The New York Intellectuals (10th Anniversary Edition)

by Alan M Wald

  Although he had demanded the immediate withdrawal of all troops during the French occupation, Howe defended the very stance he had once scorned when it came to the U.S. intervention in Indochina. In 1964 he stated that a pullout of U.S. troops would be “inhumane.”48 In 1966 he called simply for a “cease-fire” and went on to oppose antiwar actions in California that included civil disobedience because they challenged “the decisions of the democratically elected government.”49 That was a disturbingly weak argument, since (1) war had never been declared; (2) the population had voted overwhelmingly against escalation of the war by electing Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964; and (3) the same argument could be used to justify any action by an elected government of the United States, including genocide or nuclear holocaust. In early 1967 Walter Goldwater, a former SWP and WP member who had helped finance Dissent, wrote a letter criticizing Howe’s policy and was bluntly told that “unilateral withdrawal is meaningless.”50

  By giving legitimacy to the American presence in Vietnam, Howe opened himself to the charge of actually defending U.S. imperialism, for he was granting the United States the right to determine the outcome of the struggle by interfering in the internal political life of the Vietnamese nation. While it is important that Howe had criticisms of the American role in Vietnam, such criticisms cannot be regarded as a substitute for opposing the U.S. presence in that country. By 1970, when the U.S. military effort was doing poorly and the demand for “immediate withdrawal” of U.S. troops had succeeded in winning the sentiment of the mainstream of the antiwar movement, Howe was insisting that he had always been “against the war in Vietnam.” Julius Jacobson, one of Howe’s sharpest critics, noted in response that this statement obscured the fact that Howe had “opted for the continued military presence in Vietnam even though he knew that this meant mass slaughter and devastation. That means support of the war no matter how critically, mournfully or reluctantly given.”51

  The weakness of Howe’s new orientation was most obvious during the late 1960s. The bulk of Shachtman’s organization had by then dissolved itself into the right wing of the Socialist Party. For a while Howe was reconciled with Shachtman; they collaborated on some literary projects, and Howe, Michael Harrington, and Shachtman functioned as a team in social democratic circles. Unfortunately, as the Vietnam War came to national attention in the mid-1960s, Shachtman revealed himself to be a “hawk” who considered the United States to be engaged in a progressive war against Stalinism. Consequently Howe and Harrington, who had a “negotiations” position, felt that they had to break with him, thus splitting the Socialist Party into two factions. Shachtman’s group eventually became known as Social Democrats U.S.A. and grew to be a substantial force in the AFL-CIO. Such former associates of Shachtman as Donald Slaiman, Sam Fishman, and Tom Kahn would come to hold major organizational positions in the AFL-CIO; Carl Gershman, another associate in Social Democrats U.S.A., became Jeane Kirkpatrick’s assistant at the United Nations in the 1980s. Shachtman himself gained influence over the black socialist Bayard Rustin, and together they established the A. Philip Randolph Institute, which allowed Shachtman to expand his role as a behind-the-scenes influence in labor circles. Ironically, Howe, who became a member of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, now found himself being attacked from the right by the very comrades who had attacked him from the left a decade earlier when he had initiated Dissent. At first he was a cautious supporter of the New Left, but by the late 1960s his bitter denunciations clearly outweighed his commendations. To some extent his line of attack against the New Left was anticipated in an earlier essay, much reprinted, called “Authoritarians of the Left.” Howe came to use this term in a way that had a disturbing resemblance to the manner in which the Communists had once used the opprobrium “social fascist,” by which Howe meant that certain radicals may claim that they are for socialism but objectively they are authoritarians. Howe focused his attack on Marxist intellectuals such as Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran, but he reserved most of his vitriol for Isaac Deutscher, whom he disliked particularly.52

