In his last published essay before his death, commemorating the demise of The Public Interest in 2006, Irving Kristol wrote of his experiences in London in the 1950s. At a time when public discourse on neoconservatism was active and highly contentious, this essay revealed much about the origins and essence of the neoconservative project:
Our NATO allies were turning in on themselves. . . . When it came to budgeting priorities, they were all social democrats now. World War I had ended with the famous promise of returning soldiers to “a world fit for heroes.” It is only a slight exaggeration to say that World War II ended with a commitment to “a world fit for victims.” I knew there was an important lesson for the United States in this development. There was clearly a growing American opinion that believed a European-type welfare state was the correct and inevitable model for the United States. . . . Could there not be another option, a welfare state that could be reconciled with a world role for the United States? It was with this question in mind that, in 1958, I returned home.1
Thus, even to the extent that the beginnings of neoconservatism can be associated with The Public Interest, the movement was always primarily concerned with the advancement of American military supremacy and not principally with domestic affairs. Furthermore, Kristol’s essay demonstrates that the abandonment of a nominal social democratic commitment by the neoconservatives derives directly from their Trotskyite and Shachtmanite principles; that is, the overriding concern with what would best serve to advance the “global democratic revolution.”
In the early twenty-first century, the libertarian concept of the “welfare-warfare state” would be popularized by the followers of Ron Paul, perhaps the most charismatic iconoclast in the history of American politics since Eugene Debs. But experience goes contrary to that thesis: the modern welfare state has grown and prospered only at the expense of large militaries and goals of empire. It has been a self-evident axiom of historic social democracy that if the political economy should serve the interest of the working class, the limited resources of the state and society must be directed toward internal improvement, rather than adventurism and profit-seeking abroad by the privileged classes. And it has been no less clear that this has usually been well understood by those privileged interests. The history of postwar Europe, especially of Great Britain, that Irving Kristol alluded to in his lament makes this plain, forming a core principle of neoconservatism.
It was for this reason that an unusually intense hysteria overtook the neocon-led American right in response to the national health care legislation passed in 2010—that is, to even the slightest suggestion that the United States should become more like a European welfare state. Indeed, the neocons argue openly that the welfare state should be gutted to preserve the global posture of the American colossus. After a generation of indoctrination by the neocons and their allies, the lack of a national health care system—the one remaining feature distinguishing the United States from the European welfare states by the twenty-first century—apparently had become a sacred principle of American nationalism. Whereas a majority of liberals were content to reduce the phenomenon of opposition to “Obamacare” to racial anxieties, the overwrought and historically illiterate rhetoric about “socialism” points instead to abiding loyalty to empire.
This became evident with the emergence of the phrase “American exceptionalism” as the essential totem of this new right. Originally Stalin’s term of derision for the independent course of Jay Lovestone during his ill-fated tenure leading the American Communist Party, this term was then used by Seymour Martin Lipset beginning in the 1950s to signify the lack of a major social democratic party in American politics. Since then, “American exceptionalism” has come to simply mean a belief in the inherent virtue and entitlement in the world of the United States. Yet since the end of the Cold War, American exceptionalism has not on the whole signified political liberty and representative government, but instead a decadent American “way of life” accentuating clichéd comparisons to Ancient Rome. With the rise of seriously flawed democracies in Latin America, the former Soviet Union, and more recently in the Arab world, the trend since the fall of Communism has been toward an equilibrium of standards and norms, illustrated by a studied ambivalence toward torture, a surveillance state more ambitious if not yet more menacing than any in the Soviet bloc, and other flagrant offenses to the Bill of Rights.
This development represents the apotheosis of the essentially Marxian theories of late capitalism manifesting as imperialism followed by the managerial revolution, extrapolated by such authors as Charles Beard, Lawrence Dennis, and James Burnham. For the United States specifically, it is the final comeuppance of the American system’s perpetual dependence on commercial and military expansion first articulated as the “frontier thesis” of Frederick Jackson Turner.
The Socialist Party of America was the principal movement, in the half-century from the closing of the continental frontier to the triumph of the American colossus during and after the Second World War, that strove in vain for the United States to remain a republic and not an empire. That at the critical turning point within this period, the Socialist Party was the most prominent opponent of U.S. participation in the First World War, and was made to mercilessly suffer for it, alone gives it major significance in American and indeed world history. As the Socialist parties of Europe failed to stand in the way of the march to war, it was American Socialism that stood in vigorous and brutally repressed opposition to the emergence of the American colossus built on the ruins of the European empires. But the great and cruel irony of this history was the long, strange journey that followed, culminating in the creation of the revanchist neoconservative movement.
