Taking On the New Left

...Beichman's methods get one nowhere faster than Marcuse's...

...Yet the comparison with Orwell is not unfair...

...In Orwell's case-or Benda's or Marx's-the motivation was clear...

...At the very beginning of Nine Lies, Beichman offers a convoluted and entirely unconvincing argument about why it is necessary to refute the New Left...

...If serious social analysis is ever to get under way, those differences are the kinds of things we are going to have to begin worrying about...

...America is insane...

...American values are materialistic...

...It would bear repeating, though, if reexamining the old ideas generated some new ones, if attacking intellectual muddleheadedness yielded some clarity...

...the American people are guilty...

...Regrettably, Beichman does not take advantage of the opportunities for real thinking his targets afford him...

...On the contrary, they refine it...

...Since Beichman apparently has no positive ends in view, one must wonder what motivated him to take up these old battles...

...Beichman's sole consistent intellectual position is that of the neo-positivist social scientist...

...And the chapter on the insanity of American life refuses to deal with the evidence at all...

...Beichman is shooting at many of the same fish...

...His characters . . . confirm my belief that hard times and heavy weather can do no injury at all to the human comedy...

...later on he concedes that most of them are so far from the mainstream of American reality they are almost entirely ineffective...

...Wolfe's attitude is far healthier than Beichman's, but one wonders if even he will have the last laugh...

...But they will remain beyond our grasp until intellectuals stop beating up on each other, stop wasting their time and scant cognitive resources on self-indulgence and get to work...

...Beichman is undoubtedly correct in arguing that much of what passes for serious social criticism on the Left today is little more than bombast and sloppy thinking...

...Throughout, indeed, Beichman relies heavily on the very intellectual tricks he so rightly criticizes his adversaries for: An idea is damned with nothing more than the insinuation that it resembles what was once the Comintern line...

...America means genocide...

...Tom Wolfe makes it in his Foreword, and Beichman quotes Orwell approvingly several times...

...Orwell said the same things better, and before him Benda said them, and before him Marx himself, and before him Napoleon...

...Larry King recently argued that although Radical Chic was brilliant in its prose, Wolfe was shooting at fish in a barrel...

...The reason only one chapter is successful, one suspects, is that he is after far bigger game...

...Superb, but hardly original...

...His chapter on genocide is little more than a recounting of Edward Jay Epstein's excellent New Yorker piece disputing the widely-circulated claims of a systematic national police campaign against the Black Panthers...

...Along with the radicals, meanwhile, he accepts the notion of the fat and contented "trade union consciousness" of American workers, thus thoroughly blurring over the vast differences within the labor movement, and between organized and unorganized workers...

...And while the fish are preoccupied with shooting back, it seems likely that the extremely powerful forces of reaction-which everybody seems to agree exist-will take time out from their internecine squabbles long enough to laugh hysterically at the childish games of the Left...

...They have always confused it with various European phenomena that have little relevance in this country-because America is different, as Tocqueville insisted...

...The farcical maunderings of contemporary New Leftists have elicited Arnold Beichman's book, which is to Orwell what Jerry Rubin is to Trotsky...

...but that is hardly the only genocide charge extant, and the definition quoted by Beichman at the head of the chapter at the very least seems to apply to the American Indian...

...What really needs examination is the unique form conservatism has taken in this country, or, in Beichman's terms, the nature of the lies promulgated by those currently in the driver's seat, who have much greater control over our lives than the Marxist-Leninists ever will...

...But the Left is not alone...

...Like Abbie Hoffman, Beichman seems to have hit upon a set of ideas and arguments that are easily popularized, eminently saleable, and, if one doesn't think very hard about them, seductively attractive...

...our political system is a fraud...

...He wanted results, and Left-wing intellectualizing was counterproductive...

...Beichman similarly claims to be taking a reformist position, but the very tone of his work contradicts him...

...Much of his attention is devoted not to their lies, but to the sources of them, and here Beichman is occasionally superb...

...But even with the manageable magic number of nine, extensive documentation and a laudable, if often perfunctory, Orwellian attention to the political uses and misuses of language, Beichman's efforts at refutation often fall short...

