The New York Intellectuals (10th Anniversary Edition)

by Alan M Wald

  The central idea that emerges from Breaking Ranks, Podhoretz’s testament of deradicalization, is that the New Left of the 1960s was analogous to the Stalinism of the 1930s; thus, by renouncing the New Left, Podhoretz is repeating the same heroic action of his precedessors who forged the anti-Stalinist left during the Great Depression decade. In order to defend this analogy, Podhoretz makes the fanciful assertion that the New Left (notorious for its anarchy) was dominated by a “party line” and was able to enforce a “reign of terror” against those who defected—although he can cite as evidence nothing more than a few personal cuts and unpleasant incidents at cocktail parties. The New Leftists differed from the Stalinists of the 1930s, argues Podhoretz, in that, as essentially a movement of intellectuals, they constituted a “new class” that has taken over the universities and the publishing, public service, and culture industries of the United States. Podhoretz’s claim of victory for the New Left sets the stage for a strident and excessive epilogue, and in the final pages, Podhoretz issues a dire warning about the “plague” that has taken over our society, causing men to no longer act like men nor women like women.39

  Like the former Communist Whittaker Chambers, Podhoretz feels guilty because he once contributed to the growth of this phenomenon, even though he had been naive as to its true character. But he has courageously decided to “break ranks” and issue a full confession to the public, naming names and issuing a warning to humanity that this sickness must be stamped out. Like Chambers’s Witness (1952), which began with a “Foreword in the Form of a Letter to My Children,” Breaking Ranks begins and ends with passages from “A Letter to My Son.”

  Podhoretz has been supported in his neoconservative crusade by his wife, Midge Decter. Together they form a formidable center to a network of right-wing publishing operations and committees. Decter’s conservative ideas about women and the family began circulating at the same moment her husband explicitly moved to the right, suggesting that she is, in the least, the coarchitect of his new politics. Born Midge Rosenthal in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1927, she studied at the University of Minnesota and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America before beginning a career as an editor variously at Midstream, Commentary, Harper’s, Saturday Review, and Basic Books. Her first husband, Moshe Decter, was engaged by the American Committee for Cultural Freedom to coauthor McCarthy and the Communists (1954) with James Rorty.

  In 1971 she published a collection of essays, The Liberated Woman and Other Americans, which were highly critical of the motives of the women’s liberation movement. A second collection, The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women’s Liberation (1972), openly argued that freedom of choice was a greater threat to women than their alleged oppression. A third book, Liberal Parents, Radical Children (1975), contended that liberal childrearing practices of the 1960s and 1970s created a generation of self-indulgent and irresponsible youth. In February 1981 Decter announced that she had left Basic Books to work for the Committee for the Free World, an organization devoted to “the struggle for freedom.” Some of the leaders of this new group—Sidney Hook, Leopold Labdez, Melvin Lasky, and Irving Kristol—are former participants of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Perhaps mindful of the dangers of such a connection, a press release issued on behalf of the committee announced that “no money will be sought or accepted from any government or government agency.” Yet nearly half of the committee’s $125,000 in seed money came from foundations with close ties to the Central Intelligence Agency.40

  In the 1950s and 1960s Lionel and Diana Trilling were frequently regarded as a team promoting similar anticommunist political ideas, with the important difference that Lionel tended to be reticent and even recondite, while Diana tended to be more direct and aggressive. Podhoretz and Decter seem to combine Diana’s approach with a tendency to oversimplify and be abrasive. Podhoretz, for example, writes in defense of the “selfishness” of the “Yuppies,” insisting that these “Young Upwardly Mobile Professionals” have become the object of satire by members of the leftist “new class” in retaliation for the Yuppies’ wholly justifiable surrender to the bourgeois system they once opposed. The radicals who allegedly control American culture are “trying to make them feel guilty about betraying their old idealism. It is a strategy, in short, for shaming them back into the kinds of attitudes that nourish the political activism of the left.”41 Decter extends the same “look out for Number One” approach to the issue of Israeli-United States relations: “In a world full of ambiguities and puzzlements, one thing is absolutely easy both to define and locate: that is the Jewish interest. The continued security . . . of the Jews, worldwide, rests with a strong, vital, prosperous, self-confident United States.”42 Decter offers no explanation for the sudden disappearance of “ambiguity” or “puzzlement” in determining precisely what constitutes “Jewish interest,” or authentic “security,” or the means by which the United States might become “strong” and “prosperous.” Nor does she feel the need to respond to the obvious fact that, if every interest group in the world puts its own religion, culture, race, or nation first, above all others, conflicts and wars will only intensify.

