Flight of the Trotskyites

...Nor is Wald himself entirely free of sectarian dogmatism: He insists on a stance of anticapitalism (whatever that means) as a sign of virtue, and suggests that people opposed to affirmative action must be in favor of discrimination...

...Recognizing where abstract commitments to a cause can lead, Wald does concede that political perspectives should be based on "real experience...

...To answer it, Wald goes back to the 1920s and a small group of anti-parochial Jews centered around Columbia University and The Menorah Journal, among them Lionel Trilling, Eliot Cohen (the future editor of Commentary) and such largely forgotten figures as Herbert Solow and Felix Morrow...

...The magazine, it will be recalled, started as a cultural offshoot of the party, failed for lack of support when the Communists launched their Popular Front policy in the mid1930s, and was resurrected in 1937 by its editors, Philip Rahv and William Phillips, as a voice of anti-Stalinist Marxism...

...Still, when a radical like Wald begins questioning free thought and praising Lenin, it is time to check the exit doors...

...It says something about his approach, if not his politics, that Wald cannot bring himself to list Soviet imperialism among the causes of the transformation...

...The exodus, longer than the Hebrew children's, began early and has continued late...

...This position was re-enforced by "the postwar situation of economic boom, upward mobility, the failure of revolution in Western Europe, and the advent of the international Cold War and domestic McCarthyism...

...In fact, the appellation 'New York Intellectuals' began as a somewhat mystifying euphemism for a group originally called the 'Trotskyist Intellectuals.'" The path was cleared in the 1950s and 1960s for the birth of Neoconservatism in the 1970s...

...A self-styled vanguard of cosmopolitan humanists, they drifted inexorably into Communist Party circles with the onset of the Depression...

...By the same token, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter may have gone chasing after strange gods, but throughout the '70s and into the '80s more than sufficient honor was to be found in the company of, among others, Irving Howe, Daniel Bell, Richard Rovere, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Hannah Arendt, Alfred Kazin, Dwight Macdonald, Mary McCarthy, Harold Rosenberg, and Theodore Draper...

...Conflict between the periodical and the party had been inevitable: Partisan Review, through its devotion to modernism, was committed to a belief in the autonomy of the artist, whereas the apparatchiks insisted that art should be subordinated to political ends...

...Anyone who has watched self-proclaimed Socialists and Social Democrats jettison their liberal economic convictions with embarrassing haste in order to endorse the muscular anti-Communism of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan knows this criticism has merit...

...In reflecting on this division between the Neo- and the nonconservatives, one is reminded of a comment by Dwight Macdonald describing the re-establishment of Partisan Review in 1937: "If Howard Fast and Albert Maltz were adamant in refusing to write for us, we were able to rub along with Dos Passos, Farrell, Gide, Silone, Orwell, Mary McCarthy, Delmore Schwartz, Meyer Schapiro, Edmund Wilson, and T.S...

...The mistake of the New York Intellectuals, Wald concludes, was to abandon their active commitment to Leftist politics...

...A number sought refuge on the Right...

...The first reaction of anyone acquainted with the recent flood of memoirs and histories covering the same ground is therefore bound to be, "Oh no, not again...

...Rahv later wrote: "Within the brief space of a few years the term 'proletarian literature' was transformed into a euphemism for a Communist Party literature which tenaciously upheld a factional faith identifying the party with the working class, Stalinism with Marxism and the Soviet Union with socialism.' Wald emphasizes that both groups, the Jewish humanists and the Partisan Review critics, remained radical despite their break with the Communists, seeking out Leftist alternatives to the party...

...In place of Marxism, the dissidents substituted "liberal anti-Communism," blurring the distinction between their previous anti-Stalinism and the American Right's primitive anti-Communism...

...Then the first two merged to form the Workers Party of the United States, which in turn combined with the Socialist Party, until the Trotskyist faction led by James ?. Cannon and Max Shachtman founded the Socialist Workers Party, eventually split by Shachtman going off on his own to create the Workers Party—and all this is not to mention the activities of assorted Oehlerites, Fieldites, Weisbordites, Shermanites and, in lateryears, Cochranites...

...With tedious regularity they have given up their belief in Marxism-Leninism...

...Others, perhaps the majority, managed to regain their composure, especially after the turmoil had died down, and to continue working in a broad political arena from Center to Left (albeit not Left enough to satisfy Wald...

