The New York Intellectuals (10th Anniversary Edition)

by Alan M Wald

  Just six years after publishing this inspiring statement, Horowitz penned a revised autobiography that appeared in the Nation in which he described his radical career as a consistent whole. The strategy he used was the familiar one of omitting his radical anti-Stalinist phase. He referred to himself simply as having been “a soldier in an international class struggle” from his first May Day parade in 1949 until the mid-1970s, when he lapsed into inactivity.13 He proceeded to indict the New Left for a “blind spot” in regard to the Soviet Union, even though he himself had been known among the New Left for his books and articles characterizing Stalinism as despotism, albeit from the Deutscherist view that the revolution had moved forward by barbarous means. In a letter responding to various criticisms, Horowitz insisted that he did “not repudiate nor regret thirty years in the radical movement,” but only asked the left to exchange “its essentially religious longing for a socialist millennium for a more rational commitment to social change.”14

  Another six years went by and Horowitz, with his former Ramparts collaborator Peter Collier, published an essay in the Washington Post called “Goodbye to All That,” in which he very explicitly sought to “repudiate” his left-wing past and in which he proclaimed himself a Reaganite. The essay attracted considerable attention and was reprinted by Encounter, by a neoconservative newsletter, and by newspapers around the world. This time, however, Horowitz “enhanced” his autobiography by including references to his onetime admiration for Kim II Sung and the trashing of store windows, his fantasies of cop-killing, and his belief in imminent fascism—a record of ultraleftism which seems rather at odds with his political writings of the 1960s and early 1970s. In addition, this onetime defender of Deutscher’s quasi-Trotskyist critique of the Soviet Union not only proclaimed agreement with Sontag’s contention “that Communism is simply left-wing fascism” but even endorsed Reagan’s religio-mystical characterization of the Soviet Union as the “evil empire.”15

  Horowitz, however, was joining, not initiating, a political current. The far-right terrain among intellectuals in the 1980s is already dominated by the “neoconservatives” (a term that essentially means recent converts from liberalism to conservatism). In contrast, closest to the anti-Stalinist left of the 1930s are those individuals and organizations vaguely grouped around a program of supporting Solidanarnoc, exhibiting sympathy for the Nicaraguan revolution, and showing political independence from the Democratic and Republican parties. By and large the surviving members of the New York intellectuals have become the ideological leaders of the neoconservatives, a group that gained influence in the 1980s because of its ideological and material links to powerful trends in American business and government. Sidney Hook, who still calls himself a social democrat, remains the venerated founding father, and Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz are its central ideologists.

  PORTRAIT: IRVING KRISTOL

  Irving Kristol was born in 1920 in New York City, the son of a clothing subcontractor.16 In 1936 he graduated from Boys High School in Brooklyn and entered the City College of New York. A Trotskyist sympathizer for some years, he deferred from joining the movement until the spring of 1940, when he graduated from college and the Workers Party was founded. He assumed the party name William Ferry (sometimes Irving Ferry), allegedly because during one of the debates between James P. Cannon and Max Shachtman, the former had referred to the City College Trotskyists such as Kristol and his friend Earl Raab as being “on the periphery [which he mispronounced ‘perry-ferry’] of the movement.” Raab, of course, became Perry.17 A few months later, while working as a machinist’s apprentice at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Kristol joined the “Shermanites” in their departure from the Workers Party to enter the Socialist Party. The Shermanites made the change because they contended that Bolshevism was antirevolutionary, bureaucratic, totalitarian, and undemocratic. During his brief period in the Workers Party Kristol had developed a relationship with Dwight Macdonald and later wrote occasionally for Politics. In 1942 he accompanied his wife and comrade, Gertrude Himmelfarb, to Chicago where she began graduate study at the University of Chicago while he worked as a freight handler. He also served as an editor of Enquiry, the organ of the Shermanites, while he waited to be drafted.

