2. Anti-Communist Politics and the Limitsof Representation

Anti-Communist Politics

Any consideration of Cold War anti-Communism has to start with the acknowledgment that anti-Communist discourse, even in America, long predates the Cold War.¹ Although in Europe anti-Communist politics was already fully formed by the middle of the nineteenth century, in America it was the turn of the century that saw the full emergence of this kind of political discourse. The political attacks on undesirable radicals reached their first peak in the general reaction to anarchist violence and later in the persecution of the so-called Wobblies. But it was only in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution that anti-Communism became a significant force in American politics. As Richard Gid Powers has argued, by the early 1920s the basic stereotypes of both the dangerous Communist and the conservative countersubversive infringing on the constitutional rights of innocent citizens were fully established.² The first Red Scare of 1919 and the Palmer Raids of 1920 are responsible for the former; the investigations of the illegal activities of the Justice Department pursuing subversives of all breeds, as detailed in Felix Frankfurter’s Lawyers’ Report (1920), are responsible for the latter.

Thus, the novelty of post–World War II American culture was not the mere existence of anti-Communist politics, but rather its position among the available political discourses. Through a conservative hegemonic articulation, this discourse became the central organizing principle of political culture.³ It emerged from a series of potential discourses as the one that named the totality of legitimate political discourses for the organization of social order. By the 1950s, a political force that did not affiliate itself in one way or another with the cause of anti-Communism lost its legitimacy in the race for the wide-ranging support of the American people. And this is where the constitutive exclusion of this political field becomes clearly visible. The legitimate field of political opinions and actions was created by a double movement. On the one hand, the exclusion created the “universality” of the legitimate field (since anti-Communism by definition applied to all legitimate forces). On the other hand, everything that fell on the other side of this frontier was subjected to different forms of depoliticization and criminalization.

In spite of its central position, however, it would be a mistake to suppose that anti-Communist politics named a monolithic block that could be easily reduced to a unified political program. Taken at its most extreme formal generality, anti-Communist politics was without a concrete content. A whole spectrum of different political positions could be compatible with it. So it is important to emphasize that early Cold War politics in the United States was to a large extent a struggle within the anti-Communist community (rather than a conflict exclusively between anti-Communists and their opponents) for the very definition of the meaning of “anti-Communism.” Since politics by definition had to take place within the register of anti-Communism, the strongest force within the field also had the power to influence the symbolic framework of politics by investing “anti-Communism” with a specific meaning.

For a long time, the consequences of this plurality of anti-Communisms have been all but ignored in historiography. Although today it might appear evident that “rather than a single anticommunism, there have been a multitude, with different objections to communism,” the systematic analysis of these differences was not on the agenda until relatively recently.⁴ One of the most consistent examinations of such a plurality was carried out by Richard Gid Powers, who described the struggle among anti-Communists in the following terms:

During the five critical years between the end of World War II and the Korean War, anticommunists of all persuasion jostled for power: countersubversives, religious and ethnic anticommunists, liberals, and socialists. The anticommunist orthodoxy that emerged as the Cold War consensus combined the objectives of the liberal internationalist who dominated the foreign policy establishment with the ideas and values of liberal and left anticommunists. Excluded from this consensus, however, were those unmollified isolationist anticommunists still furious over being brown-smeared during the war by liberals allied with the progressive left. During the late forties, these vengeful countersubversives were able to expand their base within the Republican party until, with the outbreak of the Korean war, they could push themselves to the center of American politics, to take revenge against the same liberal anticommunists who were the architects of the free world’s defense against communism.⁵

This historical example illustrates a crucial theoretical point: the constitutive exclusion that establishes the universality of a legitimate political field does not fully determine the identity of this universality in a univocal manner. In other words, the exclusion creates a contested field of universality which forever remains the battlefield of competing political forces. Nevertheless, in order to give a recognizable schematic shape to this struggle, I will concentrate here on the two general poles identified by Powers: the political conflict between liberal orthodoxy (the co-called “Cold War liberalism”) and its countersubversive opponents.