  Howe claimed that, because they supported the Soviet Union’s nationalization of its economy, Deutscher and the others were driven to apologize for Stalinist totalitarianism. Such an interpretation was obviously an outgrowth of the debates of the late 1930s and it suffered from the same inadequate method. It was indeed true that all three had, in varying degrees, made apologetic statements about the Soviet Union, but that was because of their erroneous political orientation, not merely because they discriminated between the nature of the social system and the political character of the Soviet regime. On the contrary, to reductively equate social structure and political regime led Howe to even more errors in his posture toward bureaucratized postcapitalist societies and left-wing political movements around the world. Specifically it led to the equally erroneous identification of a legitimate national liberation movement with its Communist or pro-Communist leadership. The end result led Howe to dismiss entirely the achievements of all anticapitalist revolutions because a certain normative stage of democracy had not been reached and to refuse to give his support to many struggles because of Communist participation or the acceptance of aid from the Soviet Union. Thus, when the New Left began to hold that the Cuban Revolution had brought significant social gains for the majority of its poor and that the Vietnamese people had the right to determine their own future, even if under National Liberation Front leadership, Howe lost all objectivity; for him, the New Left itself had become “authoritarian.”

  Since Howe dismissed both the Cuban Revolution and the National Liberation Front of Vietnam because of certain undemocratic features of the former and what he held to be the Stalinist features of the latter, he left no room for dialogue between him and the New Left. He ended up projecting the positions of a part of the New Left, which did in fact uncritically admire Castro and Ho Chi Minh, onto the movement as a whole. The anger Howe had once directed against imperialism and its social democratic and Stalinist apologists now became directed at those who had revived the revolutionary dreams of his own youth.

  In especially poor taste were two articles by Howe in the New York Times Magazine, “The New ‘Confrontation Politics’ Is a Dangerous Game” (1968) and “Political Terrorism: Hysteria on the Left” (1970), luridly illustrated with photographs of bloody students (allegedly the victims of the New Left’s own strategy) and of leaders of the terrorist fringe group “Weatherman.”53 The site of publication and the imbalance of the contents were guaranteed to make the articles seem nothing less than part of the general assault on the left rather than the fatherly guidance Howe may have intended. Although he had long ago abandoned revolutionary Marxism, Howe donned a proletarian mantle to criticize the young radicals for their middle-class backgrounds, and then a Bolshevik mantle to rebuke them for failing to follow Lenin’s advice about retreat and compromise in Leftwing Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920).

  But the disoriented Howe surpassed even the misrepresentations of these essays in a 1971 article on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times called “The Campus Left and Israel.” There he argued that, while Israel may be vulnerable to some criticism, the particular ones expressed by New Left academics stemmed from anti-Semitism and a favoring of dictatorial over democratic societies.54

  Howe brought the same unfortunate perspective to bear on the women’s liberation movement following the publication of Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970), a pathbreaking indictment of patriarchal culture. Joining for his own reasons the general campaign to discredit the new feminism, Howe fired both barrels of his polemical guns in a piece called “The Middle-Class Mind of Kate Millett.” It first appeared in Harper’s, at that time under the executive editorship of Midge Decter, herself the author of an unrestrained blast against Millett’s book in Commentary. Howe called Millett “a figment of the Zeitgeist, bearing the rough and careless marks of what is called higher education and exhibiting a talent for the delivery of gross simplicities in tones of leaden
complexity.” He then spoke on behalf of his working-class mother who, he insisted, was no more oppressed than his proletarian father. He concluded that “there are times when one feels the book was written by a female impersonator.”55

  On some issues, various New York intellectuals, including Macdonald and Mary McCarthy, who had long been on Howe’s right were now on his left. Indeed, one can appreciate Howe’s astonishment when in the 12 October 1967 issue of the New York Review of Books, Philip Rahv denounced him and Michael Harrington for excessive anti-Communism and reformism. In a letter of protest to the editor, Howe wrote, “And now, after nearly twenty years of painful circumspection, appears Philip Rahv, offering Michael Harrington and myself Little Lessons in Leninism. . . . Rip Van Winkle wakes up and fancies himself at the Smolny Institute.” No stranger to the art of polemics, Rahv answered, “Irving Howe seems to be very angry. Too bad. Can it be that he is infuriated with them [the young people of the New Left], because they refuse to accept him as the eminence grise of American radicalism?” In a subsequent issue of the New York Review of Books, Dwight Macdonald denounced Howe’s associate Michael Harrington for having deceived him into supporting a racist position on the Ocean Hill-Brownsville dispute between teachers and the black community.56

