Where Have All the Anti-Communists Gone?

...Why were so many liberals, even in their most antiCommunist phase, so vulnerable to a reaction that would make the far Left of the 1930s and '40s seem noble and far-sighted, while its adversaries appeared to be not liberals at all but self-deceived reactionaries in the service of Wall Street, Southern segregationists, the CIA, or other villains of the moment...

...To be labeled a conservative is far more serious...

...Two essays on Clement Greenberg and one on Meyer Schapiro are among the best in the book...

...No respectable college would dare have a Whittaker Chambers chair...

...A novelist and radical between the Wars, Herbst lived until 1969 and befriended Kramer in her obscure, poverty-stricken old age...

...But the fact that the greatest espionage scandal since the Rosenbergs is currently unfolding despite the efforts of the Clinton Administration to keep it under wraps, with China occupying the position of the Soviet Union, may suggest that finding out will be no fan...

...If they happened at all, they happened a long time ago...

...plenty of academics describe themselves as Marxists and even glory in the good old days when Stalin was in charge...

...More important, what difference does it make when prominent Democratic politicians think of the Cold War as a 40-year error and preach "engagement" with our potential 21 stcentury adversaries...

...The recent announcement that the United States government would bestow a certificate thanking each combatant (broadly defined) for his or her service raised nothing more than yawns and giggles in the news media...

...Other sections are fresher, particularly where Kramer writes about art...

...Our slowness to recognize the dangers that a heavily militarized dictatorship in the Far East presents has a variety of causes, but the discrediting of antiCommunism among the American intellectual establishment is undoubtedly one of them...

...The Soviet purge trials, the Great Terror, the Hitler-Stalin Pact, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the Gulag are forgotten, or sometimes dismissed as inventions of the Right...

...Historically speaking, her chief claim to fame is that she was one of the people who could have confirmed in 1948 (but did not) that Whittaker Chambers was telling the truth...

...This mentality is still with us...

...Although the question has no single answer, Kramer makes some astute points...

...So much so, in fact, that she appointed him her literary executor...

...While World War II remains perennially green in the sense that its war criminals are still being tracked down and its surviving Allied veterans feted, the Cold War has become an embarrassment less than a decade after the Berlin Wall fell...

...He tries hard to make Marxism and Modernism seem part of the same story: "Together," he says, "and notwithstanding their mutual suspicions and frequent episodes of outright enmity, they have shaped the agenda of modern intellectual life...

...Bard College has a professorship named for Alger Hiss, a man no informed person now doubts was a spy for Stalin, but there is little pressure to change its name...

...In the arts, humanities and social sciences, at least, anyone who cares about his career will go a long way to avoid such an accusation...

...Is it mostly a matter of sentimentality—a susceptibility to slogans about the weak, the oppressed, victims of all shapes and sizes—coupled with a deep-down feeling that the United States is irrevocably on the wrong side of most issues...

...Most of the book first appeared in the New Criterion, the journal of the arts Kramer founded in 1982...

...Until about 1968, the mainstream of liberal intellectuals as well as politicians was resolutely anti-Soviet...

...Nobody knows yet...

...Here the episodic structure is a positive advantage because it saves him from having to knit them more closely together...

...The series seemed to embody a remarkable schizophrenia on the part of its producers—a conviction that the issues between the adversaries were freedom versus slavery, but simultaneously that the whole thing was a mistake, a succession of regrettable misconceptions...

...The accepted phrasing is that a new generation of moderate leaders in the USSR and the U.S...

...But in this case these qualities suit the material...

...How much easier to be generally on the same side as the Communists, against Hitler (once he broke his alliance with Stalin), Wall Street, and later the CIA, even though the CIA itself was founded and largely staffed by liberals...

...While its details lie in the past, the main story on which Kramer tries to focus our attention has a relevance that unfortunately refuses to fade...

...If "modern intellectual life" is restricted to critics of art and literature between 1920 and 1980 who spent most of their time in Manhattan, maybe, but there are broader definitions...

...inconveniently including President Ronald Reagan) finally "ended" the Cold War...

...another, less fortunate, decided to make a stand in Vietnam...

...As longtime readers of The New Leader know, anti-Communism was once a liberal cause...

...Let somebody offer the octogenarian film director Elia Kazan an award, and the fearless civil libertarians that the movie world is famous for rise up in wrath...

...Like other books that reprint decades of magazine articles unaltered, The Twilight of the Intellectuals sometimes has a fragmentary and slightly dated quality...

