Will success spoil anti-communists? As freedom triumphs, liberals feel sorry for conservatives. What will they do without communism to attack?

As freedom triumphs, liberals feel sorry for conservatives.

What will they do without Communism to attack?

Well, there's always liberalism-and plenty of it.

TWENTY-FIVE years after Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary, saw the lights going out all over Europe, they were unexpectedly turned on again in the fall of 1989. A friend of mine, a well-known conservative, suggested that I keep an eye on the news media's coverage of these stirring events. For the liberals, he believed, a little "spin control" would be necessary. They couldn't really enjoy what was going on, but they wouldn't be able to admit as much, either. A column by George Will partly confirmed this guess. "Some liberals," he wrote, "seem disoriented. They are even made morose by recent events." The New Yorker, however, contrived to detect a silver lining in the cloud of an anti-communist revolution-the imminent demise of anti-communism: "That the cold war may be ending, and that forty years of nuclear dread might diminish, and that anti-communism, an engine that has propelled so many American political careers, could fall into disuse-a newspaper reader hardly dares to be so hopeful."

This theme was repeated with minor variations by Russell Baker in the New York Times and by Richard Cohen in the Washington Post. "Anti-communism has been the glue that held together the volatile elements of the Republican Party for longer than most of them remember," Baker wrote. "It's all very sweet to see the old order changing from Germany to Moscow, but where's the political mileage in anti-communism if Communism is all washed up?"

"With Communism threatening to vaporize," Richard Cohen wrote, conservatives "may soon have little to react against." He added that "conservatism is reactive in nature. Its idea of a program is to oppose one offered by someone else." (Not quite. Conservatives believe that individuals, being possessed of free will, should have their own separate "programs.")

Unavoidably, however, the news media, especially television, did convey much of the tremendous joy that has been experienced by tens of millions of Europeans in recent months. Anti-communism turned out to have been a well-nigh universal philosophy. The television anchormen could do little more than position themselves before the celebrating crowds in Berlin and Prague and Bucharest, but that was all they had to do. Nothing they might have said could possibly have detracted from these images of freedom experienced for the first time, many of them unexpectedly moving-pale East Berliners gazing with silent awe into West Berlin shop windows, and so on. (To be fair, no TV reports that I saw even hinted that the unfolding events were anything other than joyous.)

IF THERE WERE spin-control teams at work at the New York Times and Washington Post, one sensed nonetheless that events were unfolding too rapidly for them to have much effect. Inevitably, there were items one could quibble with. One example was a New York Times headline over a page-one story by Craig Whitney: "East Germans Fear New Freedom Could Outstrip Ways to Control It." This headline erroneously imputed to "East Germans" in general what is surely the Weltanschauung of New York Times editors in general. The sentiment should have been attributed to "a small handful of East Germans"-those who still think that Communism is a nice idea in theory.

Something else that kept popping up was the New York Times's uncritical use of the CIA!S GNP-per-capita statistics. The media regaled us with funny stories about East Germany's getaway car, the Trabant, with its lawnmower engine. But there, tucked inside the New York Times, would be the odd claim that East Germany's 1988 GNP per capita was $12,480, compared with $7,390 in Spain, $13,270 in Britain, and $14,260 in West Germany. Obviously these figures are nonsense. They merely discredit the CIA'S information-gathering and statistical procedures. One wonders if the Times and other news media organizations-with their professed resistance to "accepting handouts" from government agencies-will ever question them. Nick Eberstadt, author of The Poverty of Communism, points out that the 1989 edition of the Statistical Abstract of the United States absurdly credits East Germany with a GNP per capita that is higher than West Germany's.

ON THE WHOLE, however, the press has been favorably disposed toward the revolution of 1989. This is not because our leading media figures are particularly enthusiastic about an "anti-communist revolution" (as the Washington Post creditably called it on its front page on January 14), or because they are wild about liberty in the abstract- In fact, on December 8 the New York Times published a unusual column by A. M. Rosenthal, until recently the paper's executive editor, railing against "so many of our academics an journalists," who "cluck nervously at the passion for freedom of the people of Eastern and Central Europe, whose very captivity was unfashionable to mention for many years." Rosenthal has a good point here. For years the press used the phrase "captive nations" gingerly, if at all, and usually within prophylactic quotation marks. The Washington Post foresaw this argument while it was still over the horizon, noting in an August 1989 editorial that the captive nations' "political strivings were commonly received as disruptive, unrealistic' threats to international stability, perhaps of some musty literal or historical merit but essentially unhelpful to the greater good of world peace."

A couple of months earlier, the Post's editorial page editor, Meg Greenfield, wrote that "until pretty recently we were dismissing 'captive nations' week and other such manifestations of sorrow over the situation in Eastern Europe as the mischievous, warmongering handiwork of far-right emigre groups." She might almost have been thinking of the Washington Post's Don Oberdorfer, who (in September 1984) referred to "the Administration's 'captive nations' ideology," or John M. Goshko, who (in July 1980) denigrated Reagan's "old cronies" at the Republican convention, including "throwbacks to the 1950s era of pleading the cause of Eastern Europe's 'captive nations."'

As a Nexis search shows (Nexis permits a computerized retrieval of individual words from major newspapers and magazines), the phrase victims of McCarthyism" occurred more frequently in the decade of the 1980s than the phrase victims of Communism," the latter being used not only sparingly but sometimes with irony. This is peculiar, of course, because the victims of McCarthyism" numbered at most in the hundreds, for a short period in the 1950s, and none of them were murdered; the victims of Communism were numbered in the hundreds of millions, were enslaved tortured and murdered, and still exist in the hundreds of millions-in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, North Korea, among other countries. But the truth is they have not constituted a fashionable or even an acceptable victim category.

