Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes (23 page)

Of course, I had actually "mentioned" the hierarchies (though not by name) to dismiss them as left-wing illusions, no more substantial than the idea that somewhere behind the Hale-Bopp comet a space ship was waiting to take the enlightened to heaven. So I tried another tack. "Let me ask you this question," I said. "Where do you put Oprah Winfrey in your hierarchies?" I knew that Oprah Winfrey was at the bottom of any oppressive hierarchy conceived by leftists. A woman born in Mississippi to a black sharecropper and a victim of sexual abuse, she was the oppressed of the oppressed.

But in the real world Oprah had risen by dint of her own intelligence, effort, and talent to become a mother-confessor and authority figure to millions of lower-middle-class white females who had never passed through a sensitivity training course. The fortune she has been able to amass through these efforts casts her among the super-rich of America's ruling class as one of the
Forbes
four hundred, with a net worth of 550 million dollars
before
the recent stockmarket boom.

"She's a token," the young woman said.

"Sorry, she's not a token," I replied. "Cornel West is a token."

Cornel West, an intellectual of modest talents whose skin color has catapulted him into academic stardom with a six-figure income at Harvard, is indeed a token. The contemporary American university is a feudal institution, run somewhat like the Communist Party, where the elect raise people to the heights by exercising the same kind of arbitrary
droit de seigneur
that was the privilege of rulers in pre-democratic and pre-capitalist times. There was no tenure committee or central committee, however, to lift Oprah out of the societal mud-to say, for example, to Phil Donahue, "Move over Phil, we need a person of color to put in prime time for diversity's sake." The power Oprah Winfrey has been able to accumulate refutes every cliché of the political left. Her psychological power over her mainly white audience has made her the first individual in history able to create a best-seller by fiat and the millions in revenues that go with it. She is a film-making industry in herself. She has shown that the barriers of race, class, and gender are not insuperable obstacles to advancement in America any more than residual anti-Semitism or prejudice against the Irish create impenetrable "hierarchies" of oppression to bar those groups' ascent.

But, of course, such a perspective is politically incorrect at places like Bates, so dangerous that the faculty commissars are constantly on guard to prevent students from too much contact with such dangerous thoughts. The relatively good behavior of my audience at Bates is not always in evidence. The campus norm when conservative ideas are expressed is a kind of intellectual fascism which makes such dissenting discourse improbable, and often impossible. On the same trip, I spoke at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. When I got to the line "Nobody is oppressed in America," a very large African-American student stood up and began ranting in my direction, "You're a fascist! I can't listen to this anymore." Then he thrust his hand into the air in a Nazi salute, shouted
"Sieg Heil,"
and walked out.

A
NEGATIVE ARTICLE in the
Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review
on recent publications by two neo-conservative authors, Norman Podhoretz and Hilton Kramer, reveals how the culture war has become a dialogue of the deaf. In the article, the left-wing critic Russell Jacoby concludes that the "problem" with these neo-conservative writers "is less their positions than their delusions about them; they seem to think they represent lonely and beleaguered outposts of anti-Communism."

How could conservatives be beleaguered in an American culture that was itself conservative? Jacoby wanted to know. Referring to Kramer's
Twilight of the Intellectuals
, the more theoretical of the two books, Jacoby asserts: "Kramer refashions reality. . . . [He] writes as if he were a denizen of the former Soviet Union, where the party controls intellectual life and only a few brave souls like himself risk their lives and careers to tell the truth." The critic focuses on Kramer's lament that "it was not the Western defenders of Communist tyranny who suffered so conspicuously from censure and opprobrium in the Cold War period but those who took up the anti-Communist cause." Incredulous, Jacoby asks, "What could 184 he mean?" as though there were no plausible answer to the question.