  THE IDEOLOGISTS OF ANTIRADICALISM

  Podhoretz and Decter seem unperturbed by the inability of their arguments to withstand careful scrutiny because, in fact, they are engaged in a serious fight for winning ideological hegemony. The method of debate they promote, and in which they train their following of young journalists and academicians, is candidly revealed in a September 1984 Commentary essay by Owen Harries, a Fellow at the Heritage Foundation. Harries’s “A Primer for Polemicists” begins by citing Irving Kristol’s call for neoconservatives to “own” the future by “determining the spirit of the age, the prevailing notions concerning what is possible, inevitable, desirable, permissible, and unspeakable.” Harries presents a set of “rules” for achieving this end, the first of which is never to “confuse polemical exchanges with genuine intellectual debate.” His other “guidelines” flow logically from this premise: develop a vocabulary inherently biased toward one’s own values (Orwell called this “Newspeak”); concentrate on building up the morale of one’s own supporters “in order to bind them more securely to the cause and make them more effective exponents of it”; feign “good sense, decency and fairness” as a tactic to win over the uncommitted; keep one’s presentation on a low level and “when you have a good point to make, keep repeating it” because “success in ideological polemics is very much a matter of staying power and will”; and hold off on impugning the motives of your opponent until the end of the debate.43

  The use of these strategies indicates that Podhoretz and Decter have no real interest in political and social theory and analysis. Podhoretz began as a promising literary critic, but, for unexplained reasons, became blocked in his work and wrote Making It as a substitute for a promised book-length literary study which he has yet to produce. Some of the neoconservatives, however, are considerably more talented, if less influential, and enjoy substantial reputations in diverse fields. For example, at the 1983 neoconservative conference on “Our Country and Our Culture” the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb presented a diatribe against the rise of “social history” in her profession; her presentation was particularly distressing in light of her appointment to the advisory board of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a critical source of funding for young scholars, many of whom work in social history.44 Still, she produced a creditable study utilizing her anti-Marxist method in The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (1984). Nathan Glazer, who at certain times has caricatured affirmative action as an illegal and un-American movement, is the coauthor of two books, The Lonely Crowd (1950) and Beyond the Melting Pot (1963), which are considered classics of descriptive sociology.45 Daniel Bell, who keeps at arm’s length from the worst excesses of the Podhoretz circle but has certain affinities with some of its premises, is a polymath whose theories of postindustrial society demand serious consideration. Along with Seymo
ur Martin Lipset, he has been a major force in reshaping the scope and character of sociological thought in the United States. Glazer, Bell, and Lipset broke with Podhoretz over his uncritical support of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.46 This rupture suggests that the neoconservative movement may have been transcended, with Podhoretz and Kristol, moving more into the oribit of the traditional conservatism of the National Review and the others keeping a holding pattern for the present.

