Word: communisms
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...ended up as respectable liberals. But even more intriguing than these liberals are those ex-Marxists who made a complete about-face, ending up as right-wingers. Smaller in number, they have been at least as important to conservatives as the others have been to liberal thought. Up from Communism is an examination of the intellectual evolution of four Communists who ended up at William F. Buckley's National Review, one of the nation's leading conservative periodicals...
...continues to see the world in white and black, but now the colors are differently distributed. As a Communist he saw no difference between fascists and social democrats. As an anti-communist he sees no difference between nazism and communism. Once, he accepted the party's claim to infallibility; now he believes himself to be infallible. Having once been caught by the "greatest illusion", he is now obsessed by the greates disillusionment of our time...
...opinion, is this: In a period when certain means we had all agreed upon for emancipating the working class, and therewith all society, have proved to lead in the opposite direction, we have remained loyal to the aim, you to the means." Dos Passos despised Communism for the same reason he hated corporate capitalism--he detested organization and bureaucracy. He ended up yearning for a misty Jeffersonian order of agrarian individualism. Herberg's conversion was religious in nature, and the most enigmatic of all. Burnham, like Eastman, rejected the "scientific" claims of Marxism and finally concluded that the goals...
...book has other flaws. While Diggins is capable of a sophisticated discussion of Eastman's critiques of Hegel, he is also prone to the most inane nonsense, as when he asks, "If communism ultimately brought Herberg to religion and to William Buckley, should Buckley thank Stalin for doing God's work?" What difference does it make? In his concluding chapter, "Conservative Paradoxes", Diggins remarks that "In Nixon's heralded detente with Russia and China, one sees that a politician nurtured on McCarthyism can be anti-communist without being anti-totalitarian." Is Diggins saying that Russia and China are totalitarian...
...from Communism is a curiously uneven book, a mixture, on one hand, of impeccable scholarship and, on the other, easy simplifications that skirt the issues raised by such conversions. The basic flaw is that Diggins finds himself unable to achieve a serious interpretation of the intellectual evolution of these four men, due to his own preoccupation with the politics of the sixties and seventies. Unable to distinguish these intellectual conservatives from the likes of Nixon, he ends by trying to subtly discredit them. If it is true, as one former radical said, that "the final struggle will be between...