On the Left

...This was unfair, and I have come to regret my judgment...

...Sympathy for new modes of rebellion gave way to vindictiveness...

...Confidence can only be sustained through patience with the "crooked paths" of dissent...

...For example, few French people find it odd that Francois Mitterrand shares Ronald Reagan's views on the Soviet Union...

...He tells the story in his autobiography of a polemical debate he engaged in with three leaders of the New Left...

...One can recognize the courage of his choices, however, and still ask of Howe, as he asked of right-wing social democrats, whether anticommunism detracted from his sympathy for the oppressed and corroded his responsiveness to new modes of rebellion...

...Determined to apply the lessons of the 1940s to the 1960s, and convinced, correctly but irrelevantly, that the Vietnamese were Stalinist bureaucrats, Howe was incapable then, and remains incapable now, of understanding the utter depravity of the U.S...

...Nor do I find it easy to pass over Howe's hostile swipes at Noam Chomsky and Herbert Marcuse, for all their faults men of extraordinary integrity and virtue...

...Where anticommunism on the Left is so easily accepted, it need not be endlessly reiterated...

...Radical movements invariably make mistakes, often serious ones...

...In the key case for my generation, the Vietnam war, Howe clearly failed to meet his own criteria...

...We share a taste for George Balanchine...

...The question is whether one has the confidence in them to recognize that they will mature, or whether one feels compelled to point their mistakes out to them with an "I told you so" air...

...Nor, finally, am I encouraged by Howe's paternalism toward the civil rights and feminist movements...

...There is something unattractive," he writes, "about a right-wing social democrat who has found hig bureaucratic niche and makes a safe politics out of anticommunism, correct as that anticommunism may be...

...Yet it infuriates me that in this era Howe calls Dave Dellinger, a wonderful man, a "leftist authoritarian" and ridicules him for his "inflated rhetoric...

...In my own naivete, I lumped it together with The New Leader, The Reporter, and other vehicles of withered idealism...

...There are lessons to be taught, but no one will ever learn them if they are delivered in the self-justificatory, accusatory, and defensive tone that Howe seems to adopt when talking to those on his left...

...This passage refers to embittered former socialists who prepared the way for the popularity and influence of neoconservatism...

...I recall reading Dissent, Howe's magazine, during the 1960s, and being constantly repelled by its rigidity...

...So long as the question is posed apocalyptically, and Howe does often pose it that way, it becomes impossible to recognize that all movements for change have the capacity to mature, even without the hectoring of Irving Howe...

...I find his recounting of his life fascinating, brilliantly written in places, and absorbing...

...While he was stationed in the Alaskan wilderness during World War II, Irving Howe read a book by Merle Curti on American democratic thought and decided that he had never fully understood much about the United States...

...Howe failed to understand the gentleness and idealism of those young men...

...As I recall, the meeting went badly because Irving Howe lashed out at Paul Potter, Paul Booth, and Tom Hayden with such vehemence and rage that Potter and Booth were stunned...

...Howe is aware of this danger...

...In A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography, Howe reports that he has corrected his gaps in knowledge through intense and purposeful reading...

...Yet, in importing anticommunist socialism to America, Howe confronts dilemmas that are beyond the ken of his overseas mentors...

...But on one question, Howe's command of American sensibility is perfectly mastered: He knows the importance of vigorous anticommunism in a society obsessed by fear of external enemies...

...By maintaining an interest in politics throughout his life—refusing to discard a socialist identification—Howe has demonstrated his integrity and genuine contempt for opportunism...

...Howe intimates to the reader that he handled the meeting badly, but he provides few details...

...Government's role in that affair and the necessity to confront it aggressively...

...On one point, however, Howe and I are in agreement: Radical movements in America tend to be quintessential^ American...

...Socialists in Western Europe tend to be anticommunist as a matter of course...

...Howe has been an enlightening teacher...

...I wish that the generosity of spirit, of sense of context, he applies to literature could be applied to new generations of radicals...

...Often ahistorical, especially in their early stages, they are given to purity of motive and suspicion of outsiders...

...But how can one be patient if every event of the century is seen as a bitter struggle between the satanic forces of Stalinist evil and the purity of anticommunist socialism...

...Mitterrand is also quite capable of sharing his government with communist ministers...

...His treatment of Jewish immigration...

...In America, by contrast, the Right dubs everyone on the Left, from prominent Democrats to anarchists, "communist," making it excruciatingly difficult to proclaim oneself both a socialist and an anticommunist...

...I am not sure he fully succeeded, for Howe strikes me, as he occasionally strikes himself, as a European intellectual cast by historical fate onto the shores of an inhospitable land...

...Howe and I are, by one of those political twists often found on the Left, now members of the same socialist organization...

...The danger is that the negative will so overwhelm the positive that few, if any, socialist values will be left...

...Alan Wolfe (Alan Wolfe is the author of "America's Impasse," recently reissued in paperback by South End Press...

...American experiences with radicalism and communism are so different from European ones that the application of the lessons of the latter to the realities of the former can lead to trouble—as has apparently happened in Howe's case...

...Discussing his friendship with Richard Hofstader—an otherwise moving account in A Margin of Hope—Howe laments that they never engaged in the male bonding ritual of rating their wives...

...World of Our Fathers, was a masterpiece of evocative experience...

...Howe never joined with others, like Irving Kristol, who practice the capitalism they preach...

...Irving Howe sees himself as part of a small European band of anticommunist intellectuals of the Left, including Ignazio Si-lone, George Orwell, and Nicola Chiaro-monte...

...Considering such attitudes, I think he needs the counsel of the women's movement more than it needs his...

...His books on literature have deepened my appreciation of Edith Wharton and Henry James, let alone more self-consciously political writers...

...He has lost that larger sympathy for the oppressed, that responsiveness to new modes of rebellion, that a socialist ought to have...

...If he listened more than he lectured, Howe might find a receptivity to the lessons he learned in his youth...