The New York Intellectuals (10th Anniversary Edition)
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Since Martin Peretz purchased and took editorial control of the New Republic in 1974, its ties to the liberal anticommunist phase of the New York intellectuals became obvious and have been much discussed.7 One of the editors of the late Peretz era, Adam Kirsch, taught a course called “The New York Intellectuals Revisited” in 2013 and wrote the book Why Trilling Matters (2013);8 another, Leon Wieseltier, used to sport a picture of Trilling on his office wall and in 2014 was featured in an essay called “The Last of the New York Intellectuals.”9 A bit to the left of that milieu, Dissent magazine is a living monument to liberal socialist Irving Howe; and to the right, the neoconservative journals Commentary and The New Criterion are shepherded to this day by the ghosts of Sidney Hook and Irving Kristol. And this is only my short list of such affinities.
A major reason for the ideological breadth in those presently reaching out for the ricocheted “Blasts from the Past” is the current international political polarization and the test that a new configuration of challenges—not just Israel—presents for engaged intellectuals. An increasing uncertainty about matters such as the nature of the economic system, the role to be played by the United States around the world, the unexpected return of religious fundamentalisms and nationalism, the future of work, and much more have resulted in cascading conflicts of the past fifteen years that are not only between Left and Right but between currents of liberalism and the Left.
The polarization was anticipated by earlier events, but the new millennium opened with a distinct aura, and long-standing patterns began to go into hyperdrive. First came the 9/11 terror attacks and “Can There Be a Decent Left?,” the 2002 proclamation by Dissent magazine editor Michael Walzer excoriating leftist theories of imperialism.10 Then came the 2003 invasion of Iraq with a militant attack on opponents of President George W. Bush’s catastrophic policy by Liberal Hawks, joined by a deradicalized Christopher Hitchens, some of whom made aggressive use of “Decent Left” arguments.11 Two years later, the 2005 BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) campaign was launched to pressure Israel to end its occupation of Palestinian land, and from much the same overlapping circles (Dissent, signers of the 2006 Euston Manifesto, future refugees from the New Republic that would break apart in 2014) emerged a countermovement against BDS; in their view, anti-Zionists and supporters of a single democratic secular state in Israel held illegitimate if not anti-Semitic views. Then there was the global financial crisis that fueled a return to the study of Marx. Now we have the complicating challenges ensuing from the Arab Spring, especially the Syrian civil war; the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement; the simultaneous growth of antiausterity as well as anti-immigrant parties in Europe; and the socialist electoral campaign of Bernie Sanders and its uncomfortable relationship to the Democratic Party.
While diverse individuals, including editorial board members, can’t be archived into tight boxes, the political schism between those who identify as closer to liberalism and those who embrace the radical Left is following a course familiar to several polarizations associated with the earlier history of the New York intellectuals themselves. Most of the younger Marxist activist-intellectuals are facing off against a rightwardly drifting current that draws the line at supporting BDS and political candidates outside of the Democrats (especially the Green Party) and is devoted to attacking the radicals’ icons, such as Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn. Most of the now mainstream-tilting journalists and academics, however, rightly insist that they are not neoconservatives or even conservatives. While adamantly pro-Israel, many adhere to a two-state solution and are critical of Israel’s military excesses against civilians.
Still, such postures seem to be modeled on those who in the 1950s “chose the West” while acknowledging that it had shortcomings. And one finds key strategies of Liberal Hawks and their friends that resonate with past practices as well. For example, in the late 1940s and 1950s, the specialized political term “Stalinism”—a way of identifying a faction within Bolshevism from a Leninist perspective—metastasized into a sweeping antiradical condemnation, one including all varieties of Leninists and other unrepentant dissidents. Thus a newly defined term became a significant weapon in the cultural warfare that consolidated the national security state and led to Vietnam. Today, epithets like “Left-wing anti-Semitism” and “anti-Americanism” are similarly divorced from original or precise meanings, and they play an analogous role of amalgamating diverse radical critics of Israeli state policy (some for two states, others for a nonreligious single state) and U.S. interventions into a demonized “other.” The 1950s New York intellectuals judged radicals and liberals by their assessments of the USSR and posited an adherence to anticommunism as the prerequisite to collaboration on common projects. Now we are seeing a trend that holds up having a “correct” view of Israel, or U.S. foreign policy, as a litmus test.
Nevertheless, a polarization is not a finished process, and one can acknowledge these threads of continuity and recognizable patterns without trying to squeeze a new development into a preexisting frame. Moreover, the forces coalescing around documents such as the Euston Manifesto (see note 11) or the academic-affiliated groups of the “progressive Zionist” organization Ameinu are not yet sufficiently consistent, coherent, or weighty enough to comprise a formation as imposing as the liberal anticommunist one emerging in the 1950s. While it sometimes seems as if a prominent radical individual such as Christopher Hitchens has abruptly gone Vader-like to the Dark Side, the pace of deradicalization is unpredictable. There is always the chance that some intellectuals will wake up and realize that they are not defending liberal values but are actually participating in an ugly backlash. Still, one cannot ignore the increasing signs of yet another generation of quondam rebels slouching toward apostasy.
