The Survival of the Adversary Culture.

The Survival of the Adversary Culture

PAUL HOLLANDER'S latest book is primarily a collection of his essays drawn from newspapers and periodicals. The best of these essays, which overlap thematically with his most notable work, Political Pilgrims (1981), are worth reading once again. Hollander is properly known for his descriptions of Communist well-wishers searching everywhere for the revolutionary dream fulfilled. He does well what Joseph Sobran carries off even more pungently: depicting apparent naifs who can never resist giving Communist dictators a second chance.

But alas, we've heard it all before! Though we may frown at the fools Hollander exposes, he does not reveal anything about them that most of his readers did not already know. His remarks on the counterculture are stale, they rarely go beyond summing up polemics that other neoconservatives have written while battling their cultural enemies. Hollander also has the bad habit of citing books without evaluating them. Though he discusses at length the provocative, carefully researched study by R. S. Lichter and Stanley Rothman of the specifically Jewish roots of the New Left, it is unclear whether or not he agrees with their conclusions. In the absence of explicit disagreement, I assume that he does. But if so, there is nothing to suggest that Lichter and Rothman influenced any of the judgments Hollander offers about the counterculture elsewhere in the book.

One suspects that this collection was funded and published for the same reason that Sidney Hook wrote the foreword: because the author expresses the now-fashionable views of an anti-Communist social democrat. In his comments on Hook's Marxism and Beyond, Hollander praises Hook as "a defender of the humanist legacy of Marx against those who sought to legitimate their inhumane policies by his ideas." Moreover, Hook "also teaches us how to distinguish the liberating, democratic ideals of socialism from the wide variety of misuses they have been subjected to in our time, both as vindications of tyranny and escapist fantasies of limitless `self-realization.'"

Behind the tortured syntax looms Hollander's hope that the "good" Marx will be vindicated from all misrepresentations of socialist humanism. Like other anti-Soviet leftists, Hollander sees contemporary America's struggle with the Communist world as one between a democratic Marxism on the one hand and a disfigured Marxism on the other. He believes (as far as I can tell) that there is nothing seriously wrong with either the America welfare state or present-day American society, except for the quarrelsome, "alienated" intellectuals he finds on the Right, as well as on the Left.

In several chapters he gracelessly attacks George F. Kennan, an aged social conservative who has strayed grievously into error on the subject of the Soviet Union. Kennan's advocacy of detente has, admittedly, often revealed a moral insensitively to the victims of Communism, which Hollander is certainly justified in criticizing. Even so, the repetitious scolding and the symbolic importance Hollander attaches to the man suggest his encumbrance with an idee fixe. Hollander accurately describes Kennan as someone "not primarily troubled by inequalities. His main concern lies with standards: moral, cultural, educational, aesthetic, or environmental. Their decline is at the root of his critique of American society." Hollander bristles at Kennan's unwillingness to treat the Soviet persecution of dissidents as a matter for international concern: "By Mr. Kennan's criteria, one is unable to censure South African whites who repress and murder blacks, because they feel threatened by the prospect of revolution and loss of power."

Even more obnoxious to Hollander than Kennan's implicit softness on South Africa is his pessimism about the continuing American experiment. Kennan has stated that American internal decay--which he associates with violent crime, pornography, drug abuse, and the breakdown of families--may threaten us even more than the Soviet military does. Of course, nothing in this indictment would offend even so hardened a cold-warrior as Pat Buchanan, who laments the same evils in his just-published autobiography. All the same, Hollander seems intent on finding a link between criticism of contemporary American society from a relentlessly conservative perspective and the abandonment of an anti-Soviet foreign policy. For Hollander, such a link may indeed be necessary. Like Hook, he strains to present the struggle against Soviet Communism as a crusade of the democratic Left.

Nonetheless, the example of Kennan may suggest an emerging pattern. Hollander is correct to assert (however tendentiously he makes the point) that virulent social critics of the United States are not likely to demand an aggressive global foreign policy. Though most paleoconservatives have not followed Kennan over the precipice, the increasing identification of the cold war with international democratism and with the defense of contemporary American life could lead to a renewal of isolationism among members of the Old Right. Something like this is likely to happen, in fact, if the cold war becomes identified exclusively with values that the Old Rights rejects both at home and elsewhere.

Despite the general absence of original scholarship, The Survival of the Adversary Culture may contain startling news for at least one benighted group: those who still believe all anti-Communists are alike. As for those who may be led to compare these essays to James Burnham's Suicide of the West, invincible ignorance can be the only possible excuse.