  Hilton Kramer is an example of a burgeoning talent who seems to have been reborn in mid-career as the conservative judge of the American cultural left—which for him starts at the right center. Born in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1928, Kramer graduated from Syracuse University in 1950 and did postgraduate work in art in various eastern universities. A contributor to the Partisan Review and the New Leader, he was briefly editor of Arts Magazine and art editor of the Nation before spending nearly twenty years as the art news editor and art critic for the New York Times. Indications of Kramer’s turn to the right first came in the mid-1970s with his remarks about sinister connections between homosexuality and radicalism. Even stronger was his 1976 article on the 1950s “blacklist,” which caricatured the “revisionist” historians of U.S. foreign policy by attributing to them the view that the Soviet Union played a “benign” role in the postwar era, and which also depicted the “Hollywood Ten” as criminals instead of victims.47

  In 1982 Kramer received a half million dollars from four corporation-connected foundations to initiate the New Criterion, named after T. S. Eliot’s famous magazine. The New Criterion aims to identify the values of high culture with capitalist civilization, much as the Partisan Review sought to claim modernist culture for revolutionary socialism in the late 1930s. Like Commentary, the New Criterion adheres rigidly to a neoconservative line, publishes many of the same writers, and has the same “hit list” of left-leaning intellectuals. An obvious target is Irving Howe, who was accused by Kramer of evaluating novels sympathetically according to their degree of anticapitalism.48 More surprising was the series of strained and rather unconvincing assaults by Kenneth Lynn and Lionel Abel against Alfred Kazin, published in late 1984.

  Although Kazin is frequently identified as a leading New York intellectual, his evolution displays many uncharacteristic features. He was born in 1915 into a poor Jewish immigrant family in New York. His father, who had belonged to the Jewish-socialist Bund in Russia, joined the Socialist Party as an admirer of Eugene Debs.49 But Kazin himself was profoundly moved by religion—first Christianity, later Judaism. As a student at the City College of New York and then an aspiring writer in New York City, Kazin was an armchair left-wing socialist, attracted to Marxist intellectuals but not to Marxism as a doctrine. Although he traveled for a while in the V. F. Calverton circle, he managed to stand apart from the internecine battles of the Stalinists and anti-Stalinists in the 1930s, regarding himself simply as “non-Stalinist,” except for a brief time in 1936 when antifascism drove him close to the Communists. This disposition protected him from the excesses of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom in the 1950s; it may also have been the reason that he was drawn to Hannah Arendt, whose firsthand experience with fascism protected her from the exclusive obsession with Stalinism that dominated the milieu. Moreover, Kazin was differentiated by his fascination with American literature, in contrast to the Europocentrism of the Partisan Review group, and he was less inclined than almost all the other New York intellectuals to mobilize literary criticism as an adjunct in a broader political struggle. By the 1980s, Kazin had even abandoned his vague socialism, declaring himself merely a “radical” but one opposed to state control of industry and services beyond the boundaries reached by such countries as Sweden and Israel.

  The New Criterion assaults were apparently in retaliation for Kazin’s devastating 1983 New York Review of Books essay on “Our Country and Our Culture,” the conference sponsored by the Committee for the Free World. Among other observations, Kazin ridiculed the New Criterion’s obsession with seeking out “anti-Americanism,” usually exhibited when writers were critical of American business.50 Thus it is no suprise that “anti-Americanism” is precisely the quality that Lynn and Abel discovered in Kazin’s work. In a reconsideration of Kazin’s masterwork, On Native Grounds (1940), Lynn faults it for its antibusiness bias, a not unusual perspective for criticism written against the backdrop of the Great Depression era.51 From Lionel Abel, one would have expected a more subtle critique.

  Born Lionel Abelson in 1910 in New York City, Abel was the son of a maverick rabbi. He attended St. John’s University and the University of North Carolina before starting a career as a playwright, drama critic, and translator in New York City, with frequent visits to Paris.52 His first wife, Sherry, was the sister of Albert Goldman, a connection that brought him close to Trotskyist circles. During the period of Trotskyist entry into the Socialist Party, Abel became a member and participated in the Trotskyist faction. Later he contributed to New International. During the 1950s he remained friendly to Shachtman’s Independent Socialist League, and in the 1960s he was for a while a sponsor of New Politics, a left-wing publication in the Shachtman tradition, in which he attacked Irving Kristol as a secret conservative.53 By the 1970s, however, Abel had signed up with the legions who were “breaking ranks.” His brief against Kazin is party line, pure and simple; he claims that An American Procession (1984) proves Kazin to be a renegade from the pro-American literature attitudes of On Native Grounds (1940): “After twenty-five years of loving the American national character, Alfred Kazin has decided to quarrel with it, and with those who represent it in our literature. . . . For he is no longer in love with the country whose coming to consciousness they represented for him in his first book.”54