III. THE ODDITY OF INCONGRUITIES
One may wonder, as well, how the political valence of the New York intellectuals could be stretched so broadly to appeal to neoconservatives, liberals, social democrats, and neo-Marxists. To be sure, over long and extraordinary careers, most of the progenitors changed their minds. Yet one of the reasons that this tradition can be hailed at both ends of the current political spectrum, as well as from the middle, is that the complex realities of the New York intellectuals’ experience could never really be contained by the many myths about its history. When efforts are now made at fuller contextualization (including new biographical information) and sharper definitions, questions are raised about the earlier assessments that make episodes and conflicts beg for continual rethinking.
The problem of packaging arose after Gilbert’s Writers and Partisans: A History of Literary Radicalism in America (1968), which began broadly in the Greenwich Village bohemia of the World War I era but was in due course limited to the journey of Partisan Review into the early 1950s. One might have expected the subsequent extension of the scholarship to encompass political dimensions that went beyond Gilbert’s accurate rendition of those of the Partisan Review core and thus deepen the understanding of the intricacies of both the original movement and its 1950s transformation. What came next, however, tended to be contradictory. Cultural historians assiduously added in more names, episodes, and publications, but they also narrowed the topic by shearing off persons, events, and periodicals that had more enduring Marxist affinities. They then reduced what should have been a larger story and more complex history to one or another of three overlapping but rather uncomplicated tales of progress: ambitious and upwardly mobile poor Jews journeying from outsiders to insiders; cultural wannabes emerging from the Communist margins to successfully carve out an elite status for themselves by supposedly rescuing literature from the corruption of political partisanship; and onetime wild-eyed political utopians saved from the abyss by the wisdom of an “anti-Stalinism” that revealed the pitfalls of ideology, the necessity of Western civilization, and the evil essence of a twentieth-century totalitarianism that bridged communism and fascism.
At the same time, there were always liberal and radical a
ntagonists of the entire tradition (some with illusions about the Soviet Union and China) who maintained that the group was composed of opportunists from the outset; i.e., that 1930s “Trotskyism” was “Left” in name but “Right” in content, containing the DNA for CIA sponsorship in the 1950s and Reagan-era neoconservative triumph in the 1970s and 1980s. To understand why the New York intellectuals matter today, one has to extricate the story from these and many other myths. One of the most pervasive is the suggestion that ethnic origins determine motivations and fate, forgetting that one’s Jewish upbringing can be definitional without being delimiting. Another is that the results of this Left-Right political journey reveal “real” intentions, forgetting that authentic idealists can be transformed by the very world they set out to change.
The argument I make in The New York Intellectuals is that the phenomenon is most accurately explained as a compelling, and in many ways profoundly unique, experience of radicalization and deradicalization. It occurred predominantly among individuals who were unusually gifted; whose secular Jewishness inflected their internationalism with the richness of an outsider’s perspective; whose openness to modernism gave their thinking a self-reflexivity and critical consciousness appropriate to the age; and who held a relatively clear understanding of the problem posed by the disastrous retreat of the Russian Revolution from its original aims and objectives. This combination gave the experience the fullness that has allowed—and still allows—for generation after generation of intellectuals to find a resonance.
The dynamic described above, however, went into crisis precisely as the New York intellectuals achieved their distinctiveness as a group after World War II. The critical factor was that anticommunism emphatically replaced Marxist anti-Stalinism as its new character coalesced. Commentary was founded in 1945 as liberal anticommunist; Partisan Review published a broadside against the Left in an editorial called “The Liberal Fifth Column” in 1946; Dwight Macdonald closed up his anarcho-pacifist Politics in 1949 and by 1952 was a staff writer for the New Yorker; Hannah Arendt published her often ill-used The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951; and the Dissent editors broke away from the Independent Socialist League in 1952 and launched their own journal in 1954. This last event circumscribed the left perimeter of the New York intellectuals at the moment of its debut, finally displacing the formation preceding it. All ties to revolutionary Marxism had ended.
Even though several of the best-known figures moved sharply left again in the mid-late 1960s, the story of the group was grounded in its deradicalization phase. The cultural power of Cold War liberalism secured a narrative foundation establishing that there simply had been no alternative to the great transformation of the Cold War. That is, since the New York intellectuals did not follow another course, they could not follow another course; the road from the 1930s had a defined end point. All that remained was for scholars to evaluate the result: had the group of onetime revolutionaries that evolved into the New York intellectuals appropriately matured, or had they “sold out”? The same outcome—the necessity of deradicalization—works for either version, whether one favors or rejects the new formation.