  Enquiry, published between 1942 and 1945, unambiguously called for a “social overturn” but insisted that its editors’ “revolutionary outlook” was coupled with a thoroughgoing concern for the maintenance and extension of the practices and institutions of democracy. Denouncing “the bankruptcy of supporting the ‘lesser evil’ of compromise with the status quo,” the editors added that “political support of the present war, organized by reactionary forces and deepening the totalitarian trend, will be found to be incompatible with a consistent fight for concrete democratic aims.”18 Among Kristol’s most forceful essays was a critique of Sidney Hook’s prowar position, which he attempted to discredit on the grounds that Hook had reduced all issues to the pragmatic goal of stopping Hitler immediately and by any means necessary: “In this near hysterical insistence upon the pressing military danger and in the complaint, ‘mere theoretical carping,’ we recognize not only a common academic reaction to events, but also an ominously familiar ideological weapon. It is the exact technique of the Communistliberal coalition during the days of the Popular Front and collective security. One element is seized from its context as the receptacle of all political significance, and crucial political disagreements based on a broader perspective than ‘licking the villain’ are condemned as malicious and irresponsible criticism.”19 At the same time, Kristol was reading Reinhold Niebuhr and other neo-orthodox theologians of the period and was impressed by their critique of utopian doctrine.

  Finally drafted in 1944, Kristol saw combat in France and Germany as an infantryman in the 12th Armored Division and was discharged in 1946 as a staff sargeant. While living in postwar England, where Himmelfarb was attending Cambridge University, Kristol, now substantially deradicalized, began contributing to Commentary. In 1947 he returned to New York to become the magazine’s managing editor as it was becoming a major forum for anticommunist thought among intellectuals. This phase of Kristol’s career began with a turn to religion and was climaxed with his famous statement in 1953 that “there is one thing the American people know about Senator McCarthy; he, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing.”20

  He then returned to England to found and coedit the journal Encounter, sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, later revealed to have received funding from the Central Intelligence Agency. Kristol, together with associate Melvin Lasky, denied all knowledge of such funding, but his credibility among many liberals was permanently damaged.21 After returning to the United States for a brief stint on the editorial staff of the Reporter, Kristol became the executive vice-president of Basic Books, a position he held for the next eight years. During this period, with Daniel Bell he founded the Public Interest and in 1969 became Henry R. Luce Professor of Urban Values at New York University.

  Kristol would later claim that neoconservatism emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s as the product of a new constellation of ideological forces, but his conservative politics in fact went back several decades and he personally embodied neoconservatism’s continuity with Cold War liberalism. Thus the “consensus school” notion that Kristol and his associates are merely “inside-out Bolsheviks,” behaving on the right as they once behaved on the left and always scornful of the middle road of liberalism, is an oversimplification. Personality traits may have remained the same, but there is simply no one style of “Bolshevik” behavior. Moreover, the neoconservatives who actually held membership in Leninist organizations were few and most did so briefly, either during or just after college. The American Committee for Cultural Freedom, of which Kristol became executive secretary and which was the first intellectual arena for the young Podhoretz, was a much more decisive determinant of the political values and organizing
styles characteristic of the neoconservatives.

  The leading neoconservative intellectuals had long sought ideological acceptance by the government. When this finally became possible through their links to the Nixon and then Reagan administrations, those leaders of the current who found this acceptable slightly modified their official political coloration to conform with the prevailing conservative sentiment, and their ranks soon followed suit. Thus there is a real continuity between Cold War liberalism and neoconservatism, both of which aspired to defend the same political system by different tactical means. The claim of a symmetry between their sojourns on the far left and the far right is not defensible, except insofar as Kristol and his colleagues aspired to be ideologues at all points in their evolution.