Cold War Anti-Communism

In order to better understand the ideological stakes of this conflict, three important historical changes have to be considered. First, the fact that America for the first time in its history found itself in an active, leading role in an international political theater implied a significant reversal: the primacy of foreign policy over domestic politics. This reversal turned anti-Communism into a truly global politics. Second, since participating in international politics meant an engagement in an enduring conflict on a global level, we witness during this period the consolidation of the militarization of American politics. The novelty of the Cold War was that, for the first time in its history, it redefined American anti-Communism as an actual war. And third, due to the peculiar nature of this militarization which assumed nontraditional forms, culture took upon itself a crucial political function. Since total war was equated with nuclear annihilation, the Cold War became also a war for the minds and hearts of people, that is, a global cultural war. Thus, anti-Communism established two competing paradigms: the (conservative) militarization of politics and the (liberal) aestheticization of politics.

As Daniel Bell has argued, one of the most important changes in American political culture during the postwar years was the institutionalization of the primacy of foreign policy over domestic policy. The reversal of political primacies, according to Bell, was a result of the peculiarly American phenomenon of “status anxiety” (since class antagonism is not really applicable to American society), which proved to be fertile ground for the “new threat” of extremist excesses: “These elements of moralism, populism, Americanism, and status anxieties achieved a peculiar congruence in the fifties because of the changed nature of American politics: the emergence of foreign policy as the chief problem of politics. The politics of the 1930’s were almost entirely domestic, and the sharp political conflicts of that decade were around economic issues, and the divisions in interest-group terms.”⁶ This primacy of foreign policy meant that, at least in theory, all domestic issues had to be handled with an eye on the international threat of Communism, and in case of a conflict of interests, foreign policy decisions had to be given priority.

The primacy of foreign politics, however, also justified the militarization of American anti-Communism. Of course, as Michael S. Sherry reminded us, “militarization” was neither restricted to America nor was it exclusively a Cold War phenomenon. Following his analysis, we could say that the early phase of the Cold War witnessed the full institutionalization or, in his term, the “consolidation” of militarization, even if the process was not explicitly apparent to contemporary observers.⁷ Sherry insists on this point: “Just as empire did not look imperial to most Americans, the militarized state did not look militaristic.”⁸ Taken in this broader sense, militarization does not imply a direct military coup d’état that forces martial law over a whole country. Rather, we have to understand this militarization as a political logic that defines the meaning of politics as doing war, and therefore subordinates all political issues to the exigencies of the Cold War. This is how the logic of war slowly eroded prior conceptions of politics.

In order to understand the nature of this militarization, however, it is important to note that recent historical scholarship has paid increasing attention to the “unconventional Cold War.” For example, Gregory Mitrovich argued that “the Cold War struggle, particularly from 1948 to 1956, began as a true war between the two camps with one side destined to emerge victorious over the other.… It was a war fought, however, by non-military methods—psychological warfare and covert action.”⁹ Mitrovich provides here yet another formulation of the fundamental predicament of the Cold War: it is a war which cannot be fought as a traditional war. As a consequence, militarization itself had to proceed through nonmilitary methods and, therefore, primarily meant the extension of the logic of war to nonmilitary cultural terrains. The most important tool of this nonmilitary warfare was the notorious “psychological warfare” which, as Kenneth A. Osgood argued, “had become, in essence, a synonym for Cold War.”¹⁰ Whatever other form this historical change might have assumed, what we need to remember is that at the same time politics entered the process of militarization, the very meaning of “war” also changed.

The conclusion we have to draw from this ambiguous extension of the meaning of military categories is that during the Cold War the very meanings of the terms “war,” “politics,” and “culture” have undergone important changes as they became increasingly difficult to separate.¹¹ As part of this nonconventional warfare, culture itself became a political weapon. From the perspective of American intellectual history, one of the most enduring historical documents of this transformation remains Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination. In his preface, Trilling recorded the same historical change: “It is the wide sense of the word [politics] that is nowadays forced upon us, for clearly it is no longer possible to think of politics except as the politics of culture, the organization of human life toward some end or other, toward the modification of sentiments, which is to say the quality of human life.”¹²