The root of this massive contradiction in the legacy of the Socialist Party can be traced squarely to Leon Trotsky; specifically to the meeting he led in the Brooklyn apartment of Ludwig Lore on January 14, 1917, which set in motion the fracturing of the Socialist Party that created the Communist Party. The movements that sprang from American Socialism—American Communism, the Socialist Party Militants who founded Cold War liberalism, and by way of American Trotskyism, neoconservatism—transgressing its spirit as they greatly influenced American politics, could trace their origin to the personal prejudices of Trotsky and his desire for a more pure “revolutionary” movement. It is true, of course, that dissent within the Socialist movement had deeper roots in the historic American left wing; it can also be argued that a more authentic predecessor to the neoconservative movement existed in the First World War-era Social Democratic League. But for those left-wingers who did not exit the party as war supporters, it was Trotsky, during his brief but fateful American sojourn, who most bluntly articulated the prejudices of the left wing and who gave them the narrative and program that allowed them to have an impact on the Socialist Party and far beyond.
Here also lies the answer to the question that has so fascinated and perplexed the scholars of the Socialist Party heyday who came out of the new left. As Nick Salvatore writes in his excellent biography of Eugene V. Debs,
The faith of Debs and his followers in the redemptive power of the ballot is, from a current perspective, simply staggering. They took the republican tradition seriously and stressed the individual dignity and power inherent in the concept of citizenship. While frequently vague over exactly how to transform their society, these men and women had no doubt but that, if the people united, the vitality of that tradition would point the way.2
What especially staggered the new left historians was the question of how and why this quality—this essentially Jeffersonian passion and faith—of American radicalism changed so profoundly. The short answer is the Popular Front, specifically for making virtues of mass mobilization and the intrigue of its leaders at the expense of the ballot. This fixed the association of radicalism in American historical memory with a politics that was reformist and opportunist at its core, a fateful development with extraordinarily wide ramifications. The elevation of protest over politics, which was ambivalent at best about democratic and civil libertarian values and methods, completely remade the organizational style and the underlying assumptions of both mainstream liberalism and radicalism, especially following the later experience of the civil rights movement. Beginning in the 1960s, this American example would be adopted by, and profoundly transform, the European social democratic left, completely turning on its head the Cold War-era concept of “American exceptionalism.”
In large and indispensable part, the victories of the Popular Front ensured that the Socialists and other non-Communist radicals of the 1930s would generally be inaccessible to future generations of radicals seeking a usable past. Born of a sympathy for and identification with the victims of McCarthyism, in no small irony, the effort to rehabilitate the legacy of the Popular Front has ensured that the real reason American Communism matters in twentieth-century U.S. history remains obscure. The Communist Party and the respective responses to it profoundly shaped the emergence of both American liberalism and American conservatism in the postwar era. In particular, its model of political activism, mobilization, and influence-seeking became the norm with both liberalism and conservatism, particularly with the consolidation of the two-party system. Irving Kristol stated openly in the 1970s that he was applying the tactics of Leninism to the peculiar circumstances of modern American politics, underscoring the essential nature of both neoconservatism and the larger political climate in which it has thrived.
What, then, of any living legacy of American Socialism? The three groups born of the Socialist Party’s ultimate demise in 1972—SDUSA, DSOC/DSA, and SPUSA—cast their lot with three wildly disparate emerging forces in American politics, respectively—neoconservatism, mainstream liberalism or progressivism, and the radical left. Yet all three groups followed remarkably parallel trajectories in their respective spheres: each was an essential influence on its sphere throughout the 1970s, and toward the end of the decade each seemed to have promising future prospects. But then just as suddenly, very largely as a consequence of circumstances in the election of 1980, each outlived its usefulness and relevance. Significantly, all three were fundamentally shaped by revolutionary socialist legacies, specifically of Trotsky’s American sojourn. For both Social Democrats USA and the organizations formed by Michael Harrington, the astonishingly pervasive influence and legacy of Max Shachtman was determinative. And in the main, the Socialist Party USA completely identified itself with the legacy of the historic left wing.
