Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes (29 page)

So why the continuing lies? The reason is pretty obvious: the truth is embarrassing. To
them
. Imagine what it would be like for Betty Friedan (the name actually is Friedman) to admit that as a Jew she opposed America's entry into the war against Hitler because Stalin told her that it was just an inter-imperialist fracas? Imagine what it would be like for America's premier feminist to acknowledge that well into her thirties (and who knows for how long after?) she thought Stalin was the Father of the Peoples and that the United States was an evil empire. Or that her interest in women's liberation was just the subtext of her real desire to create a Soviet America. Now,
those
explanations would demand a lot from anyone.

Which is why it probably seemed easier to lie about all of it at the time, apparently until after her death, when her papers would be unlocked. The problem with this solution, however, is that lying can't be contained. It begets other lies, and eventually becomes a whole way of life, as President Clinton himself could tell you. One of the lies that the denial of the communist past begets is an exaggerated view of McCarthyism. Fear of McCarthyism quickly becomes an excuse for everything. The idea advanced by people like Friedan, that McCarthyism was a "reign of terror," as though thousands lost their freedom and hundreds their lives while the country remained paralyzed with fear for a decade, is simply false.

McCarthy's personal reign lasted but a year and a half, until Democrats took control of his committee. The investigation of domestic communism, which needs to be separated from McCarthy's own underhanded tactics, is another subject altogether. Ultimately, however, being an accused communist on an American college faculty in the 1950s was only marginally more damaging to one's career opportunities than the accusation of being a member of the Christian Right would be on today's politically correct campus, dominated as it is by the tenured left. Bad enough, but a reign of terror, no.

The example of Betty Friedan should be a wake-up call. If we are going to restore civility and honesty to public discourse about these issues, and integrity to intellectual scholarship, it is necessary to insist on candor from people about their political commitments and from intellectuals about what they know. And it is important to call things by their right names. Without such a resolve, we will continue to be inundated with books from the academy with ludicrous claims like this: "In response to McCarthyism and to the impact of mass media, suburbs, and prosperity, a wave of conformity swept across much of the nation. Containment referred not only to American policy toward the USSR but also to what happened to aspirations at home. The results for women were especially unfortunate. Even though increasing numbers of them entered the work force, the Cold War linked anti-communism and the dampening of women's ambitions."

This is the commentary of Friedan's biographer and the kind of ideological hot air that passes for analysis in the contemporary academy. It is the same nonsense that Friedan has sold to American feminists: "With
The Feminine Mystique
, Friedan began a long tradition among American feminists of seeing compulsory domesticity as the main consequence of 1950s McCarthyism." Well, if the new biography is correct, perhaps it is not American feminists to whom Friedan has sold this bizarre version of reality so much as American communists posing as feminists in Women's Studies Departments, along with the unsuspecting young people whose understanding of the past comes from tenured leftist professors.

^*
Daniel Horowitz,
Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminist Mystique
(Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachsetts Press, 1998).

^†
October 23, 1998: "His father, Jack D. Foner, and his uncle, Philip Foner, were both leftist historians blacklisted during the McCarthy era for their alleged Communist activities ('like supporting the Spanish Civil War,' Mr. Foner says dryly). 'I grew up in a family where we were well aware of the gap between the rhetoric and the reality of freedom — and where we were willing to challenge it. "'This is how the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at one of the nation's most prestigious schools describes his Stalinist family's political opinions.

^‡
In fact this was even the case in 1955, when the left-wing journalist Murray Kempton published his book about the 1930s,
Part of Our Time
. Kempton felt at ease enough to recall that he had been a member of the Young Communist League. The difference was that Kempton was an anti-Stalinist and anti-communist in the 1950s, even though he was still on the left. Unlike Friedan he had nothing to hide from his readers about his politics.

F
OR YEARS, Richard Rorty has been holding court as the foremost left-wing intellectual in America. Recently, he published a book that is a heartfelt lament about the state of his party, which he describes as anti-American, programless, and politically irrelevant. Damning as this indictment might seem,
Achieving Our Country
is not a work of political "second thoughts." Rorty has no intention of abandoning a movement in whose causes he has toiled as a lifelong partisan. When all his complaints are registered, the left remains in his eyes the "party of hope," the only possible politics a decent, humane, and moral intellectual like himself could embrace. This irreducible air of invincible self-righteousness, coupled with a tone of worldly lament, make Rorty's book at once a desperate and revealing specimen, an emblem of the impossible quandary in which the American left now finds itself.

Rorty's own career as a philosophical pragmatist is based on an American skepticism hostile to the grand theorizing and absolute certitudes characteristic of marxism. Yet Rorty's background is rooted firmly in the marxist tradition. His parents, by his own account, were "loyal fellow-travelers" of the Communist Party, breaking with their comrades in 1932 when they realized how completely the party was dominated by Moscow. Rorty's father became a leader of American Trotskyism and was lampooned in a 1935
Daily Worker
cartoon that portrayed him as a trained seal reaching for fish thrown by William Randolph Hearst. In this environment the young Rorty grew up as an "anti-communist red diaper baby" — supporting America's Cold War against the Soviet empire abroad, while keeping the socialist fires burning at home — a postmodernist
avant la lettre
. With the passing of Irving Howe, Rorty is now one of the last of the breed, godfather to a small but influential remnant of self-styled "social democrats" huddled around Howe's magazine Dissent. While Rorty sometimes seems to understand the profound real-world failure of the socialist fantasy, he stubbornly clings to an idea of socialism as (in Irving Howe's phrase) "the name of our desire."