  Although his motives may have been constructive, Howe seemed driven to repeat his basic error in considering every sector of the radical movement. By blowing out of proportion the excesses of the black movement, the women’s movement, and the student movement, he created a fantasy world populated by middle-class, hedonistic political crazies. At the same time Howe seemed to be minimizing the corruption of the puppet regimes of the United States in Vietnam, and denying the oppressive policies of the Israeli government. He also fostered the same illusions about the extent to which leftists could shape the policies of the Democratic Party that he had previously refuted when they had been proposed by Daniel Bell two decades earlier.57

  Was there any sense in which Howe was “standing fast,” or had he undergone the same embourgeoisement for which he had so sharply rebuked his elders? Howe had initiated Dissent in 1954 on an ambiguous premise. He held that no viable socialist movement existed in the United States, but his objective was nevertheless to keep socialist ideas alive. In 1955 Howe had reaffirmed that “there are differences of a fundamental kind between liberals and socialists, differences which cannot be skimmed over and which are likely to become more, rather than less, significant with the passage of time.” One difference cited was that socialists must describe U.S. foreign policy unambiguously as a function of the capitalist economic system. “The ADA”, he complained, “was ready to challenge a good many manifestations of U.S. foreign policy, but never so much as to question its underlying assumptions” (emphasis in original). Another was the liberals’ erroneous identification with Roosevelt’s New Deal, which had in fact been the incubator of many policies they now abhorred. A third was the liberals’ desire to be “respectable,” a form of compromise which they masked under the euphemism “responsible.”58

  Without ever theorizing or explaining the change, Howe spent the 1960s drifting across the boundary line he had carefully drawn. In his New York Times Magazine essay on “Confrontation Politics,” he concluded by describing the Vietnam War simply as “a scandal and a disaster.” In his subsequent writings about the 1930s, he retracted his onetime opposition to the New Deal. As early as 1964, Dissent was running an advertisement that proudly quoted Time magazine’s description of Howe as “a responsible intellectual.”59 True, Howe remained a socialist, but in certain respects he had in fact redefined the meaning of socialism itself.

  In the early 1950s Howe and his close collaborator Lewis Coser coauthored an essay called “Images of Socialism” in which they rejected the scientific arguments for the logical development of socialism as the stage of social organization that would replace advanced capitalism, positing instead an ethical vision. Socialists, of course, are for ethics, and a socialism without moral consciousness would be a horror; yet the divestment of a scientific approach from socialism, and the valorization of an autonomous discourse of ethics and morality, undermines the historico-causal basis of the argument for radical social change. Moral judgments are a poor substitute, for they tend to be subjective and relativistic, obscuring the objective reasons for the critique of capitalism and the necessity of its transformation. Over the years the call for this ethical socialism was replaced by the demand “to extend the welfare state,” and eventually Howe, like Hook in the 1950s, came to identify true socialism as being essentially a militant wing of liberalism.60 This shift was facilitated by the vagueness of the term “democratic socialism,” to which Howe was able to attribute a different political content at each phase of his development.