The question then becomes what historical memory has survived broadly speaking within each of the persuasions affected by the disparate legacies of the Socialist Party. Within neoconservatism and the larger American right it took over, that historical memory has almost completely vanished. By the time Emanuel Muravchik, one of the more vocal torch bearers among old Scoop Jackson Democrats, died in 2007, his obituary in the Washington Jewish Week merely noted “a world that no longer exists,” with no elaboration or reflection.3 Yet among the British loyalists of Tony Blair, at almost exactly the same time as the formal passing away of Social Democrats USA, there emerged a veritable cult of Max Shachtman and the history of his followers. Led by Alan Johnson and his short-lived, extremely dense journal Democratiya, its narrative stood in splendid isolation from the larger history of socialism. Johnson was a co-author in 2006 of the Euston Manifesto, a mostly British attempt to articulate a “socialist” affirmation of the “war against Islamofascism.” As the writer Geoffrey Wheatcroft bluntly advised, “There is a plausible slogan to be added to their manifesto—‘progressive, democratic, imperialist, and proud of it.’ ”4
But the Euston Manifesto was the exception proving the rule among neoconservatives after the September 11 attacks. As the generation shaped by SDUSA and historic controversies of the left passes from the scene, a younger generation, startlingly ignorant of this past, has increasingly set the tone of the neoconservative movement. The new generation, particularly as represented at Commentary magazine, is mostly made up of Modern Orthodox Jews, who in notable contrast to their Shachtmanite elders are plainly and openly motivated first and foremost by a belligerent and doctrinaire Jewish nationalism. Much of the sophistication of earlier neoconservative generations has been lost, with the old saws about “democracy and its enemies” reduced to hollow sloganeering. Having become so deeply grounded in this retrograde and self-destructive foreign nationalism, neoconservatism has entered its bitter terminal stage, its roots consigned to a superfluous memory.
The conscious Socialist legacy in mainstream liberalism or progressivism is more complex, but only slightly less faint. The organizational legacy of DSOC and DSA has been substantial; probably most notable are Harold Meyerson (a son of historic SP stalwarts in Los Angeles) and Robert Kuttner, two DSOC veterans who founded The American Prospect, arguably the most influential left-of-center political magazine for much of the early twenty-first century. But the historical memory of American Socialism in contemporary liberalism is another matter entirely. Throughout the Cold War, it was commonplace for the Socialist and labor movements to be cast as heroic forerunners of the New Deal and the organized liberalism that followed. But this has been almost entirely forgotten by contemporary liberalism. Typical of its more current historical narrative is that best displayed by the films of Ric and Ken Burns—valorizing the most elitist figures and forces leading to positive social change, putting race rather than politics or class at the center of the American story, and unreservedly celebrating “national greatness” and martial glories.
It is not that this narrative does an injustice to the story of American liberalism; indeed, quite the contrary. But it has profoundly shaped the character of contemporary liberalism for the worse, making liberals inclined to see activist government not as a means to the ends of social justice but as an end in itself. They simply do not consider the critique of the American political system—of its concentration of power in undemocratic institutions perpetuating vested interests—that defined historic American Socialism. Contemporary liberalism offers little more than knee-jerk defenses of Keynesian economics and opposition to such odd phantom concepts and panaceas as “corporate personhood.” The historical romance for the Popular Front, among the most significant legacies of the era of DSOC and NAM, fits in neatly with this zeitgeist. As the generation of scholars who came out of the new left begins to pass from the scene, the most extreme apologetics for American Communism are largely forgotten, but the end result has proven pernicious. The celebration of the Popular Front has been awkwardly jammed into a new consensus history of the liberal left, typified by Ric and Ken Burns, and such books as Michael Kazin’s American Dreamers and Peter Dreier’s 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century.
Most works of “radical history” since the 1970s have also been beholden to Popular Front mythology. The most widely read by far, the book that practically defined the genre, is A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn. Although a member of the Communist Party in the early postwar era, to his credit Zinn did not adhere to a party line and challenged much that was sacred in the Popular Front narrative, particularly American righteousness in the Civil War and the Second World War.5 But he nevertheless remained true to the central Popular Front myth of the “people’s movement” of the 1930s, and that myth has been well served by the massive franchise that eventually grew out of his book. With far less redeeming value has been the school of conspiracy theory, most famously represented by Oliver Stone, which allows acknowledgment of the military-industrial complex while maintaining on their pedestals its most vigorous champions such as Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy.
