Corruptions of Empire: Life Studies and the Reagan Era.

Corruptions of Empire: Life Studies and the Reagan Era

IN 1973 Alexander Cockburn arrived in this country from London to embark on a career of denouncing capitalists and frolicking with heiresses. He has been a brilliant success as both socialist and socialite, exploiting the contradictions of capitalism so adroitly that he got himself a regular column in the Wall Street Journal, besides the one he writes for The Nation.

He's a skillful polemicist, all right. He reminds me of a lawyer the Journal reported on a few years ago, who had never failed to clear a client on a drunk-driving rap--nearly always on such technicalities as that the nurse who administered the breath test did so a few hours after her nursing license had expired. That's Cockburn: he always finds a way to get the Soviet bloc off the hook.

"Obviously, it's not to the Russians' credit that they shot 007 down. On the other hand . . ."

"The Russians are confident enough to call for a conference on human rights in Moscow this year. They have got a lot of explaining to do, no doubt about it. But so has the U.S., . . ." (And we're off, with a long list of economic "rights.")

"Did we find in those long years [of Somoza's rule] that passionate concern which now so animates opinion in the United States about social, political, and human rights in Nicaragua?"

Corruptions of Empire (our empire, that is) is a collection of Cockburn's columns and articles from the Reagan years, and even his admirers will agree that 479 pages of Cockburn is a lot. Since most of these pieces are highly topical, they're too dated to read consecutively; an index would have helped. When he's fun, he's fun in the way gossip is. He has a knack for embarrassing people, by fair means or foul, but preferably foul. A little of that goes a long way, though, and he rarely offers an insight that stays with you.

That's because his whole way of looking at the world is basically jejune--what Raymond Aron called "Marxist vulgate." Once in a while he stops sneering to speak with apparent sincerity, and affirms that "the Cuban revolution remains a triumph on the level of the most elementary human justice": illiteracy is down, and so forth.

The key to Cockburn's method is a calculated audacity. He never quite goes so far as to say that Communism as such is good; he ignores the existence of Communism as such, and splinters the Communist world into discrete elements: "Russians," "Cubans," "progressives." (But "fascism"--as in Chile--still has a generic reality.)

Looking back over Cockburn's columns of the early Eighties, you find that he was saying things (about Nicaragua, for example) that have since become commonplate for congressional Democrats. He has a Leninist grasp of "progressive" logic: he knows whither liberals are tending before they do, and he can scorch them for deviating from their destined course. He throws some of his sharpest darts at liberal politicians, pundits, and newspapers (his favorite target is the New York Times) for lacking the courage of their own "progressive" norms. His role is to keep shepherding liberal opinion further leftward. His work is dated partly because it succeeded. He serves as a sort of conscience of liberalism not because he has any particular conscience himself, but because he knows how to use progressive rhetoric like a beadle's whip. Liberals are defenseless against him; so is Ronald Reagan, when he frames his case in progressive terms.

And those are what Richard Weaver called the "uncontested" terms of contemporary rhetoric. Cockburn seems bold and rude because he recognizes no traditional norms of discourse as authoritative: he holds everyone to implicity Communist rules of conduct. It works. It has made him a star, of sorts. I know earnest men who stay poor defending capitalism; Cockburn thrives by attacking capitalism in the Journal, where he propagates the myth of capitalist repression.

He knows the West can easily be put on the defensive, though he ruminates quaintly on "why the British are always so peculiarly astounded by what they care to call treachery," Really? Does anyone in the free world call anything treachery any more? I'd say our immune system is in bad shape, this book being evidence of that.

Nevertheless, with the Left's bogus self-pity, he recalls how his father was persecuted (well, snubbed, anyway) as a Red even after he left the Communist Party (without having announced his departure). The Nazis, he says, even marked the elder Cockburn for death. Damned ungrateful of them, I'd say, since he presumably supported the Soviet-Nazi alliance: he didn't leave the Party, according to his son, until 1947.

And why was old Cockburn a Communist? Well, in the Thirties "there was a lot to feel treacherous about." That line bears meditating on.