But it is obvious to any reader of Kramer's book that he had in mind the emblematic figure of Whittaker Chambers, the subject of the first two essays in his powerful volume. Jacoby seems to have given the book an attention as cursory as his evident contempt for its author's conservative politics. In Kramer's view, Chambers was an "archetypal" ex-communist and his treatment in "the court of liberal opinion," which is coterminous with the literary culture, reflected its own attitude towards the anti-communist cause. Chambers did risk his life and career to expose one of the top Soviet spies in the American government, yet his status in America's literary culture ever after has been that of a renegade and a snitch. As a direct consequence of his patriotic deed, Chambers — one of the towering figures of the early Cold War and, in
Witness
, the author of an American classic — was fired from his job as a top editor at Time and brought to the brink of personal ruin. Despised in life, for forty years after his death in 1957 Chambers was a forgotten man. Indeed, when I had the occasion to ask some senior honors students at the University of California in the early 1990s if they had ever heard of Whittaker Chambers, they said they had not. But they knew the name "Alger Hiss" and that he was a "victim of McCarthyism."

Alger Hiss was, of course, the Soviet spy whom Chambers exposed. In contrast to Chambers, Hiss emerged through his ordeal as a political martyr to the liberal culture, a hero and a
cause célébre
among
Nation
leftists, who continued to champion his "innocence" long after his guilt was obvious. The convicted Hiss even had an academic chair named in his honor at a distinguished liberal arts college. Upon his death in 1996, he was eulogized in progressive magazines and by liberal television anchors as an "idealist," and (inevitably) as a long-suffering victim of the anti-communist "witchhunt." As Kramer sums up this parable, "Hiss — convicted of crimes that showed him to be a liar, a thief, and a traitor — was judged to be innocent even if guilty, and Chambers-the self-confessed renegade who recanted his treachery-was judged to be guilty even if he was telling the truth. For what mattered to liberal opinion was that Hiss was seen to have remained true to his ideals — never mind what the content of these 'ideals' proved to be — whereas Chambers was seen to have betrayed them."

In this passage, Kramer identifies the central cultural paradox of the Cold War epoch in the West: the survival among American intellectuals of the very ideals — socialist and progressive — -that led to the catastrophe of Soviet Communism. As Kramer puts it, "Liberalism, as it turned out, was not to be so easily dislodged from the whole morass of illiberal doctrines and beliefs in which, under the influence of marxism, it had become so deeply embedded, and every attempt to effect such a separation raised the question of whether . . . there was still something that could legitimately be called liberalism." Yet, Jacoby's only response to these seminal chapters and the questions they pose is that they make Kramer's book seem "musty." This despite Chambers's final vindication in the release three years ago of the Venona transcripts of Soviet intelligence communications, which definitively established Hiss's guilt.

For anti-communist conservatives, Whittaker Chambers is a political hero. But it took forty years from the time of his death for the publishing world to produce a biographical tribute in Sam Tannenhaus's worthy volume. And Chambers stands almost alone among anti-Communist heroes of the Cold War in finally receiving his biographical due. Elizabeth Bentley, Louis Budenz, Bella Dodd, Frank Meyer, Walter Krivitsky, Victor Kravchenko, Jan Valtin, once large figures of the anti-communist cause, along with countless less well-known others, are more typical in having virtually disappeared from cultural memory.

By contrast, to cite only one of many counterexamples, Abbie Hoffman, a political clown of the next radical generation but a hero to the left, has been the subject of three biographies within a decade of his death, not to mention a book-length exposition of his political "philosophy." There can be no question that the nostalgic glow around Hoffman's memory and the interest in his life are integrally connected to the fact that he was a stalwart defender of communist tyrannies in Cuba and Vietnam, and thus in the shared ideals of progressives who now dominate the literary culture and shape its historical judgments.