  What had changed was the political climate of the middle and the late 1970s, which allowed Kristol and his contemporaries to openly call themselves conservatives, something they could not have dared to do before. Moreover, there was a declining cohesion of the New York intellectual community (as a result of the traumas of the 1960s), which limited its ability to continue to “impose” certain boundaries as acceptable political discourse. Claiming that the United States and the Western world suffered from a “crisis of authority” that is essentially cultural and that the American government is crippled by “overload” because it attempts to do too much domestically, the neoconservatives called for reducing the government and restabilizing the international order. Kristol has been closely associated with the Republican congressman from upstate New York, Jack Kemp, and the Arthur Laffer “supply side” school of economics.

  There are, of course, important divergences within the neoconservative movement, and some neoconservatives were more reluctant than Kristol to accept the label when Michael Harrington first applied it. Daniel Bell, for example, had heralded the “end of ideology” in the West during the 1950s, and in 1965 had joined forces with Kristol to devote the Public Interest to practical problem-solving and to render social science knowledge useful to government policymakers. Yet he subsequently left the magazine and, like Hook, he continues to insist that he is a “socialist.”22 Public pronouncements, however, are not decisive in determining the authentic character and composition of a movement. For example, most neoconservatives insist that they support the “welfare state,” even though a good number voted for Reagan, whose program amounted to dismantling it, and all claim to be against discrimination, even though most oppose strong affirmative action as a means of achieving equality for women and minorities.

  Kristol’s unique function has been to arm right-wing politicians and corporate executives with an ideological self-assurance that traditional conservatism could not provide. Through his connections with the American Enterprise Institute and the Wall Street Journal, and in lectures to business groups, Kristol makes his ideological services available for impressive fees. He has also established himself “at the center where the neo-boys’ network interconnects,” arranging positions for those who think as he does on editorial boards of journals and in universities.23 At times Kristol expresses himself with power and eloquence, but he has also committed notorious gaffes which reveal a gross insensivity to the poor and the exploited. In 1960 he suggested that universal suffrage was a mistaken and potentially disastrous idea.24 When questioned by the New York Times Magazine in 1981 about his support for federal cuts in school-lunch programs, he responded, “there’s something to be said for parents making lunch. Kids shouldn’t get used to the idea that life is one free lunch after another.”25 And when the Argentine newspaper publisher Jacobo Timerman published Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number (1981), a strong indictment of anti-Semitism and brutality in his homeland, Kristol responded by trying to link Timerman with a missing Jewish bank swindler who allegedly supported left-wing terrorists. He then charged Timer-man’s admirers in the United States with ignoring Communist violations of human rights.26

  Kristol’s political thought often seems banal. Patriotic in the narrow sense of romanticizing the U.S. past, his version of neoconservatism is based on a belief in a messianic “national destiny” for his country.27 In a 1980 Wall Street Journal column entitled “Exorcizing the Nuclear Nightmare,” he offered only one objection to using nuclear weapons against Cuba and Nicaragua: “the foreseeable revulsion of public opinion both at home and abroad.”28 His comments on Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy invariably encourage the president to take greater military risks.

  In a 1981 column, this lapsed revolutionary, an uncompromising nonconformist and resolute antimilitarist in his own youth, published a “Letter to the Pentagon.” In it he deplored American soldiers who failed to stand properly at attention during the national anthem and urged the reinstitution of “proper military parades”: “There is nothing like a parade to elicit respect for the military from the populace.”29 Although Kristol reminisced in his “Memoirs of a Trotskyist” that the 1940 debates between Cannon and Shachtman over the class nature of the Soviet Union were the paramount learning experience of his life, he resorts to the use of such vulgar characterizations as the “Soviet Mafia” and has recommended that Americans learn about the Soviet system by viewing The Godfather and The Godfather, Part II30