This redefinition of politics as a “politics of culture” calls attention to the fact that Cold War politics was not only a “politicization of culture” that appropriated cultural products for the cause of anti-Communism. In fact, what is more important is the reverse move: the politicization of culture was accompanied by a redefinition of politics according to an “aesthetic principle.” It is here that Arthur Schlesinger’s The Vital Center (1949) and Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination (1950) emerge as complementary pieces involved in the same redefinition of liberal politics.¹³ But while Schlesinger provides a political and historical analysis with strategic but only occasional references to art, Trilling’s book is an exemplary case of literary criticism that moves toward political conclusions. In other words, Schlesinger’s interest appears to be a certain “politicization of the aesthetic,” while in Trilling’s case we get an example of the reverse process, namely, the “aestheticization of politics.” Schlesinger’s interest in art does not explicitly go beyond the common observation that the repression of art is one of the most obvious symptoms of totalitarian politics. This is how the aesthetic becomes the touchstone of a free society: the correct political organization of the social will always allow the aesthetic field to develop according to its own laws. Contrary to the attempts of totalitarian systems, the purely aesthetic essence of art should not be reduced to a politics external to it. Nevertheless, for Schlesinger, the two fields (aesthetics and politics) still remain clearly separated fields.

In Trilling’s book, however, we can easily trace the opposite movement, since he depicts artistic literary activity as the ultimate model of correct liberal political action. Trilling formulates the connection between politics and art in the following way:

The job of criticism would seem to be, then, to recall liberalism to its first essential imagination of variousness and possibility, which implies the awareness of complexity and difficulty. To the carrying out of the job of criticizing the liberal imagination, literature has a unique relevance, not merely because so much of modern literature has explicitly directed itself upon politics, but more importantly because literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.¹⁴

The passage makes it clear that the redefinition of the liberal imagination (where “imagination” is to be understood in the strong sense as the very constitution of the basic terrain of political activity on the level of an imaginary horizon) is the primary political task of the moment. In the background of this redefinition, we find the disillusionment of a whole generation with 1930s leftist radicalism. At the same time, we can also see that literature plays an essential role in the redefinition of the liberal imagination. But—and this is the crucial point here—the role of literature is not defined on the level of mimetic representation. Rather, we get here a functional definition of literature. To put it differently, it is not a realist aesthetics that can bring liberalism back from the other side of dangerous illusions, but understanding politics as essentially a literary activity. And not just any literary activity: Trilling’s language also prescribes a concrete aesthetic program to the degree that it speaks of “variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty” as aesthetic values transcending naïve forms of realism. Therefore, literature (defined on this functional level as a human activity) becomes the ultimate model for correct liberal politics. For Trilling, literature is not simply a special case of political action—it is political action par excellence.¹⁵

More important, however, Trilling derives the necessary aestheticization of liberal politics from the constitutive paradox of liberal democracy: namely, that it wants to institute freedom by limiting it. This is why “imagination” has to be understood as equivalent to the field of representation established within the democratic framework. As Trilling explains, the necessary self-criticism of liberal politics is based on the following insight: “So that when we come to look at liberalism in a critical spirit, we have to expect that there will be a discrepancy between what I have called the primal imagination of liberalism and its present particular manifestations.”¹⁶ The source of the paradox is the irreducible difference between the primal imagination and its particular manifestations: “Its characteristic paradox appears again…for in the very interests of its general primal act of imagination by which it establishes its essence and existence—in the interests, that is, of its vision of a general enlargement of freedom and rational direction of human life—it drifts toward a denial of the emotions and the imagination.”¹⁷

It appears then that the function of criticism and literature is to “liberate” the liberal imagination from its self-imposed limitations by reactivating its primal imagination. Politics, therefore, is necessarily aesthetic in nature, since it must reactivate the primal imagination in order to reconsider the limits of a given field of representation from the perspective of the original institution of the democratic framework. But if the constitutive paradox of liberal democracy is that it institutes freedom by limiting it, the function of this aestheticization of politics is to guarantee that the limit remains always displaceable. Rather than a simple given, this limit must be an object of interpretation. The aesthetic critique of liberal politics proposed by Trilling automatically leads to the conclusion that liberalism can be truly liberal only if it is auto-critique. To put it differently, liberalism must first and foremost be a critique of liberalism itself.