Rorty begins his diagnosis of the American left by comparing national pride to individual self-esteem, declaring it a "necessary condition for self-improvement." This introduces his central concern, which is the emergence since the 1960s of a left that despises America and hates everything it stands for. When this left speaks of America, according to Rorty, it does so only in terms of "mockery and disgust." When it thinks of national pride, it is thinking of a sentiment "appropriate only for chauvinists." The left associates American patriotism with the endorsement of atrocities against Native Americans, ancient forests, and African slaves.

In Rorty's view, it was not always so. There was once a progressive left in America, whose pride in country was "almost religious" and whose aspirations were summarized in Herbert Croly's famous title
The Promise of American Life
. It was a left that believed in an organic development of this country into the nation that it
should
be; it believed, therefore, in a politics of piecemeal reform. Into this radical Eden, according to Rorty, there came first the serpent of marxism and then the trauma of Vietnam. Instead of reformism, the left embraced marxism, which was chiliastic in its ambitions and absolutist instead of skeptical in its epistemological assumptions. Instead of aiming at realistic improvements to our benighted condition, marxists aimed at a totalizing revolution that would transform the world we know into something radically other. This apocalyptic vision made piecemeal reform irrelevant and even dangerous, since reforms might co-opt the revolutionary spirit and dampen its zeal. Negativism is the principal weapon of revolutionary intellectuals committed to this totalitarian faith. In their hands, social criticism is a corrosive acid since, in order to create a new socialist order, the old slate of existing institutions has first to be wiped clean. But, in the absence of a social catastrophe that would provide it with fertile political ground, this negativism, according to Rorty, merely leads to political isolation.

Rorty views the Vietnam War as the decisive event converting the American left to the marxist revolutionary paradigm. He describes the war as "an atrocity of which Americans should be deeply ashamed." Along with the "endless humiliation inflicted on African-Americans," the war persuaded the New Left, which had previously recognized the "errors" of marxism, that something was "deeply wrong with their country, and not just mistakes correctable by reforms." As a result, they became neo-marxists and revolutionaries.

In Rorty's view, that revolutionary vision is now irretrievably dead, killed by the failures of twentieth-century utopias and the nonmarket economies on which they were based. The fall of communism made marxism untenable. Rorty is realist enough to recognize this truth, but remains leftist enough to believe that rather than vindicating its capitalist opponents, its death offers new opportunities for the left to advance its socialist agendas. With communism no longer an issue, the previously divided factions of the left can now unite in a new version of the old Popular Front, the anti-fascist coalition between Stalinists and liberals of the 1930s. According to Rorty, it is time to dispense with distinctions like "Old Left," and "New Left," which once reflected differing attitudes towards the Soviet bloc. It is also time to erase the distinction between socialists and liberals, since it is easy to see that the two share similar egalitarian goals, once the (metaphysical) idea of overthrowing capitalism is abandoned.

Just how far Rorty is willing to take this reconciliation is revealed by the roster of icons he selects as representative of his progressive front: "A hundred years from now, Howe and Galbraith, Harrington and Schlesinger . . . Jane Addams and Angela Davis . . . will all be remembered for having advanced the cause of social justice," he writes, apparently forgetting that for Angela Davis the cause of social justice was the communist gulag itself. "Whatever mistakes they made, these people will deserve, as Coolidge and Buckley never will, the praise with which Jonathan Swift ended his own epitaph: 'Imitiate him if you can; he served human liberty.'" Elsewhere, Rorty comments: "My leftmost students, who are also my favorite students, find it difficult to take my anti-communism seriously." His readiness to embrace apologists for police states like Angela Davis, while dismissing such defenders of liberty as William F. Buckley, shows why.

The attempt to resurrect a popular front of the left is threatened, however, by internal factors, specifically the emergence of what Rorty calls the "cultural left." Its commissars, as Harold Bloom and others note, have disquietingly reproduced the political modalities of 1930s fascism and Stalinism on American campuses. It is a left that Rorty describes as "spectatorial, disgusted, mocking," and politically correct. His chief complaint about the cultural left is not that it has purged conservative viewpoints from the academy using methods that even McCarthy did not, but that its nihilism is so total that it has no practical political agenda to offer. After reading works by prominent tenured radicals like Frederic Jameson, comments Rorty, "you have views on practically everything except what needs to be done."

There are overlaps between these "postmodernists" and the Old Left. Rorty himself notes that Jameson, an armchair Maoist, thinks that "anti-communists are scum." To Rorty, this is an amusing quirk rather than a nasty political orientation. Indeed, elsewhere, Rorty himself has referred to anti-communist politicians like Ronald Reagan, in almost identical terms.

In distinguishing between the two incarnations of the left, Rorty characterizes the older economic vanguard as intending to purge society of "selfishness." The new "cultural left," in his view, aims rather to purge America of "sadism." As Rorty tells it, this agenda has been marked by "extraordinary success." According to Rorty, the speech code and sensitivity enforcers of the academic left "have decreased the amount of sadism in our society. Especially among college graduates, the casual infliction of humiliation is much less socially acceptable than it was during the first two-thirds of the century. The tone in which educated men talk about women and educated whites about blacks is very different from what it was before the Sixties. . . . The adoption of attitudes, which the Right sneers at as 'politically correct,' has made America a far more civilized society than it was thirty years ago."

In such statements, the intellectual bubble inside which leftists like Rorty conduct their ruminations is revealed in all its parochial glory. Perhaps it is true that the tone in which "educated" men talk to women, and whites to blacks, has improved under pressures from the left. But what about the tone in which women talk to men and blacks talk to whites, and in which both talk to males who are also white? What about the ritual punishments meted out daily in these havens of cultural sensitivity and concern to those who deviate from the leftist party line?
^*
To those who are the subject of political grading and hiring, or who suffer general ostracism and reflexive hatred as a result of their unpalatable politics, race, gender, or religious orientation?