In a highly poignant metaphor for how completely these narratives have triumphed with the self-identified left, The Progressive—the magazine once called home by Norman Thomas, Oscar Ameringer, Harry Elmer Barnes, and Oswald Garrison Villard—in 2013 ran a fawning interview of Oliver Stone, in praise of his ambitious hagiography of Henry Wallace. Indeed, even on the radical left, the American Socialist legacy has not fared much better. Perhaps the one group to even pay it much mind is the International Socialist Organization (ISO), which traces its roots to the orthodox Trotskyist YPSL exodus of the early 1960s, whose leader, Joel Geier, remains the elder statesman of the group. With its publishing arm, Haymarket Books, a leading leftist commercial publisher, they reissued the works of Ira Kipnis and Ray Ginger in a transparently deliberate effort to promote only the crudest left-wing version of the story of American Socialism.
Since the election of Barack Obama, the most prominent phenomenon of the radical left has been the “Occupy Wall Street” movement. The Occupy movement deserves credit for reasserting the imperatives of accountability for major financial institutions and addressing economic injustice in the wake of the financial crisis that began in 2008. But in the main it was a vivid apotheosis of all the pathologies characterizing the history of American radicalism. The “general strike” romance extending all the way back to the founding of the IWW typified the most devoted Occupy partisans. Indeed, the folly of antiwar protest that Devere Allen so pithily lamented to Norman Thomas—“applying some of the minor Gandhi tactics in a situation where their chance of success is so infinitely smaller that it makes them look ridiculous”—has now been embraced in general protest against capitalism. And yet, the Occupy movement consigned the sectarian left to the margins, and there was notable overlap with the followers of Ron Paul. In the coinciding struggles of the labor movement that largely embraced Occupy, against the hollow pleas of the far left to embrace the “general strike,” the labor movement has mostly pursued the available means of direct democracy—the initiative, referendum, and recall. With mixed success in various states, this would surely have gladdened the hearts of the stalwarts of the heyday of the Socialist Party.
If even the chimera of memory of American Socialism has so largely faded into the past, there may yet remain the individual standard-bearer of social democracy in American intellectual life, a role played in the postwar era by figures as disparate as Michael Harrington, Sidney Hook, James Weinstein, Irving Howe, and Christopher Lasch. Two possible claimants representing diametrically opposite stands on the great questions of the post–Cold War era—Paul Berman and Tony Judt—emerged in the first decade of the twenty-first century, but each seems to represent the end of the line. Paul Berman emerged on the road to the American misadventure in Iraq as the last neocon to still call himself a socialist, and in the first of his rambling manifestoes he channeled the intoxicated spirit of Irwin Suall in The American Ultras:
The panorama of the Terror War cried out for . . . a Third Force, different from the conservatives and the foreign policy cynics who could only think of striking up alliances with friendly tyrants, and different from the anti-imperialists of the left, the left-wing isolationists . . . devoted to a politics of human rights and especially women’s rights, across the Muslim World, a politics of ethnic and religious tolerance, a politics against racism and anti-Semitism . . . a politics of authentic solidarity for the Muslim world, instead of the demagogy of cosmic hatreds.6
Naturally, Berman was an honored speaker at the final two conferences of Social Democrats USA, where he was even allowed to invoke his inspiration from the European new left in elaborating his militant stance.7 Berman achieved his greatest notoriety a decade later for his crusade against the reputation of the liberal Islamic philosopher Tariq Ramadan. As Lee Siegel devastatingly wrote of Berman’s later manifesto specifically targeting Ramadan,
Unlike riven Europe in the 1930s—Mr. Berman’s own personal golden age—there is no furious debate in this country between Americans who side with the fanatics and terrorists and those who don’t. . . . But Mr. Berman, now in his sixties, has the puerile fervor of an undergraduate pouring his sexual and emotional frustration into a dormitory screaming match over capital punishment. He spends page after page defining “the left,” “fascism,” and “liberalism,” when in fact accurate definition is beside the point. (Not to mention the fact that social and political life have moved on to other realities, other paradigms). Yet these are the concepts that ruled Mr. Berman’s radical youth, and you feel that Mr. Berman refuses to give up his erstwhile relevance. He argues his weirdly outdated concepts with such fury because he is really trying to make a case for his own importance.8
Berman trafficked in the paranoid style of American politics with what was essentially a bizarre high-brow version of the crude right-wing paranoia about the threat of sharia law in the United States. By conflating Tariq Ramadan and the Muslim Brotherhood with its dreaded militant heresy, al-Qaeda, this self-styled “democrat of the left” repeated the very pattern that characterized the original “American ultras” who insisted that Social Democracy and Communism were one and the same.