Thus, we can articulate here some of the basic coordinates of early Cold War anti-Communism. As a first step, anti-Communism had to be elevated to the level of the signifier that names the totality of legitimate political opinions. This articulation created the field within which politics as such could take place. But within this field we witness the interaction of two different political logics: the militarization and the aestheticization of politics. The first attempts to define the essence of politics as participating in a paradoxical war that must proceed through nontraditional means. The second defines the essence of politics as an aesthetic activity concerned with the very institution of a field of representation. The two logics, as we can see, are not always easy to separate, but they were clearly based on different definitions of “representation.” The analysis of this conflict between the two definitions will allow us to account for the crisis of representation characteristic of Cold War anti-Communism.

The Cold War and the Crisis of Representation

As Ernesto Laclau argues, we always find a “crisis of representation” at the root of a populist outbreak.¹⁸ A crisis of representation, however, can assume two different forms: it can either be the local crisis of a particular demand that finds no institutional representation; or it can be the crisis of the very principle of representation that established a particular field of social visibility. In the first case we assume that the lack of representation can be corrected without endangering the symbolic framework of representation; in the second case, we face a more radical crisis that threatens this symbolic framework itself. In other words, whereas in the first case certain elements from the other side of the antagonistic internal social frontier threaten to penetrate the field from which they were excluded, in the second case the emergence of a heterogeneous element threatens the field of representation as such. In the early Cold War context, the first kind of crisis corresponds to the internal conflicts of Western democracy; the latter—more radical—form of crisis is represented by the menace of Communism.

In order to examine the crisis of political representation, we have to emphasize that the very figure of the “Cold War” refers to a “permanent crisis.” The paradoxical logic of militarization was fully dependent on a crisis that was “permanent” not because it would never end, but because this militarization sustained itself by maintaining a permanent state of exception.¹⁹ To put it differently, the crisis is not permanent de facto but de jure. It lasts precisely as long as the politics that aims to solve it is maintained. In other words, while the Cold War is often defined as a crisis of certain democratic institutions, it was in fact also the very institutionalization of the rhetoric of crisis. Giorgio Agamben argued that twentieth-century totalitarianism introduced the logic of the permanent state of emergency into politics: “modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system. Since then, the voluntary creation of a permanent state of emergency (though perhaps not declared in the technical sense) has become one of the essential practices of contemporary states, including so-called democracies.”²⁰ In the present context, we should add to Agamben’s analysis that one of the most important steps in the institutionalization of the “permanent state of exception” within the framework of democracy occurred precisely in response to the Cold War. For the latter is a permanent crisis which defines itself as a war on the level of international politics, while on the domestic front it assumes the form of a “legal civil war.”

One of the most striking features of early Cold War historical documents is the unremitting pervasiveness of a rhetoric of global crisis. In the somewhat melodramatic language of Whittaker Chambers—the Communist defector whose autobiography became one of the classics of anti-Communist literature—this was a “total crisis”:

The world has reached that turning point by the steep stages of a crisis mounting for generations.… The last war simplified the balance of political forces in the world by reducing them to two.… All the politics of our time, including the politics of war, will be the politics of this crisis.

Few men are so dull that they do not know that the crisis exists and that it threatens their lives at every point. It is popular to call it a social crisis. It is in fact a total crisis—religious, moral, intellectual, social, political, economic. It is popular to call it the crisis of the Western world. It is in fact a crisis of the whole world. Communism, which claims to be a solution of the crisis, is itself a symptom and an irritant of the crisis.²¹

If we follow Chambers, we have to conclude that “total crisis” really means that everything partakes of the same historical crisis: in other words, crisis defines the norm of this new historical era. First, politics itself is identified as a management of this universal crisis which is even more primary than the logic of war. Then, the crisis is defined as being total both in the sense that it involves all spheres of human activity and in the sense that it affects the whole globe. The role of anti-Communism is clarified when Chambers calls Communism a symptom of this crisis: while Communism embodies this crisis precisely as a symptomatic false solution to it, anti-Communism is going to be a politics of this crisis by waging war on its symptom.