  PORTRAITS: NORMAN PODHORETZ AND MIDGE DECTER

  Norman Podhoretz, second-in-command of the neoconservative ideologists, was born in 1930 in Brooklyn. A student of Lionel Trilling, he was not shaped by the anti-Stalinist left but by its eviscerated reincarnation as liberal anticommunism. First becoming associated with Commentary in 1955, he assumed the editorship in 1960, following the suicide of Elliot Cohen.31 A left liberal who occasionally brushed up against the New Left for most of the decade, he published his autobiographical Making It in 1968 and startled some of his admirers with its frank admission that a lust for success was the motivating force in his life. This was followed by a steady drift to the right beginning in the late 1960s, which he described in the second installment of his autobiography, Breaking Ranks (1979). The turning points seem to have been the June 1967 Middle East war, which inspired a wave of chauvinism among the Jewish-American community, and the 1968 New York City teachers’ strike, which pitted the black community against the heavily Jewish American Federation of Teachers.32

  In the 1970s he concluded that the movement against the Vietnam War was a sign of American weakness and that participating in the campaign against nuclear weapons was an act of solidarity with the rulers of the Soviet Union. He then turned Commentary into a vigorous forum for denouncing busing to achieve integration, affirmative action, homosexual rights, and the Israeli peace movement. At one point Commentary even called for the United States to occupy Arab oil fields, and in another article it demanded restoration of the draft. In 1985 Commentary campaigned against corporate divestment from South Africa and misrepresented the antiapartheid movement as terrorist; several of its leading contributors also joined forces with the Reverend Sun Myung Moon to raise money for the reactionary Contras in Nicaragua.33

  Perhaps Podhoretz’s most startling pronouncement came in “The Culture of Appeasement,” which appeared in the October 1977 issue of Harper’s. Polemicizing against the decline of the military spirit in the United States, he unexpectedly introduced a discussion of “the central role homosexuality played in the entire rebellious ethos of the interwar period in England.” Podhoretz claimed that many of the radicals who infected British culture with antipatriotic sentiments in the 1930s were homosexuals upset by the loss of potential male lovers in World War I. He then suggested that the same role was being played in our own culture by “such openly homosexual writers as Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin, and Gore Vidal.”34 Another disturbing effort by Podhoretz to give intellectual respectability to the most extreme ad hominem accusations appeared in an October 1982 Commentary essay called “J’Accuse” in which he asserted that critics of the recent Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the mass killings at the Shatila and Sabra Palestinian refugee camps were actually motivated by anti-Semitis
m.35 His 1982 book Why We Were in Vietnam—replete with factual errors, including a misleading synopsis of his own past positions—is a thinly veiled attempt to justify an aggressive U.S. policy of intervention in Central America.36

  A consistent feature of Podhoretz’s critique of his fellow intellectuals is the projection of his own motives onto others. The young Podhoretz was extraordinarily impressed when Lionel Trilling, “one of the most intelligent men in the world,” remarked to him that that “everyone wants power. The only question is what kind.”37 This seems to have encouraged Podhoretz to explain the behavior of others in the same terms (power hungry) in which he now saw his own behavior. He argued that radical intellectuals in the 1930s capitulated to Marxism because they were then powerless in capitalist society and imagined that they would be leaders in a socialist order. In the 1960s, according to Podhoretz, radical students were motivated to protest by a combination of boredom and fear of being drafted rather than by a sincere belief in the values they espoused. Those intellectuals who supported them were driven by a desire to conform.

  Even Trilling is accused by Podhoretz of ultimate cowardice for his refusal to endorse Podhoretz’s “born again” conservatism. Since the 1950s Trilling had been tormented by a recognition that the “adversary culture”—the antibourgeois values that he and other New York intellectuals had promoted in the literature that they taught—might under certain conditions encourage rebellion against the very social order to which he was wedded. In 1968 Trilling’s worst fears were realized when his own students at Columbia participated in the antiwar strike that shut down the campus and resulted in violent clashes with the police. Yet Trilling, as much as he abhorred the campus upheaval, could not bring himself to openly renounce the “adversary culture” in the same two-dimensional terms that Podhoretz proposed. Although Trilling claimed he was “fatigued,” Podhoretz insisted that his former mentor was simply too cowardly to speak out against the vogue of the times.38