http://www.city-journal.org/2008/bc0404fs.html
The American Left has a long history of utopianism.
by Fred Siegel
4 April 2008
A Conservative History of the American Left
by Daniel J. Flynn
(Crown Forum, 436 pp., $27.50)
In 1969, the Theater for Ideas organized a symposium to discuss
whether acting should be "theater or therapy." The event was prompted
in part by the antics of the Living Theater, which had become famous
for asking members of the audience to shed their clothes onstage
along with the cast. In an emblematic moment, the distinguished
critic Robert Brustein, one of the symposium's panelists, spoke of
the importance of "supremely gifted individuals" such as Chekhov to
the theaterand was met with shouts of "Fuck Chekhov!" Eventually
that command would extend to "Fuck Shakespeare" and "Fuck Euripides."
Another panelist was Paul Goodman, who had come of age in the 1930s
and was now a guru to the sixties generation. His 1960 book, Growing
Up Absurd, had taught baby boomers that winos offered "a wise
philosophical resignation plus an informed and radical critique of
society." But Goodman became uneasy about what he had helped create.
First, he compared the Living Theater and the symposium's audience
with the Anabaptists, a fanatical sixteenth-century antinomian
religious cult that anticipated twentieth-century totalitarianism by
promising its followers a transformation that would break with the
world's wicked ways. Then he told the enraged audience: "I've lived
through moments like this before, and I'm always struck by the
poverty of ideas. In the last 2,000 years, there hasn't been a single
new revolutionary idea."
Goodman was overstating the case, but his point holds and is a kind
of leitmotif of Daniel Flynn's engaging new book, A Conservative
History of the American Left. Flynn's well-written narrative
describes how the history of the American Left is marked, with some
exceptions, by utopianism and a recurring hostility to middle-class
American life. For the Left, a bright new future has always
beckonedif we can only break with our outmoded conventions.
This notion goes back a long way. In 1826, the British socialist
Robert Owen, founder of a utopian community in New Harmony, Indiana,
issued a Declaration of Mental Independence that condemned "private,
or individual propertyabsurd and irrational systems of religionand
marriage." Owen met privately with many American presidents, twice
addressed joint sessions of Congress, and became an important
influence on Friedrich Engels. In the document, which Flynn calls a
mix "of Ross Perot, Harold Hill, Karl Marx and Jimmy Swaggart," Owen
argued that marriage was "the sole cause of all prostitution," while
religion "has made the world [into] one great lunatic asylum."
Owen anticipated both Marx's concept of "false consciousness" and
Herbert Marcuse's of "repressive tolerance." He insisted that men,
because of the way "they have been hitherto educated . . . are
incompetent to form a correct or sound judgment." Creatures of their
environment, they "have been rendered irrational by the absurd
doctrine of free will and responsibility." All could be put right if
"such subjects. . . . be instructed in better habits, and made
rationally intelligent." But until then, Owen didn't want "the
opinions of the ill-trained and uninformed on measures intended for
their relief and amelioration. No! . . . their advice can be of no value."
Owen's sentiments were exemplified by the most famous of the utopian
communes, Brook Farm in Massachusetts. Influenced by the ideas of
French social reformer Charles Fourier, Flynn writes, Brook Farm was
stocked with "Boston Brahmins, Harvard graduates, [and] descendants
of the Pilgrims" who "retained the Puritan conviction that they were
the elect" but had little common sense. Failures at subsistence
farming, "dependent on charity for their Thanksgiving dinner," they
needed to hire unskilled laborers in order to feed themselves.
Writing about the plebes, one of Brook Farm's members, Charles Dana,
insisted: "We are in fact the only men who can really point out their
course for them and they can hardly help looking to us for their
advisors." But the laborers chafed under their supervisors' feckless
paternalism, openly mocking Dana and his fellows as "aristocrats."
Like Dana, the communards at the Oneida Community in New York,
founded by John Humphrey Noyes, were the best and brightest of their
day. Noyes, who renounced "active cooperation with the oppressor on
whose territories I live," pursued what he described as "complex
marriage"what today we would call open marriage. In order to break
the chains of convention, all the women of Oneida had to be sexually
available to Noyes. He had quite a pedigree: his father and
grandfather were congressmen, his father-in-law was a lieutenant
governor of Vermont, and his first cousin was the 19th president,
Rutherford B. Hayes. (The next president, James A. Garfield, was
killed by a troubled former follower of Noyes's.)