In fact, Arthur Schlesinger was also quick to point out that the Cold War is essentially a “permanent crisis.”²² He argued, however, that the ideological conflict between Communism and capitalism is not the cause of this crisis: “The crisis of free society has assumed the form of international collisions between democracies and the totalitarian powers; but this fact should not blind us to the fact that in its essence this crisis is internal.”²³ This time the crisis is permanent and internal. Schlesinger argues that the dilemma of the “age of anxiety” is based on a historically determined existential predicament. This historical determination, however, is not the conflict known as the Cold War, but the much broader history of industrialization: the internal crises of modernity as such. In fact, the United States and the Soviet Union were both products of this history. In Schlesinger’s own terms, the “dilemma” of history must be distinguished from the “problem.”²⁴ He calls the dilemma the fact that “man today must organize beyond his moral and emotional means” and “this basic dilemma projects itself to us in the middle of the twentieth century in terms of the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union.”²⁵ Schlesinger then explains the relation of the dilemma and the problem in the following terms:

The USA, the USSR, the strength of industrialism and the weakness of man cannot be evaded; they make up the problem; and there is no point, in General Marshall’s phrase, in “fighting the problem.” We must understand that the terms of the problem do not exhaust the dilemma of history; but we must understand equally that men in the middle of the twentieth century can strike at the dilemma of history only in terms of the problem.²⁶

Chambers and Schlesinger demonstrate here an important aspect of anti-Communist politics. As a first step, they both historicize the crisis and therefore include the politics of anti-Communism in a wider historical and political framework. Unlike more unregenerate anti-Communists, they both claim that the crisis cannot be reduced to the Communist threat. Schlesinger insists on this point: “[The United States and the Soviet Union] are not the cause of the tensions. Nor does either nation have the secret of their solution. Nor will the destruction of one by the other usher in utopia.”²⁷ Thus, as Communism is displaced from being a cause to being a symptom of the crisis, Schlesinger effectively claims that fighting the symptom (problem) will not lead to utopia (a solution to the dilemma). Nevertheless, Schlesinger’s claim does not fully reject the politics of the symptom. It is very important that he claims that “men in the middle of the twentieth century can strike at the dilemma of history only in terms of the problem.” This exclusive position of the problem recasts the politics of the center as a more enlightened version of the politics of the symptom. Although anti-Communism as an end in itself is rejected, it is legitimized as a means toward a more comprehensive end, since it is the only legitimate means.

If we consider this crisis in more concrete terms as it relates to the everyday experience of politics, we could borrow a term from Timothy Melley, calling it an “agency crisis.”²⁸ The general awareness of crisis simply recorded the effects of a number of historical transformations that affected the very structure of political life. The sudden “globalization” of politics through Cold War anti-Communism led to the conclusion that traditional models of political behavior were no longer viable. Schlesinger, for example, speaks of “new ambiguities”: “Left and right were adequate to the political simplicities of the nineteenth century, when the right meant those who wished to preserve the existing order and the left meant those who wished to change it. But the twentieth century, here as elsewhere, introduced new ambiguities.”²⁹ Similarly, C. Wright Mills opens The Power Elite (1956) with the diagnosis that today ordinary men “often seem driven by forces they can neither understand nor govern” and therefore they feel that “they are without purpose in an epoch in which they are without power.”³⁰

But one of the most compelling accounts of this crisis is to be found in David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950). In Riesman’s analysis, the historical shift from “inner directed” to “other directed” personality also leads to an experience of the “incomprehensibility of politics.”³¹ According to his nostalgic construction, during the nineteenth century “men were masters of their politics,” which constituted “a comparatively well-defined and indeed often over-defined and constricted sphere.”³² But as Riesman hastens to add:

Politics today refuses to fit into its nineteenth-century compartment. With the mass media behind it, it invades the privacy of the citizen with its noise and claims. This invasion destroys the older, easy transitions from individual to local, local to national, and national to international interests and plunges the individual directly into the complexities of world politics, without any clear-cut notion of where his interests lie.

