...They have put themselves in a perfect position for a new united front with other leftist elements in the various democratic populations—an English Forum is in process of formation in England...

...It was a bad spectacle, very bad indeed, and it was especially disturbing to see a few fellow-members in the liberal-intellectual community allowing themselves to be seduced into joining their anti-Communist fervor with his, unpained by his methods...

...The downgrading of Stalin naturally brought about changes in the national party line-ups...

...Of the response of the American public to the Hiss book I shall write at some length in a future column...

...Studying the names so far published, we see that, with a few notable exceptions, the persons thing to make Communism less of an enemy of democracy than it is majority liberal opinion in this country bears a direct and major responsibility for this newest Communist infiltration...

...It has the gravest consequences, whether in our lives as private individuals or in our lives as citizens...

...The overestimation of an enemy is no light matter...

...It killed its opposition...

...Schwartz has in mind are of course Khrushchev's assault upon Stalin and Stalinism and the consequent upsets within the Communist parties of the world...

...Yet neither from this nor from other examples on the recent historical record—the fate of Father Coughlin comes to mind—could American liberals learn even a strategy of combat against demagogues, let alone the ability to make a proper estimation of the danger...

...There were many more anti-anti-Communists in the American Committee than there were simple old-fashioned anti-Communists...

...HERE AND NOW By Diana Trilling McCarthy, the Liberals and a New Communist-non-Communist Forum' The recent announcement of the formation of the American Forum, an organization to promote cooperation between Communist and non-Communist leftists in this country, comes as an ironic and strangely fitting climax to a fortnight which also brought the news of Senator McCarthy's death and the appearance of Alger Hiss's appeal to the court of public opinion...

...And Mr...

...Today it is only of the concurrence of McCarthy's death and the launching of the American Forum that I am moved to speak...