Then as now, the authoritarian strand in leftism sometimes
crisscrossed with its libertarian and egalitarian tendencies. Owen
also insisted, in anticipation of today's progressive education
failures, that in schooling there should be "no distinction of
teacher and pupil." The double gameso common in American
universities todaythat joins claims about the radical
unintelligibility of "truth" to authoritative pronouncements on
matters social and political was already well developed at New
Harmony. But one of the New Harmonyites, Sarah Pears, rebelled
against Owen's claim that he possessed superior knowledge while all
others were equal before him in their ignorance. "Mr. Owen says we
have been speaking falsehoods all our lives, and that only here shall
we be enabled to speak the truth. I am sure that I cannot in
sincerity look upon these as my equals, and if I must appear to do
it, I cannot act or speak the truth." Here is an early
nineteenth-century reaction to what 1930s Communists called
"political correctness."
While the utopian Left saw a potentially shining future rising out of
a dark, repressive bourgeois past, another strain of the movement saw
that bleak past leading only to an even bleaker future. The father of
this current of leftism was none other than Henry Adams. Born to
wealth and an august lineagehis grandfather and great-grandfather
had been American presidentsthe refined Adams found the hustle and
bustle of American life so dismaying that he once said that he
"should have been a Marxist." But he could indulge in nothing so
vulgar. His famous book, The Education of Henry Adams, described his
disappointment with an American society that did not pay him his due
deference and helped create the model for much of what became
left-wing intellectual lifeor is it right-wing intellectual life?
Certainly Adams's cultural critique was sourly conservative. But it
included, too, a radical call to give power over the masses to men of culture.
Flynn leavens his book with character sketches of some of the wilder
figures of the nineteenth-century left, such as Victoria Woodhull and
Tennessee Claflin. The free-spirited sisters were crusaders for
women's rights at a time when such proselytizing required
considerable daring. Rejecting the separation of religion and
politics, Tennessee insisted, in the manner of the European utopian
August Comte (who would, through Herbert Croly, become an influence
on twentieth-century liberalism), that religion and politics needed
to be melded into "the religion of humanity," which would be "a
religion based not on conjecture but fact." But in this new faith,
veridical truth meshed, postmodern-style, with an absolute
relativism. The sisters explained that "to the cannibal the taste of
human flesh is very good; while to us the mere thought of it is
horrible. And yet with us, he is the offspring of the Great Creative
Power, and as rightfully and legitimately possessed of his taste for
human flesh, as we are of a predisposition against it."
Feminists though they were, the sisters pursued rich men along with
social reform. For a while, Cornelius Vanderbilt provided financial
backing for their magazine, and he reportedly greatly enjoyed their
charms. Victoria blackmailed Henry Ward Beecher, a leading minister
of the day, for not preaching free love from his pulpit after the two
had been lovers. Flynn notes that after exposing the affair she wound
up in England, where she "blackmailed a rich suitor into marrying her
and inherited his fortune."
The book falters somewhat when it gets to the twentieth century,
where Flynn has the difficult task of distinguishing between modern
statist liberalism and leftism. From Flynn's own Christian and
libertarian perspective, FDR was a leftist. But taken in the context
of the times, Roosevelt's willingness repeatedly to try out ideas and
then drop them made him a chameleon rather than an ideologue. FDR's
inaugural address, for instance, calls for both a balanced budget and
national planning. But Flynn is on firmer ground in describing how
much of what we associate with the Aquarian sixties was in fact old
hat. We aren't too surprised when we read that David Dellinger, the
far-left leader of the anti-Vietnam War movement, used to belong to a commune.
But if the pattern was visible to those with a sense of history, it
wasn't to the New Left, which, writes Flynn, "imagined itself radical
pioneers, discovering a new world of ideas that had eluded all who
had lived until the present." Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)
founder Tom Hayden, like many of the members of MoveOn.org today,
exulted in his dismissal of all that had come before. "In formulating
our vision and ideas," explained Hayden, "it was most important to
draw lessons from that same experience instead of relying on the
textbooks of others." There was no past, just a glorious future. In
short order, the New Left had created its own version of the
Nazi-Stalin pact by embracing both the leather-clad fascist thuggery
of the Black Panthers and the Maoist version of Stalinism.
The sixties ended with SDS's morphing into the violent Weathermen,
leftists with wealthy backgrounds who tried to "smash monogamy"
through group sex and "smash capitalism" with pipe bombs. It was all
very nineteenth-century, as was their Charles Danaesque sense of
themselves as the "ruling class," in the words of New Left founding
father Carl Oglesby. New Leftists had "a deeply inbred assumption
that they knew what the country needed, and they knew how to deliver
it," Oglesby explained.
A Conservative History of the American Left is highly readable and
informative, if somewhat misnamed. It might have been better titled
The Utopian Politics of Hope. With messianic hopes now being invested
in the candidacy of Democrat Barack Obama, Flynn's history is a
timely demonstration of some disturbing continuities in left-wing thought.
--
Fred Siegel is a contributing editor of City Journal and a professor
of history at the Cooper Union for Science and Art.
.
No comments:
Post a Comment