At the same time politics becomes more difficult to understand in a purely technical sense, partly because it invades previously semi-independent spheres like economics, partly because of the growing scope and interdependence of political decisions.… The incomprehensibility of politics gains momentum not only from the increase in its objective complexity but from what is in some respects a drop in the general level of skills relevant to understanding what goes on in politics.³³

Riesman very clearly registers here the crisis as the result of the historical transformation of politics. What is striking about these lines is that they depict this new experience of politics as being simultaneously compulsory and incomprehensible. According to this description, a new experience is forced upon the individual that remains alien to his or her traditional sphere of experience. As the mass media invade the privacy of the citizen, politics is forced upon the individual against his or her will. Politics is no longer contained in its proper public space. It overflows these boundaries and threatens to demand the whole life of the individual. But then we also learn that this experience is incomprehensible partly because Cold War politics dissolves the traditional differences between the local and the global. In the Cold War, to do politics means participating in global anti-Communism. The transition from “individual to local, local to national, and national to international” level is too quick, because the primacy of foreign policy demands that every political act contain a certain universal anti-Communist component whose content must be derived from the global situation. Therefore, “incomprehensibility” also registers the discontent that it is not always clear how local interests are being represented in the politics of global anti-Communism.

Following Frederick M. Dolan’s suggestion, we could call the politicized split between essence and appearance that underlies the experience of the incomprehensibility of politics “Cold War metaphysics.”³⁴ According to Dolan, this metaphysics introduces into the discourse of politics a radical break between reality and deceptive appearance. Politics is therefore organized by a general fear of simulation that is used by both extremes of the political spectrum: “The right-wing articulation of simulation as fear of communism, and the left-wing articulation of simulation as fear of consumer capitalism, are equally workable (or unworkable) attempts to think, judge, and protest the transition to a society of sheer artifice, where the model, as in Baudrillard’s influential formulation, not the original, is the only source of authority.”³⁵ Simulation is thus the generalized name given to the crisis of representation that is supposed to be solved by politics.³⁶ But the interesting thing about simulation is that it is not a crisis of representation because of a lack of representation (according to which someone’s interests are not being represented). The case is precisely the opposite: simulation is an excess of representation which misrepresents the represented (and threatens to do away with it altogether). The ideological concern of anti-Communist politics is precisely the restoration of “representation” to its original function. If the crisis is that of representation, the task is to define the proper limits of representation against both harmful extremes: the lack of representation (which is undemocratic and leads to social discontent) and the excess of representation (which is a deceitful practice pursued by the enemies of democracy).

To illustrate these points, we could refer here to the locus classicus of the anxiety concerning the split between essence and appearance and the subsequent “unreadability” of the enemy: Jack Finney’s 1955 novel The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Dr. Miles Bennell returns to his hometown of Santa Mira, California, only to find that an alien race invaded the town and systematically and conspiratorially replaced people by their exact replicas. One of the first encounters with the dubious signs of alien invasion is described to us when Bennell is called to the house of a friend who is convinced that her Uncle Ira is not really Uncle Ira:

Wilma sat staring at me, eyes intense. “I’ve been waiting for you today,” she whispered. “Waiting till he’d get a haircut, and he finally did.” Again she leaned toward me, eyes big, her voice a hissing whisper. “There’s a little scar on the back of Ira’s neck; he had a boil there once, and your father lanced it. You can’t see the scar,” she whispered, “when he needs a haircut. But when his neck is shaved, you can. Well, today—I’ve been waiting for this!—today he got a haircut—”

I sat forward, suddenly excited. “And the scar’s gone? You mean—”

“No!” she said, almost indignantly, eyes flashing. “It’s there—the scar—exactly like Uncle Ira’s!”³⁷

Wilma’s indignation is just. Why would an intelligent doctor like Dr. Miles Bennell still hold on to such an outmoded model of deception? Bennell’s anticipation of the missing scar is a sign of a traditional conception of “identity theft” (he anticipates imperfect imitation as sign of deception)—but what the whole story and Wilma’s indignation tell us is that this new form of deception (perfect imitation) is so effective precisely because of the old-fashioned reading of the signs of deception. Dr. Bennell starts with the assumption that if the signs are wrong, then identity must also be problematic. Wilma, however, proceeds the other way around: if identity is wrong, even the right signs are problematic. Uncle Ira’s scar is supposed to be the sign of ultimate authenticity. But in Wilma’s reading it is precisely authenticity which makes the sign inauthentic: the uncanny moment is an excess of authenticity. The perfectly normal is rather suspicious.