...For Kramer, that conflict began years after American Communism had reached its high point and begun to decline...

...A liberal Democratic President gave us the Marshall Plan and NATO...

...Few subjects are by nature more fragmentary, or more obsessively concerned with the past, than the story of intellectuals' involvement in Communism and anti-Communism from the 1920s to the 1990s, first as a real political struggle and then as a battle to define what happened...

...Proposals for a Cold War memorial have not as yet gotten off, or onto, the ground, despite the proliferation of monuments in Washington for nearly every other cause or group...

...The most interesting of Kramer's topics, however, remains what he shrewdly entitles the last section of his book, "The Strange Fate of Liberal Anti-Communism...

...This curious case of amnesia has been coming on since the Vietnam War and related developments largely discredited anti-Communism among liberals...

...Without ever mentioning the old Popular Front slogan "No enemies to the Left," he emphasizes how uncomfortable many New Deal liberals felt about criticizing anyone who was an enemy of the Right...

...Did Vietnam and the relentless pressure exerted by young opponents of that war shame "establishment" liberals into abandoning the anti-Communism they had taken pretty much for granted from the late 1940s on...

...After all, he probably meant well...

...In addition to chronicling the rise, fall and rebirth of Marxism among intellectuals, Kramer has anotherpurpose: to narrate the decline of artistically minded intellectuals' allegiance to Modernism during the same period...

...Mentioning that the Soviet Union expired at about the same time is regarded as tactless...

...Today Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the editors of this magazine and of the New Republic are still fighting a noisy rearguard battle, but most liberal anti-Communists became neoconservatives long ago...

...Such has been the trajectory of the art critic and cultural commentator Hilton Kramer, once an associate editor at The New Leader, whose new book The Twilight of the Intellectuals: Culture and Politics in the Era of the Cold War (Ivan R. Dee, 363 pp., $27.50) recounts some singular events in a history that is now fading from memory or, worse, being reconstructed in a way that transmutes longtime Stalinists like Lillian Hellman into lonely heroes while the Democratic Socialist George Orwell is caricatured as a villain of the Right...

...Hiss and Chambers locked in their eternal embrace, secret CIA financing of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the loves of Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell—these legends, well retold here, have the familiarity that fairy tales possessed in the days when parents read to their children...

...To much of the audience at which the CNN series was aimed, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and the Hollywood Blacklist are the Cold War's best-known names...

...The only part of it that still raises much heat in intellectual circles is the injustices of anti-Communism itself...

...Why should anyone care when 30-yearold assistant professors try to relive the Red Decade in fantasy...

...Kramer repeatedly points out that many liberals pass their days in fear of being stigmatized as conservatives...

...Although Kramer makes many intelligent comments about both movements, the two strands of his book coexist rather than cohere...

...Parts of both stories have often been told...

...Few except anti-Communist ideologues speak of the United States and its allies as having won, let alone celebrate the victory...

...Her life usefully focuses several of Kramer's themes—the perverse loyalties and serial betrayals inherent in Stalinist politics, the relation of political radicalism to literature, above all the romantic reconstruction of the radical past that began when the 1930s fell into the hands of the 1960s generation...

...But what explains it...

...I can attest that this fear is a reality in universities, and helps explain why faculty opposition to radical changes there has usually been so weak.To be calleda Marxist does one's career no harm today...

...From my student days in the late '40s and early '50s," he writes in the Introduction, "my political beliefs—to the extent that I held any—were those of a liberal anti-Communist, and when liberalism itself took a sharp turn to the radical Left in the 1960s, I defected to the ranks of the newly emerging neoconservatives, where I happily remain today...

...The most vivid essay of all is the longest, "Who Was Josephine Herbst...

...That life also helps demonstrate the personal price that some ex-Communists paid, not because of McCarthyism or the Blacklist but through the effect of constant deception on their own psyches...

...To be sure, CNN has just finished broadcasting a lengthy documentary TV series entitled Cold War, and abbreviated versions of it may soon become the chief means of teaching high school students about 40-odd years of U.S.-Soviet confrontation...

...Certainly a drastic loss of confidence in American institutions, plus a style of relativism that often equates opposition to a dictatorship with intolerance of another culture, began to flower early in the war and soon grew into a sturdy branch of conventional wisdom...

...Of course, all of these controversies should be part of the safe past by now, academic in the popular sense of the word...