...A second stream of Communist dissidence that contributed to thedevelopment of the New York Intellectuals emerged somewhat later among the writers and editors of Partisan Review...

...Everything they valued, including ideas they had built their lives around, seemed threatened...

...Similarly, it is a mistake for him to draw a straight line from Cold War liberalism to Neoconservatism...

...There they encountered others who would be crucial to the formation of the New York Intellectual mentality, notably Sidney Hook...

...No scholarly neutrality or settling of old scores for him...

...As recently as 1982, Susan Sontag, normally not so slow a learner, declared that she had finally become convinced of "the utter villainy of the Communist system...

...Steadiness, though, was not the dissidents' strong suit, and during much of the 1930s they were shuffling and reshuffling, moving constantly between camps or establishing camps of their own when no one else's would do...

...SPRING BOOKS FUGHT OF THE TROTSKYITES BY BARRY GEWEN Alan M. Wald's The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (University of North Carolina, 440 pp., $32.50) travels one more time around the block with that old gang of familiar faces, the Hooks, Rahvs, Trillings, Howes, et al...

...These tergiversations seem to hold an endless fascination for many who lived through them, much the way the school football team does for old grads...

...In the effort to be "independent critical thinkers," they came unhinged, lost a necessary anchor and drifted starboard...

...The rift became irreparable when the Moscow Trials got under way in 1936, and after word filtered back during the Spanish Civil War that the Stalinists were destroying their supposed comrades in the non-Communist Left...

...Sidney Hook was a pioneer down this path, and practically every person in Wald's book has followed him in the same direction though not necessarily to the same length—including some who went to prison under the Smith Act for their political views...

...Wald, as a Marxist historian, takes the various maddening shifts seriously enough to do a remarkably thorough job of tracing them...

...Many of the ex-Communists officially joined Trotskyist organizations, while others, like the Partisan Review editors, cheered from the sidelines...

...Yet most people, even those with an interest in the American Left, are apt to conclude that by the late 1930s the Marxist river had arrived at its delta, splitting into a thousand rivulets that, considered together, amounted to an enormous bog...

...From the perspective of the 1980s, he perceives the Neoconservative movement as the sturdiest political legacy of these former Leninists and revolutionaries, and he wants to know what went wrong...

...Initially, they could choose among the American Workers Party, the Communist League of America and the Communist Party Opposition...

...The crucial events producing the current conservative wave occurred not in the 1940s and 1950s but in the 1960s when the counterculture, the upheavals on the campuses and the woolier rhetoric of the Vietnam War protesters terrified many of the New York Intellectuals and drove the rest nearly to distraction...

...According to Wald, World War II was a critical event in converting the non-Stalinist Marxists into budding Neoconservatives...

...Allegiances, developed out of some notion of a larger picture, are important...

...Her announcement was greeted with shrugs by those who wondered what had taken her so long...

...Yet if his book shows anything, it is that for over half a century the "real experience" of dedicated radicals has been disillusion and renunciation...

...As late as the 1950s, the Shachtmanites were forbidden to contribute to Dissent without permission of the leaders...

...Several distorted the past to minimize their prewar revolutionary beliefs...

...Wald's angle, however, is different...

...Trotskyism in particular exercised a natural pull, not simply because of its anti-Stalinist Marxism but perhaps even more because of the attractiveness of its brilliant eponym, who had made history as well as written it...

...The majority of them, having made the choice to support the Allies, entered into a new and positive relationship vis-à-vis the American government, downplaying their earlier radicalism and opposition to capitalism...

...Eliot...

...He writes as a Marxist and an activist engaged in the search for a usable past...

...Wald is wrong to bunch them together...

...His eyes are firmly fixed on the present...

...It is not a bad question...

...Almost every Marxist sect described in TheNew York Intellectuals exhibited the kind of authoritarian intolerance that derived from a self-righteous faith in its own purity...

...Once freed of the Marxist-Leninist blinders, the New York Intellectuals spread themselves across a wide political spectrum, from socialism to anarchism to staunch conservatism...

...Most or all of these individuals supported William Z. Foster, the Communist candidate for President in 1932, but before long were feeling stifled by Stalinist rigidity and began breaking with the party in 1933...

...he is unable to see significant distinctions because of his position out in Left field...