STEVE HAYWARD: The Left’s Permanent Derangement — It’s more than Donald Trump.
Cold War liberals may have been weak-minded and timorous, as James Burnham and others never tired of pointing out, but they understood that Stalin was no hero, that Soviet Communism was an obstacle to social democratic aspirations in the West, and fellow-travelling was not to be tolerated. Equally important for Cold War liberals was the disposition to see America as a decent country, even as they remained highly critical of American capitalism, militarism, imperialism, and racism.
The latter point was not always to be expected. Left-wing intellectuals reveled in their alienation and contempt for America especially when the Great Depression seemed to validate their Marxist worldview. But sometime early in World War II Mary McCarthy shed her aloofness, consciously recognizing she wanted America and its allies to win. Her attitude quickly spread. Shortly after the war, Partisan Review startled the Left’s intellectual circles by noting “a reaffirmation and rediscovery of America is under way,” and Lionel Trilling grudgingly conceded that “for the first time in the history of the modern American intellectual, America is not to be conceived of as a priori the vulgarest and stupidest nation of the world.”
On some questions, many of the Dissent-ers sounded increasingly like neoconservatives, and might have completed the odyssey to the Right but for their stubborn attachment to dreamy socialist utopias. (Some of those at Partisan Review, such as William Barrett, did shed their socialist commitments—the key step, as it turns out—and became neoconservatives.) At the very least, a number of these conditionally pro-American Old Left figures understood early on that the so-called “New Left” of the 1960s was bad news for democratic socialists. Irving Howe thought the New Left amounted to “kamikaze radicalism.”
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The Old Left decisively lost (and ultimately surrendered) this intramural fight, but the conditional American loyalty remained. Enough so that in spring 2002, just months after the 9/11 attacks, Dissent’s then-editor Michael Walzer, whom The New Republic’s Martin Peretz described as “the unanointed dean of the American left,” threw down the provocation, “Can There Be a Decent Left?” A serious student of just war theory among other issues, Walzer was appalled by what he perceived to be “the barely concealed glee that the imperial state had finally gotten what it deserved.” Needless to say, his essay was not well received at the very moment that Bush Derangement Syndrome was taking hold.
To paraphrase AOC, woke 0.0 was crazy.