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It takes one to know one | page 1, 2, 3, 4
Although Weisberg and Marshall strain bravely to pretend otherwise, the cause of the current controversy was the indisputable import of the evidence brought to light by the Soviet collapse. These facts inconveniently vindicated the old anti-Communist right, and discredited the partisans of both Old and New lefts who have put up a fierce rearguard action to deny them. The agenda of "Third Way" liberals like Weisberg and Marshall is to make the best of a bad situation. Since their brand of liberalism has portrayed McCarthy and his conservative allies as far bigger domestic villains than the Communists themselves, that liberalism is implicated in the behaviors of the left that have now been exposed. To manage their defense, the authors' first task is to dispose of the specter that the facts have dredged up -- the internal threat of a subversive left. This includes the Stalinist left of the early Cold War and its genetic heirs, the anti-Amerikkka left of the Vietnam era and its politically correct successor in the Clinton years. Today, this left dominates the liberal arts faculties of the nation's elite universities and thus the historiography of the Cold War itself. The Weisberg-Marshall strategy is first of all to belittle the importance of this left, which they dismiss as "powerless" and "irrelevant." Since such a diminution precludes the necessity of reevaluating conservatives' role in containing this "threat," the pair can move on to re-demonizing them for contemporary battles, which is accomplished by hanging the albatross of "McCarthyism" around their necks. As it happens, each of the individuals targeted by Marshall and Weisberg is on record as a sharp critic of McCarthy and McCarthyism, specifically his demagoguery and recklessness with the facts, his contempt for legal process and his unscrupulous attacks on innocent or half-guilty individuals. Each member of this group, me included, has also been careful in his writings to credit anti-Communist leftists with their actual achievements in the battles against domestic totalitarians and not to confuse them with the pro-Communist factions of the "progressive" cause. While these achievements of anti-Communist liberals and leftists are real, Weisberg dramatically overstates them. For Weisberg, anti-Communist liberals like Arthur Schlesinger and Reinhold Niebuhr represent "the one group that basically got Communism right." But if this is the case, Weisberg doesn't explain why the pursuit of domestic spies like Hiss and Communist agents like Owen Lattimore were predominantly -- though not exclusively -- the work of the anti-Communist right (which included in those days Democrats as well as Republicans). Then as now, the right was the consistent and perdurable champion of the anti-Communist cause. A satisfactory explanation of the dynamics of the internal Cold War would have to explain these facts. Weisberg does not even try. While Weisberg notes that the anti-Communist liberals he favors have been strangely silent in the current controversy, he doesn't examine the reason for their silence. Does it have something to do with liberal politics itself? Could the off-again, on-again popular front between liberalism and leftism explain the paradox? Is there not some truth in the conservative charge that liberals and leftists share goals and differ only in the means to achieve them? On these provocative questions Weisberg takes the Fifth. Instead of confronting them, he diverts the reader's attention by suggesting that the "real" issues in the controversy are psychological, not political. "Radosh," he writes, "exemplifies a kind of Whig Fallacy in reverse -- viewing the present through the lens of one's own painful past." For Herr Doktor Weisberg, Radosh's alleged attachment to the melodramas of his youth explains his refusal to understand "the way in which Communism, long irrelevant in American politics, has become not just powerless but absurd." (Interestingly, the same issue of the Times features an op-ed piece titled "The Next Dialectic," by a bestselling liberal author who writes that Marx "foretold the present cyber-age" and that "writing about globalization in 'Principles of Communism' in 1847, Engels sounds very 1999.") Of course, Weisberg doesn't bother to provide evidence for the claim that Radosh is suffering from a case of arrested development (let alone for the assertion that the left lacks influence). Instead, his text shifts quite abruptly to me: "Radosh is a mild and temperate critic in comparison with an old friend of his from the New Left, and a fellow red-diaper baby, David Horowitz."
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