One of the clearest examples of the way this crisis of representation figures in the discourse of Cold War anti-Communism can be found in J. Edgar Hoover’s 1962 book A Study of Communism (see Figure 1). In its closing chapter, we find a diagram entitled “COMMUNIST FRONT ORGANIZATIONS” (resembling an upside-down genealogical family tree) explaining how the CPUSA exploits other organizations.³⁸ At the top of the picture we find the CPUSA, from which a line descends into thirteen different categories. Below the little box containing the CPUSA, we read “Main spheres of activity exploited by communist party in its front operations.” The thirteen spheres are as follows (from left to right): education; civil rights; veterans; minority groups; youth; women; defense; press, radio, television, and motion pictures; peace movements; foreign born; culture; legislation; and labor. Three main categories can be distinguished in this list: social struggles, government functions, and culture/media. In other words, the three spheres of social existence depicted here include social demands, the institutions that are supposed to represent them, and the channels of communication between the two.

Figure 1. Communist Front Organizations.” In A Study of Communism by J. Edgar Hoover (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962), 170.

The position of the Communist Party in the picture is precisely that of the ideological “quilting point” which ties together all forms of social antagonisms. The basic assumption of the anti-Communist argument is that the Communists will exploit all forms of social discontent by penetrating organizations or treacherously promising the discontent to cater to their needs. But in reality, so the argument goes, the Communists really want to amplify all forms of social antagonism in order to weaken the unity of the nation. Therefore, the Communist becomes the very figure of antagonism as such. Thus, the diagram provides a reading strategy which is predicated upon the masterful deceit of Communists and allows us to project the ideological figure of the Communist behind all forms of social antagonism.³⁹ This is why the exclusion of the Communist becomes a form of inclusion: the act of exclusion establishes the field of politics; but the excluded element threatens to return in the form of a simulacrum.

We can again see that what is unique to the Cold War is not anti-Communist politics, but the fact that anti-Communism could be articulated as the essence of politics as such. If we use the terms provided by Hoover’s figure, we can say that the meaning of this articulation is that the box representing the CPUSA could be removed from the series of other political forces and elevated to the level of the element that names the general logic of the series of social struggles. The exclusion of a particular element establishes a field within which, in reference to the very act of exclusion, an articulated totality can emerge. Since the Communists will exploit every social struggle, there is no social struggle without a potential or unknown Communist content. This content, no matter how insignificant it might be, fully contaminates the identity of the given struggle, and reduces it to nothing but a Communist conspiratorial tool. On the other hand, if domestic politics entails a management of society, it requires a regulation of these social struggles. But if the identity of every single social struggle is supposed to be contaminated by Communism, every political act of social management, in turn, has to contain an anti-Communist element.

The logical conclusion is clear: there is no politics unless it is anti-Communist. The identity of both particular social struggles and particular governmental politics is necessarily split by this discourse: beside their particular content (racial, feminist, immigrant, cultural, etc.) social struggles contain a Communist invariable as their universal content; while every act of social management, beside their particular content, contains an anti-Communist universal content. Through the equivalence of the universal contents, this split establishes an internal social frontier that allows the populist discourse of anti-Communism to align two opposing forces, since social struggle equals Communism and legitimate politics equals anti-Communism. But what concerns us the most is that the figure of the Communist, by introducing an excess of representation, threatens the very democratic framework of representation, since the politics of deceit undermines the fundamental process of democracy, representation itself.

So it is important to point out that the diagram is an attempt to represent the agency that makes political representation impossible. In other words, Hoover provides his readers a certain “phenomenology” of political heterogeneity. Although the Communist Party must be excluded from the field of politics, the question behind the diagram is this: How does the excluded Communist (the enemy of the democratic principle of representation) nevertheless still appear within the normal system of representations? This strategy effectively achieves two significant things. On the one hand, it establishes a field of political visibility in the sense that, according to this diagram, what comprises the field of anti-Communist politics is the collection of representable entities that can be infiltrated by the Communist Party. To the degree that politics by definition has to be anti-Communist in the Cold War, the diagram defines the primary terrain of politics itself. By naming the little boxes, it effectively summons into being the very entities whose relations will define politics as a field of visibility. On the other hand, the diagram also establishes the phenomenology of the impossibility of representation in that it displaces a constitutive impossibility to the Communist threat. Hoover shows that the enemy basically saturates the whole field of political representation (or at least has the potential to do so) in a manner that makes it, strictly speaking, impossible to locate in one single spot. The enemy is truly dangerous because it does not appear as such within the field of representation, but disguises itself through the otherwise “normal” mechanisms of American democracy. The absurd logical consequence of this phenomenology of anti-Communist enmity, however, is that it opens up the possibility of the suspicion that the impossibility of representation appears as its very own opposite.⁴⁰ The worst enemy of democracy turns out to be democracy itself.