This is a form of teleology I reject as much as I have always rejected those versions of “Marxism” that position socialism as the ineluctable outcome of the contradictions of capitalist society. In The New York Intellectuals, I emphatically designate my research method as Marxist because the evidence I found in archives and interviews corroborated Marx’s classic statement on historical interpretation: “Men make their own history but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances already existing, given and transmitted from the past.”12 Although my focus was on both the ideas and lived experience of a range of actors, I interpreted the great transformation in their outlook in the context of historical restraint and a calamitous political “climate change” at the national and global level. It seemed to me that, in the guise of recognizing what was purported to be an “objective situation” of having to choose either “imperfect democracy” or “totalitarianism,” scholars of this topic imprisoned in the Cold War liberal conventions were urging resignation to defeat. This elimination of a genuine third way functioned to promote a new kind of disillusionment in which the social framework of the Left’s memory was to be disarticulated so as to break the continuity with the tradition of independence from Washington as well as Moscow. I did not believe that, had a certain political “line” been followed by the intellectuals, a postwar utopia would have been possible; but I did have an interest in learning what kinds of paths were open to resistance even as they were scorned by the select grouping that created the postwar New York intellectuals.
What I concluded was that historical developments limited options and altered perspectives so that a majority of the intellectuals variously adapted to the forces already committed to anticommunist liberalism, modifying as well as being modified by the new converts. Among the intellectuals, such forces included the Americans for Democratic Action, the Menshevik sympathizers of the New Leader, and the Adlai Stevenson wing of the Democratic Party. This was a realignment so distant from the earlier far Left movement that the Central Intelligence Agency had no difficulty in channeling funds into cultural projects that were seen as mutually beneficial. Nonetheless, in my distinctive version of the chronicle, there were exceptions to be noted—individuals and small organizations and journals that argued against what was happening and did not succumb. The course ultimately followed by the majority, then, is explained by neither determinism nor fatalism. The national and international political climate change made their transformation in consciousness more likely, but personal life, psychology, and political organization played a role as well.
IV. LIBERALS EXPLAIN THINGS TO ME
It is often said that the greatest crime in literary history was the 1824 burning of Lord Byron’s autobiographical memoir, and I suppose that the counterpart in my field was the 1950s erasure of the Marxist opposition to Stalinism and capitalism. Liberal scholarship was mainly to blame. The liberal metanarratives that are perpetuated—that of an admirable maturation or a fulfilling of opportunist ambitions—float above the actual messiness of the Cold War deradicalization process. Not only do they present us with an outcome foretold from either side; they also mask the diverse forms of the radical political imagination that survived on the margins, the pockets of resistance that were not wiped out but that kept alive Marxist perspectives that would come back to life in later generations. So this point is critical: there were many different futures available for the revolutionary intellectuals who coalesced in the 1930s.
All scholars acknowledge some variations: that a few intellectuals veered sharply to the right and joined National Review, and that others, such as Irving Howe, were more adamant about opposing McCarthyism than those locked into the American Committee for Cultural Freedom (the U.S. affiliate of the anticommunist Congress for Cultural Freedom). But what is rarely conceded in looking at experiences now blurred by time and distance is that there were also a smaller number of intellectuals of the same political origins who saw this new development as a decline, and who tried to seek out a different future. This includes individuals such as C. L. R. James and Sidney Lens, and others in groups such as the Socialist Union, the Independent Socialist League, and the Socialist Workers Party. What Cold War liberals were celebrating as an advance to maturity, and their rival Progressive liberals (descendants of the Popular Front tradition) were exposing as the revelation of long-term opportunism, these radicals saw as a retreat to conformity. It would have been disproportionate to give these Left heretics center stage in The New York Intellectuals, a location they did not deserve in terms of influence at the time; but they were included in the book and subject to the same critical examination as others.
My view was not that the intransigent ones had all the answers, as is made clear in my chapter called “The Iron Cage of Orthodoxy.” It was mainly that pr
evailing scholars and memoirists were sweeping the decks clean of this aspect in their haste to conflate the very different politics of Marxist anti-Stalinism and anticommunism. The upshot of this “liberalsplaining”— overconfident, patronizing, and often clueless—about Leninism as necessarily breeding Stalinism, and ideology as a kind of mental illness that afflicts all but those who adhere to the vital center, was successful. Most books on the topic blocked off the revolutionary past of the New York intellectuals, and those who remained variously loyal to it, as a rigorously separated, risible, and trivial effort that never had a future. My investigation continually showed that there needed to be a reconnection through a creative and scrupulous scholarly research that returned to sources and bracketed such Cold War thinking.
This argument seemed to be beneficial as well to understanding the period in which I was writing. Marxists may have been purged from the post-1940s New York intellectuals, but individuals still rooted in the founding ideas were to play the critical roles of nurturing trends of thought and activism that reemerged in full force in the 1960s, a development recently documented by Howard Brick and Christopher Phelps’s Radicals in America: The U.S. Left since the Second World War (2015).13 Whether one of these alternative futures will reemerge in the twenty-first century remains an open question. The New York Intellectuals presented history as a force field full of uncertainties and possibilities, with no happy endings or even automatic progress guaranteed. Thirty years later, I can only reiterate the point.