  From a far left viewpoint, it is tempting to argue that Howe’s main contribution has been to provide socialist arguments for supporting capitalism, although that would be an unfair caricature. He has never been explicitly antiradical as was Sidney Hook, and he continues to make important contributions to socialist culture. In his worst moments he served as a kind of legitimator of deradicalization as did Lionel Trilling some decades earlier, meeting with some success. For example, neoconservatives of the 1980s such as Norman Podhoretz and right-wing “socialists” such as Tom Kahn and Carl Gershman were once at least somewhat under his influence, as was Michael Harrington, a veteran of the Shachtman organization during the 1950s, whose political course has paralleled Howe’s while always remaining a few steps to the left. As once was the case with the New Leader, few of those integrated into the Dissent circle ever move toward or return to the left; their movement is almost invariably and steadily to the right, although sometimes much faster and further than Howe would prefer. In the 1980s Dissent no longer calls itself “socialist” or “radical”—it merely represents the views of the “democratic left!” Neoconservatives Nathan Glazer and Hilton Kramer insist that Howe’s differences with them are more rhetorical than real, and in areas such as affirmative action there may be some justice to this claim.61 Howe has been partly captured by the very forces he himself set out to influence.

  Still, during the late 1970s and early 1980s, the very time that Howe became a nationally known figure for World of Our Fathers (1976), he distinguished himself by offering strong resistance within the liberal community to the burgeoning neoconservative movement. His antifeminism all but disappeared, his attitude toward younger radicals (who were by now less numerous and less threatening) became more tolerant, and after 1982 he even spoke more critically of Israel. It should also be remembered that many of Howe’s criticisms of the New Left—its failure to study history and theory, its insensitivity to the need to build a working-class base, its tendency to idealize individualistic rebellion rather than collective action, its cavalier attitude toward bourgeois democracy, its romanticization of Third World leaderships, its overestimation of the conjunctural prospects for revolutionary change in the United States—were largely accurate. It was Howe’s lack of balance between negative and positive, his failure to consistently direct his main focus and anger at the real sources of oppression and violence, and his unwillingness to acknowledge the impotence of social democratic alternatives that justifiably deserved criticism.

  The case of Irving Howe is quite different from that of Sidney Hook or, to point to an exact contemporary, Irving Kristol. He is far from a “renegade” in the classic sense. To the contrary, despite the lacunae in his memoirs, he has written of the past with a greater accuracy, fairness, and sensitivity than many others among the New York intellectuals. If he has exhibited moments of self-righteousness, he has also been frank about the psychological pain involved in his political journey, and his view of his own literary achievements is unnecessarily modest—especially in comparison with the braggadocio of Norman Podhoretz, whose achievements are incomparably inferior.

  Despite the fact that Howe has progressively diluted the content of his socialism, no one has worked harder to
keep the socialist idea alive in the liberal academic community. He has also kept open the discourse on such unfashionable topics as Leninism and the role of the working class. His personal failings seem to be those of his variant of socialism as well as quite human ones; the case against Howe is not at all ad hominem but centers on the limitations of an anti-Stalinist socialism that operates within instead of against the capitalist social order.

  Howe’s inveterate reformism—his insistence on proposing political solutions that only reinforce the systemic origins of the problems—has probably assisted the decline if not the demise of the anti-Stalinist left. His major theme for some years has been to define socialism “as an extension of democratic processes”; the formulation is ambiguous and not entirely erroneous, but in practice it has translated for Howe into a focus on building a left current within the Democratic Party.62 Unfortunately, there is no evidence that such a strategy “extends” democracy; it more likely builds up and gives credibility to the ideology and institutions that undermine democracy by channeling the struggles of working people into efforts to elect millionaires to the House and Senate.

  Howe’s problem is that in basing his political strategy from within rather than without the institutions of the capitalist social order, he invariably ends up making that social order appear moretolerable and open to change than it actually is. Of course, Howe has no difficulty finding foils among radicals who exaggerate the domestic oppression in the United States or who oversimplify the road to social transformation. But a better antidote to those infantile leftists who lightly dismiss “bourgeois civil liberties” is not to exaggerate the significance of such hard-earned democratic rights; rather, socialists should defend socialism as a higher form of democracy than that which exists in the liberal-democratic bourgeois states. A higher form of democracy, however, is obtainable only through a democratically organized structural transformation. Unfortunately, such arguments fall beyond the pale of the social democratic vision.