Why aren't these people smiling?

The genial Left has been aching for the end of the cold war-but not this way.

JOHN Kenneth Galbraith has summed up the differences between capitalism and Communism with the line that capitalism features the exploitation of man by man, while under Communism the situation is just the reverse. This bit of cleverness has usually been employed on behalf of Galbraith's theory that the Soviet and American economic models were exhibiting increasing signs of "convergence." But it was also meant to ridicule the cold war. Why, Galbraith seemed to suggest, should intelligent men waste their talents in an absurd conflict over competing economic systems, each with its obvious imperfections and inequities?

Is it churlish to remind the world of the infamous-or, in Galbraith's case, silly-opinions expressed by the democratic world's progressive intellectuals on the subject of Communism? Not really, given the role they will play in shaping the post-Communist foreign-policy debate. Galbraith, for example, having been wrong, wrong, and wrong again about the Soviet economy, is even today cautioning the Russians and others against putting too much faith in the market.

Galbraith's views were shared by most of America's liberal intellectuals and foreign-policy specialists, as well as those of a more leftward bent. Mainly the critics of the cold war were concerned with Washington, not Moscow. The cold war, they claimed, did not entail a commitment to the spread of freedom, but rather signified, in the words of Ronald Steel, "numerous interventions conducted in the tired vocabulary of anti-Communism, .. the sacrifice of ... unmet needs to an insatiable war machine, and . . . the deliberate deceit practiced by [America's] leaders."

Written in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, Steel's words remind us that over the past twenty years victory over Communism did not figure prominently among the priorities of the intellectual elite. For in the ideal scenario, the final chapter of the superpower conflict was not to have brought unilateral Soviet surrender, but rather some sort of mutual accommodation which would leave both systems more or less intact. Thus where once it was smugly proclaimed that Mikhail Gorbachev's reform course had deprived Western anti-Communists of their life's passion, it now seems that those encountering the most difficult adjustment to the cold war's winding down may be those who opposed the cold war all along.

The refrain of the late socialist leader Michael Harrington was: "We are not naive about the Soviet Union." In fact, a measure of willful naivete was necessary if one was actively to promote a policy of American global disengagement. For it was well understood that public support for detente would be forthcoming only if the Soviet Union was perceived as less brutal and less imperialistic than was actually the case. The Soviet leadership proved the biggest obstacle to this effort. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance's pronouncement that Presidents Carter and Brezhnev had "similar dreams and aspirations" was

repeatedly mocked by reports of poets being packed off to mental hospitals, the production of more and more accurate missiles, or the presence of Soviet tanks and advisors in some wretched Third World country.

The real crime of the apostles of disengagement was the unwillingness to engage in a reassessment of their world view in the light of Soviet rigidity, Communist global gains, and the retreat of democracy in the immediate post-Vietnam era. Indeed, Communist triumph provoked ever more tortured alibis for the Kremlin's internal totalitarianism and global aggression.

We were told that the sole purpose of Brezhnev's military buildup was to achieve parity with the U.S., an objective that was justified because Russia had so often been the victim of foreign invasion. In expanding its influence in the less developed countries, the USSR, it was said, was only doing what the U.S. had done in the past; as George Kennan observed, it was absurd to think that the Soviets could ignore the pleas of fraternal socialist regimes given their position as leader of the world Communist movement.

By the time the Red Army had rolled into Kabul and the Sandinistas had declared America the "enemy of mankind," a revised line of reasoning had to be elaborated. A few complained that the hostile U.S. stance was denying the USSR the world stature which was its right. Stephen F. Cohen, for example, drummed home the notion of a "parity principle" by which he meant a co-equal role for the Soviets in settling political problems all over the globe. Incredibly, there were those who contended that a policy of restraint was needed given the Kremlin's awesome military might and the prospect that conflict in some Third World outpost might escalate to full-scale atomic war-a policy, in other words, of flat-out appeasement.

High-Wire Act

HERE INDEED was a dizzying high-wire act. For it mattered hardly at all whether the advocates of disengagement saw the Soviet Union as ideologically relaxed and uninterested in expanding the empire, or as an increasingly unpredictable military juggernaut. The advice to the American government was always the same: Don't overreact.

Another obstacle faced by the anti-cold-war brigade was the utter failure of the Communist ideology to mellow. The appalling abuse of psychiatry revealed, or should have revealed, a quite stunning attitude of official contempt toward Western standards of humane behavior. George Kennan allowed as how under Stalin dissidents would have been shot, not merely given a prison sentence. Richard Barnet, of the Institute for Policy Studies, was one among many who insisted that the Soviet people were more concerned with economic and social guarantees than with personal liberty.

Others cautioned against giving too much credence to the views of the dissidents. True, the Marchenkos, Bukovskys, and Solzhenitsyns were to be admired for their personal courage. But, after all, they were embittered individuals, prone to exaggeration about the level of popular discontent and overly hopeful about the prospects for Russian democracy. Stephen Cohen suggested that the dissidents were less in touch with the views of ordinary Russians than the local Party secretaries. Some were even harsher. Sovietologist Jerry Hough, whose reputation for eccentricity is often due to a willingness to say publicly what others assert sotto voce (he recently characterized Boris Yeltsin as a fascist), once stated that Soviet dissidents had no more influence on their society than Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman had on American society.