...That the Leftists proclaim a love for the people without much liking people, that they claim to support and advance the interests of oppressed classes while actually fearing and distrusting them, that they treat violence by the good guys as somehow intrinsically different from violence by the bad guys, that they advocate destroying the bourgeoisie while sitting in their eminently bourgeois positions, that they tolerate actions in "progressive" countries that they find abhorrent in their own-all this is a familiar litany...

...Moreover, error is not rooted out by name-calling, no matter how subtle or genteel...

...instead, it neatly turns the rhetorical tables on the "liars" by implying that they are insane...

...In his admiring Foreword, Tom Wolfe says, "Arnold Beichman takes a grimmer view than I do of the people he features in this book...

...in other words, Beichman himself accedes to the lie that ours is a materialistic society...

...The chapter on materialism contains a largely valid, albeit largely ad hominem attack on Andrew Hacker's latest (and quite reactionary) book, but deals with the predominance of material values in the United States only by arguing that other societies are equally materialistic...

...Only in his chapter concerning the indefensible idea of collective guilt does Beichman deal effectively with the rhetoric of his opponents...

...In his chapter on the fascist lie, Beichman argues with complete justification that fascism in the European sense is hardly a clear and present danger in the United States, but he makes the same error his enemies do in fuzzing the distinction between fascism and reaction in general...

...Here the New Left critics have accomplished far more than Beichman is willing to give them credit for, though hardly enough...

...the volume of sloppy thinking, rhetorical nonsense and simple stupidity currently in wide circulation is staggering...

...Yet he unquestioningly buys the "myth of the affluent worker" and concentrates his fire on the Leninist tendencies of young radicals...

...Neither Beichman's empty positivism nor his repeated irrelevancies are much help in the massive task that confronts us...

...The choice of nine lies is clearly either numerological or a bad pun, for the scatter of Beichman's shotgun encompasses many other lies, large and small, ranging from the putative distortion of the term "underground press" to the insistence that a good revolution is a contradiction in terms...

...For instance, no social phenomenon has been so mythi-fied and distorted in this country as the status of the working class...

...But he almost never proves that any of them are wrong...

...His unrelenting demands for the "facts" and "verification"-without ever supplying any of his own-and his constant misconception of the uses of abstract ideas make clear that New Leftists are not the only ones guilty of falling into well-worn intellectual traps...

...We need new analytical categories, new definitions, new ideas if we are to make sense out of American social reality...

...the American worker is a 'honky...

...It is to the vapidity and conservatism of contemporary behaviorist "positive" social science that the New Left is overreacting, with perfectly good cause...

...Michael Paul Rogin, in his brilliant book on McCarthyism, pointed out that American intellectuals, of whatever coloration, have never really understood the nature of plain old capitalist conservatism...

...Reviewed by Bruce C. Vladeck Graduate Student, University of Michigan The tragic blindness and fatuity of Left-wing intellectuals in the '30s produced one positive side-effect: They so infuriated George Orwell as to drive him to some of the most brilliant and lucid political prose he, or anyone else, ever wrote...

...false analogies, invidious comparisons and irrelevant empirical evidence abound...

...format notwithstanding, his book is actually an attack on Left-wing intellectuals, American and European, as a class...

...Orwell was probably even more committed a socialist than any of those he attacked, and he attacked them precisely because he realized their stupidities stood directly in the way of radical social change...

...the bomber Left is a moral force...

...Beichman sets out to refute nine "Big Lies" foisted on the American public, through the willing cooperation of the mass media, by members and fellow-travelers of the New Left: that "America is a fascist country...

...and "America needs a violent revolution...

...He calls names, makes unsubtle references to Weimar, harps endlessly on Czechoslovakia, and in general reminds me of Lyndon Johnson's famous remark to an AFL-CIO convention: "I'm not going to say that you never had it so good, but that's the truth, isn't it...

...its smug self-satisfaction would embarrass a smalltown Rotary Club...

...The chapter on the political system contains political science that is so confused, and confusing, this hardened graduate student had to get out pencil and paper in an unavailing attempt to make coherent sense out of the argument...

...This self-contradiction is entirely in character with his methods, but it leaves the question of motivation open once again...

...In all fairness, it should be noted that Beichman is perhaps fighting fire with fire, since the writers he attacks are hardly models of logical form and good sense...