Berman’s opposite was Tony Judt, an English-born European historian and distant relative of Meyer London. Judt first gained notoriety with a 2003 essay in the New York Review of Books foreseeing the demise of the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the controversy over which unfortunately often overshadowed his larger concerns about the post–Cold War era. With a 2006 essay in the London Review of Books, “Bush’s Useful Idiots,” Judt stood courageously alone proclaiming the authentic social democratic view of his time—that neoconservatism, not Islam, is the heir and successor of twentieth-century totalitarianism:
Long nostalgic for the comforting verities of a simpler time, today’s liberal intellectuals have at last discovered a sense of purpose: they are at war with “Islamofascism.” . . . It is particularly ironic that the “Clinton generation” of American liberals take special pride in their “tough-mindedness,” in their success in casting aside the myths and illusions of the old left, for these same “tough” new liberals reproduce some of that old left’s worst characteristics. They may see themselves as having migrated to the opposite shore, but they display precisely the same mixture of dogmatic faith and cultural provincialism, not to mention the exuberant enthusiasm for violent political transformation at other people’s expense, that marked their fellow-traveling predecessors across the Cold War ideological divide. The use value of such persons to ambitious, radical regimes is indeed an old story. Indeed, intellectual camp followers of this kind were first identified by Lenin himself, who coined the term that still describes them best. Today, America’s liberal armchair warriors are the “useful idiots” of the war on terror.9
Not since George Orwell had such a thunderbolt of forthright social democratic truth-telling come to illuminate the shadows shrouding an intellectual world in illusion. But like Orwell, Tony Judt was fated to a premature death at the peak of his creativity. His last, posthumously published book, Thinking the Twentieth Century, elaborated his bold call to reclaim the social democratic cause: “The choice we face in the next generation is not capitalism versus communism, or the end of history versus the return of history, but the politics of social cohesion based around collective purposes versus the erosion of society by the politics of fear.”10
To this last elegy for historic Social Democracy, the consensus liberals at The American Prospect could only gripe that Judt had “fallen into anti-intellectualism . . . as when he dismisses social history, women’s history, labor history, cultural studies, and the study of race, as . . . mediocrity defended by political correctness.”11 Yet the priesthood of overly verbose identity politics in the universities, which is somehow the most enduring legacy of the new left, was not his only obstacle to seriously pursuing the resurrection of Social Democracy in the United States. Judt’s European grounding was both his strength and his weakness: his strength because it girded him against the idolatry afflicting American liberalism, and his weakness because it effectively precluded him from engaging the American Socialist past.
Tony Judt recapitulated the social democratic ethic by which the Socialist Party of America distinguished itself once the meaning of the Russian Revolution and the American Communist split became clear. This ethic may be seen, both in its original context and in the present day, as a kind of conservative temperament. For like the widely reputed founder of the modern conservative idea, Edmund Burke, that American Socialist ethic was and is fundamentally grounded in a radical critique of the existing order, of which the rejection of revolutionary means and reverence for permanent things are indispensable parts. Indeed, as radical voices in the wilderness who warned against their own country pursuing the path of empire at the same time they forcefully rejected the blood-soaked revolutionary alternative abroad, Karl Kautsky and Morris Hillquit may have been the truest heirs of Edmund Burke in the twentieth century.
The history of American politics in the last half-century lends itself to the deepest pessimism about the prospect for any kind of positive radical change, much less organizing to that end. But a longer view tells a very different story. In the early 1960s, two heavily militarized empires dominated the globe, and the specter haunting men and women of conscience was nothing less than the end of all life on earth resulting from a nuclear war. But within a generation, a bloodless popular uprising toppled the more tyrannical of the two empires, and the whole specter of totalitarianism that defined the twentieth century was no more. Barely two decades later, the days of the American empire appear numbered, which may mean nothing less than the repeal of the twentieth century—the century of horror, the century of mass destruction and genocide.
Whatever may follow, the place of the Socialist Party of America in the longer arc of that history is clear. To the kings and nobles of the court historians, the imperial presidents and their elite and enlightened courtesans, they were the prophets, who warned of the folly in which the country and its leaders were setting out and who offered the alternative path of peace and justice. They were, indeed, an exceptional party in an exceptional nation.