In fact, Russian intellectuals like Amalrik, Bukovsky, and Solzhenitsyn clearly understood something which eluded most Western experts, and that is that Communism was unreformable and could not be changed through incremental steps. The dissidents functioned as expert witnesses on behalf of the theory of Communism as a totalitarian system quite different in nature from traditional dictatorships like Chile's. Their testimony carried the power of personal experience, devastating in its unique insight into the psychological repercussions of life under state socialism. Not surprisingly, the dissident message was unwelcome to the proponents of detente. Yet rather than engaging in a frontal attack, they carried out a disgraceful rear-guard campaign designed to discredit the dissidents through accusations of incipient fascism, Russian chauvinism, or anti-Semitism.

One source of particular distress was the dissidents' assertion that socialism was in practice antithetical to human nature. The great leftist illusion, after all, was that socialism had never really been tried, that fledgling attempts to realize the socialist dream had been strangled by a combination of Stalinist brutality and American hegemonic bullying. Indeed, a few continued to find positive aspects in the Soviet experience. One year after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Richard Barnet could write that revolution, "for all its brutality, has had some spectacular successes." He cited the "rapid modernization of Russia," "the end of massive starvation in China," and Cuban literacy efforts as examples of "what regimentation and the shake-up of an old corrupt order can do." The Reverend William Sloane Coffin once described Communism as a "page out of the Bible," and described as a "real indictment of Christians" our failure to equal the achievements in "social justice" found in China and Vietnam.

Now that Communism has been swept aside, there will be a temptation to excuse the excuses as a kind of intellectual victimless crime. This would be a mistake, for the fudging, evasions, and downright duplicity contributed to the weakening of a number of important American institutions, and may even have played a role in extending the Soviet system's life.

The Democratic Party and, more generally, American polities, must be counted as among the chief casualties of anti-anti-Communism. It was, after all, leading members of the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, cold-war enthusiasts to a man, who changed their minds and provided establishment credentials to the anti-cold-war stance hitherto limited to marginal intellectuals like Noam Chomsky. The party itself, from the precinct level up, fell victim to an isolationist virus which-more than any other single factor, including race influenced the Democrats' decline as a national party. That the Democrats came to regard George McGovern as a respected elder statesman (the "conscience" of the party) despite his apologetics for the Soviet subjugation of Eastern Europe, while treating Scoop Jackson as something of a menace for his anti-Soviet philosophy, indicates the depths of the party's retreat since John F. Kennedy's "Bear any burden, pay any price." Unfortunately, the party's impulse in dealing with its waning fortunes has not been to undertake a thorough re-evaluation of its world view, but rather to attempt a series of public-relations maneuvers designed to camouflage the persisting sway of the mindset of disengagement.

Another institution to have suffered from the collapse of the cold war consensus is mainline Protestantism. Not only did the churches' attitude toward Communism involve questions of fundamental morality, there was the additional issue of the Communist persecution of Christians, both in Eastern Europe and in Third World countries which the mainline denominations looked on as paragons of social virtue. Yet as their co-religionists were being tormented, church leaders were busily meeting with compromised, regime-sanctioned church officials or formulating manifestos laying blame for the world's ills squarely at America's door. These actions did not go unnoticed by those who suffered under Communist oppression, and who now regard the American Protestant leadership with disdain.

Political-science scholarship suffered from its difficulty in regarding Communist societies as totalitarian. It is little wonder that Sovietologists failed to anticipate Communism's demise given their assumption that the Soviet Union and even the Eastern European regimes had achieved political stability and were developing social institutions which were increasingly resembling their counterparts in the democracies. The corruption of academic standards was notably pronounced in the study of Third World radical societies, which came to be dominated by ideologically "engaged" scholars who saw totalitarian institutions as the engine of economic advancement and, yes, as a stimulus to democratic participation. But Sovietology did not escape unscathed. Scholars who persisted in stressing the Communist use of terror or more subtle instruments of control were often looked on as cold-war relics; young scholars were more prone to examine Soviet day-care policies than the repression of religious believers.

Finally, there was serious damage done to the idea of integrity in political debate. It could at least be said that the early Western enthusiasts for Bolshevism did honestly believe in the utopian potential of Communism and were unaware of the criminal nature of the system.

The current generation, by contrast, cannot claim ignorance of Stalin's murders. They knew the truth, and yet were willing to manipulate facts, contrive excuses, and even lie in order to move America toward a more "reasonable" posture. Perhaps the most lamentable result was the serious internal division over the need to respond to Communist advances. As certain revolutionary leaders have testified, Communist gains in the Third World were directly influenced by a perception of internal division and waning will in post-Vietnam America. Those who contributed to the country's self-doubt also contributed to the victory of Third World Stalinism-systems whose major achievement was not development," but killing, mass exile, poverty, and civil war.

As to the future, it is to be hoped that the more moderate critics of the cold war will again play a constructive part in the debate over America's role in the world. It must be noted that the predominance of anti-Yeltsin views suggests little cause for optimism.

Those of a more radical stripe will no doubt seek out new causes and new utopias. Environmentalism holds an obvious appeal for those drawn to utopias; the realization of the radical environmental agenda would entail a degree of totalitarian regimentation that would compare well with what went on in Hoxha's Albania. But a truly mass movement devoted to radical ecology is not likely to materialize. Environmental controls inevitably collide with the public's economic well-being, a fact which will always limit the movement's mass popularity.

For the moment, then, the Left is likely to focus its energies on the Balkanization of America along lines of race and gender. And, of course, the struggles for multiculturalism, political correctness, diversity, and the like carry the potential for doing further damage to some of America's key institutions-its schools, its universities, and its once-great cities, not to mention the crucial, overriding idea of a common culture. For many, the war against the cold war was less about supporting Communism than about weakening America. We can soon expect the Left to bring that struggle back home.