Anti-Communism and the Limits of Representation

The solution offered by anti-Communism to this crisis of representation was to set the proper limits of representation. The proper way of controlling the errant simulacrum was to contain legitimate representation within clearly defined boundaries. The logic of war legitimized restrictions on representation as it declared a state of exception, while the logic of aestheticization moved beyond the naïve political realism of representation and instituted a new kind of realism that moved beyond mere appearances. In spite of their political differences, however, both of these positions were clearly predicated upon the separation of representation from a domain beyond its legitimate limits. As the truth of anti-Communist politics named the totality of legitimate political positions, it was also responsible for setting the constitutive limits of such politics. Therefore, the limitation of representation had to proceed on two separate levels: as a first step, anti-Communism had to establish the very terrain within which politics could take place; and as a second step, within this political terrain the proper limits of political representation had to be drawn. This is exactly what we saw in Hoover’s diagram: first it established the field of politics and then defined proper politics as a necessary limitation of representation in order to purge it of its harmful excesses.

Anti-Communist politics had to produce the kind of public knowledge that could legitimize this double move. This is why this kind of propaganda explicitly defined itself as the dissemination of a “necessary knowledge” about the Communist threat. One of the most often recurring motifs of the genre is George F. Kennan’s proposition that “There is nothing as dangerous or as terrifying as the unknown.”⁴¹ In the introduction to his Masters of Deceit, Hoover calls this “a body of knowledge that we dare not be without.”⁴² In more sensational terms, Fred Schwarz opens his book, You Can Trust the Communists, with the warning: “In the battle against Communism, there is no substitute for accurate, specific knowledge. Ignorance is evil and paralytic.”⁴³ While W. Cleon Skousen charges that the “unbelievable success” of the Communist conspiracy is “the result of two species of ignorance—ignorance concerning the constitutional requirements needed to perpetuate freedom, and secondly, ignorance concerning the history, philosophy and strategy of World Communism.”⁴⁴

Hoover’s expression, “the knowledge that we dare not be without,” however, also displays the inevitable ambiguity of this anti-Communist knowledge, which proved to be a rather serious nuisance for architects of national security in the 1950s. The full sentence in the original clearly designates the limits of this knowledge as well: “Obviously this book does not pretend to disclose a body of material known exclusively to the FBI. What it does express is the hope that all of us may develop a shared body of rudimentary knowledge about communism: a body of knowledge we dare not be without.”⁴⁵ There appears to be an implicit tension here between what is known exclusively by the FBI and the “rudimentary” nature of the public information. This was precisely the question that kept haunting anti-Communist politicians: Just how much knowledge is still beneficial and when does too much knowledge start working against the alleged goals of national security? While ignorance is no doubt evil, knowing too much can also be a serious liability. This complication concerning the right kind and correct amount of information to be made available to the American public is not just a theoretical exercise for the historian, it was a real problem for those involved in the fight against Communism. It is at this point that we touch upon an essential conflict within the so-called Cold War liberal consensus: although democratic politics implies an unconditional openness, the unquestionable imperative of national security might demand secrecy.

Consequently, the propagation of anti-Communist truth could not be equated with a simple production of a “necessary knowledge”—it had to be complemented with the creation of “necessary secrets” (or, as the renowned sociologist Edward Shils put it in 1956, “the necessary minimum of secrecy”) and “necessary illusions” (to borrow a phrase from Reinhold Niebuhr, who eventually became the most prominent theologian of the Cold War).⁴⁶ In other words, anti-Communist propaganda had to define a certain field of proper knowledge, on the one hand, by reference to what always remains external to this field (the secret) and, on the other hand, what necessarily appears as an excessive element within this field (the illusion). In the following chapter, I will examine in detail the ideological figures used in the construction of these three separate fields.