Russell Jacoby acquired his own credentials by writing a book called
The Last Intellectuals
, which bemoaned the vanishing "public intellectual." This was a label he gave to intellectuals who worked outside the academy, wrote lucid (instead of postmodernist) prose, and influenced the public debate. The very title of Jacoby's book, however, is an expression of progressive arrogance and the unwillingness of leftists like Jacoby to acknowledge their cultural success. What Jacoby really mourned was the disappearance of the
left-wing
public intellectual, a direct result of the conquest of American liberal arts faculties by the political left and its distribution of academic privilege to comrades among the politically correct. Jacoby is well aware that an important consequence of this takeover is that almost all contemporary conservative intellectuals are (of necessity) public intellectuals. Indeed, this fact is regularly used by leftists in their
ad hominem
attacks on conservative intellectuals as "bought" by their institutional sponsors. Jacoby himself cannot even mention Kramer's magazine the
New Criterion
, without adding that it is "funded by a conservative foundation." Of course, the
Nation
for which Jacoby himself writes regularly is funded by rich leftists and leftist foundations. So what?

The reason conservative intellectuals gravitate to think-tanks like Heritage, American Enterprise, and Hoover, and to magazines like
Commentary
and the
New Criterion
is because of their de facto blacklisting by the leftist academy. It is, in fact, the public influence of these conservative intellectuals that is the focus of Jacoby's lament in
The Last Intellectuals
. Academic intellectuals, he complains, write for a professional coterie instead of a broad public. Yet the pull of institutional security is so great that Jacoby himself has since succumbed to its lure. Since writing his assault on the "obscurantist" university, Jacoby has given up his own independent existence and accepted an appointment from his political comrades in the history department at UCLA.

While lack of self-reflection and self-irony are indispensable characteristics of the left in general, Jacoby's attack on Podhoretz and Kramer is an extraordinary specimen. Not only is his attack directed at two intellectuals who, for political reasons, were denied a platform in the
Times
, but they were also denied the very academic patronage that Jacoby himself now enjoys.
"What can he mean?"
Indeed.

Jacoby's attack was actually one of four nonfiction reviews the
Times
chose to feature on its cover. Three were of conservative books-all of which were attacked from the left. The fourth was a review of two books on Clinton, both written by leftists, both praised by reviewers from the left.

The issue of the
Times
in question happened to be May.9, 1999, but it could have been any date. In December 1997, the
Book Review
ran a year-end wrap-up, the "
Times
' ioo Best Books," compiled from previous
Times
reviews. Because some reviewers had written more than one notice, there were eighty-seven contributors in all. They were a familiar sampling of the literary left, and even of the true believing left (Saul Landau, Martin Duberman, Robert Scheer, and Ellen Willis, for example). Among them all, however, the only reviewer I could detect with the slightest claim to a conservative profile was an academic, Walter Lacquer, who has no obvious association with conservative politics comparable to the connection of the aforementioned leftists to radical politics.

I learned how the "100 Best Books" were picked shortly after the issue appeared, when I had lunch with Steve Wasserman, the newly appointed editor of the
Review
. I knew Wasserman as a former Berkeley radical and protege, in the 1960s, of a
Times
contributing editor, Bob Scheer, when Scheer was promoting the party line of Kim Il Sung and plotting to overthrow the American empire as a member of the Red Family. Scheer's present politics were still to the left of "Senator Bullworth," in whose film he had made a cameo appearance courtesy of his friend Warren Beatty. After the 1960s, Scheer had ingratiated himself with Hollywood's bolsheviks, married a top editor at the
Los Angeles Times
, and become a figure of influence in the paper's hierarchy, which enabled him to secure Wasserman his job.

I had defended Wasserman's appointment in print, at his own request, when journalist Catherine Seipp attacked him in the now defunct
Buzz
magazine. In my letter to Buzz, I praised what I thought were Wasserman's good intentions of fairness, despite our political differences. The lunch we had arranged was an attempt to rekindle the flame of a relationship that had survived the 1960s. The mere fact that he would have civil contact with me, a political "renegade," seemed an auspicious sign-rare as such gestures of civility had been over the years from my former comrades-in-arms. It led me to assume (falsely) that Wasserman had some respect for my own odyssey and quest for the truth. Indeed, he had praised my autobiography,
Radical Son
, which some reviewers had flatteringly compared to
Witness
, and even thought the critical portrait I drew of Scheer "charming" and "accurate."