  The New Criterion’s most vicious campaign was waged against Noam Chomsky through the publication of a 1984 essay, “Censoring 20th-Century Culture,” by the British linguist Geoffrey Sampson. Sampson was angry because the biographical entry he had written about Chomsky was removed by the publisher from a projected U.S. paperback edition of Alan Bullock’s 20th-Century Culture, which had already appeared in England, on the grounds that some of his claims about Chomsky were questionable. In his New Criterion article, Sampson repeated these claims, including the allegation that Chomsky endorsed “a book . . . that denied the historical reality of the Jewish holocaust” and that he repeated “polemics minimizing the Khmer Rouge atrocities in Cambodia.” Moreover, Sampson insisted that Chomsky had succeeded in having the entry removed because he “threatened to initiate libel action” against the publisher.55

  The New Republic, whose editor, Martin Peretz, had joined Kramer in helping to found the Committee for the Free World, repeated Sampson’s allegations in a special editorial and concluded that “even in circles which had once revered him, Mr. Chomsky is now seen as a crank and an embarrassment. Shame on Lord Bullock [for eliminating the above charges from the Chomsky entry in the Book-of-the-Month Club paperback edition of the book] and shame on those in Harper and Row who countenance this cowardly complicity in keeping the truth about Mr. Chomsky from readers who would consult what purports to be an authoritative reference work.”56 Unfortunately, every one of Sampson’s charges against Chomsky turned out to be false; yet both the New Criterion and the New Republic delayed publication of Chomsky’s refutations for months, giving plenty of time for the falsehoods to circulate unchallenged.57

  Whether articulated through the social criticism of Podhoretz’s Commentary or the cultural criticism of Kramer’s New Criterion, the ideological rhetoric of the neoconservatives masks a program that suggests that they have learned well at least one lesson from the Marxist incarnation of the New York intellectuals: that the social function of intellectuals is class-dependent. As radical young intellectuals, they chose to ally themselves with the working class and other movements for social change in an effort to restructure society for the benefit of all. As “mature” adults they took the opposite stance, and they hard
ly stop at trying to mobilize in defense of the status quo in the intellectual community but now aspire to become preeminent in the state and international spheres. Thus the 1980–81 “Report on Activities of the Committee for the Free World” describes how Executive Secretary Midge Decter “addressed an international gathering of military strategists from around the world, and sought to impress upon them that the critical defense to be mounted at this moment was in the field of propaganda. They were in full agreement and expressed much interest in the Committee and its work.”58 No doubt Decter had a few suggestions as to who might be engaged to carry out this propaganda.

  In a period of cutbacks in social programs and layoffs for the poor, minorities, and working people in the United States, many of the neoconservatives began to “earn” substantial material rewards for their loyal services as publicists, legitimators, and ideologists of American expansionism, benignly renamed “democratic capitalism” by Michael Novak in his book The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (1979).59 The neoconservatives see their role as providing “moral” and “civilized” rationales for the exploitative activities of the American ruling elite, a task for which they receive large grants from such right-wing foundations as the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, and from various large corporations. With similar kinds of funding channeled through the Institute for Educational Affairs, they assist the publication of a network of some thirty conservative journals and newspapers on university campuses across the country, the most notorious of which has been the Dartmouth Review.”60 The Committee for the Free World issues a monthly newsletter, Contentions, which publishes a series of pamphlets by the “Orwell Press,” holds national conferences, and jets its members around the world to confer with their counterparts in other “free world” countries.