By far the worst large-circulation offender has been Time. The magazine's editor-at-large, Strobe Talbott, has emerged as the most prominently placed and unremitting Soviet apologist in the U.S. press corps. In Time's Man of the Decade issue, Talbott told us not only that the cold war is over, but that the "red menace" never really existed in the first place. Western policy had been based on "a grotesque exaggeration of what the USSR could do ... It was believed to be possessed of immense and malignant strength, including the selfconfidence, prowess, and resources for the conduct of about war." Communism is now a thing of the past, Talbott evasively hinted.

As for the wrongheaded notion that the Soviet Union ever was possessed of "malignant strength," the Time reader with a good memory might once again have been puzzled. Talbott used to write long treatises advocating arms control on the grounds that any new weapons we might deploy would be reduplicated by the Soviets, condemning us both to a costly, futile, and dangerous arms race. "Critics warn that the Soviets will inevitably develop strategic defenses of their own," he wrote in 1985. A year earlier, in Time's Men of the Year cover story (Reagan and Andropov, in case you forgot), "reported by" Talbott, among others, the argument was made that "inefficient as the Soviet civilian economy is, the Kremlin could squeeze it further to continue piling up arms. The Soviet public will do what it is told, partly because it has no choice, but partly because it responds vigorously when it believes the motherland is being threatened."

Talbott's view of the future (in Time's Man of the Decade issue) is also worth pondering. He writes with exasperation that U.S. defense policy still includes this caveat: "the West must be prepared for the danger that Gorbachev will be overthrown; he might be replaced by a retrograde Soviet leadership that will once again that is the key phrase: once again-threaten the rest of the world with military intimidation if not conquest."

THUS DOES he suggest the Soviets never have that is his message: never have-resorted to military intimidation? A Washington Post editorial (May 23, 1984) supplied evidence to refute him; "Sober people believe the basic Soviet purpose is to frighten the West .. Look, for instance, at the rocket rattling of the last year or so in the Soviets' own words: |their~ defense programs make Japan a likely target for a nuclear response strike.' Scandinavian countries are 'to burn in the fire of nuclear war in the name of Atlantic solidarity.' Helmut Kohl's re-election could result in West Germany's 'ascending a nuclear gallows.' Deployment of U.S. missiles could make all of Italy 'a Pompeii.' This is the policy Kremlin spokesmen call peace-loving."'

And what was the opinion of opinion magazines? The poor old New Republic's "bid to define the decade" was published on October 9th; so they missed the main event. Some (but not much) overt discontent with recent developments has appeared in the left-wing press. "For now," The Nation noted after the Malta summit, President Bush "has a depressingly free ride. With Gorbachev preoccupied with the nightmarish state of the Soviet economy, there is no pressure from Moscow . . . to moderate U.S. behavior in what are still considered sensitive areas of the Third World." (Interesting that the Moscow of yore should now be seen as a moderating influence.) "Ideological struggle" should be a thing of the past, Gorbachev told Bush at Malta. "So we'll just have to carry on without him," replied Alexander Cockburn, who "stared gloomily" at the New York Times story by Clyde Haberman, headlined "Gorbachev Lauds Religion on Eve of Meeting Pope."

This is the analytical crux of the matter. In general, the media have been enthusiastic about the events of 1989 mainly because they occurred with the assent of Mikhail Gorbachev, indeed with his imprimatur. For years the professed liberalism of some influential members of the U.S. press corps has been in practice subordinated to the will of the "Soviet leader," whoever he happened to be at the time. If liberal principles were in conflict with Soviet will, then the latter should be permitted to prevail (as unobtrusively as possible). To insist upon anything else would be provocative old-war rhetoric. For a good many years this or something like it has been the editorial position of the New York Times; more recently also of Time magazine and network-television news. The Times today sometimes does write disparagingly about Gorbachev's predecessors-Leonid Brezhnev for example. But its attitude toward the living and breathing Soviet leader has almost always been deferential. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan Time was ready with an explanation: "Our Containment Is Their Encirclement," read the headline. "The Soviets are most on the defensive and therefore most likely to take the offensive along their own borders," Strobe Talbott and Bruce Nelan (Moscow bureau chief) wrote.

TODAY, journalists who have obeyed this etiquette of deference flying more easily in formation with Moscow than with Washington whenever a major policy conflict between the two arises) now find themselves with a Soviet leader who doesn't embarrass them. Their sentiments can be compared to those of Roman Catholics who, having endured (let us imagine) a succession of bad popes, suddenly find themselves with a good one in the chair of St. Peter. Earlier, loyalty had dictated that the pope could not be openly opposed. But now he can be openly embraced. Why this curious deference to Soviet will has prevailed throughout important sections of the media is a much neglected question. Sheer fear should not be overlooked. Many journalists and policy-makers have clearly regarded the Kremlin as a kind of modern Moloch, which must be placated with sacrifices (preferably of U.S. missiles). Those who point to ideological similarities between Communism and contemporary American-style liberalism are in danger of being accused of McCarthyism.

Still, let us not be afraid to point out the family resemblance. Both ideologies are hostile to private property, free contract, and mediating institutions not under government control; both are hostile to religion-openly so in the case of Communists, under cover of the First Amendment in the case of liberals. In a nutshell the common ideology is egalitarianism without God. Modern liberalism tries to achieve "communistic" goals with democratic methods. Even the liberals' dedication to "democratic methods" has been known to waver-note the liberal preference for the non-elected branch of government, preferably peopled with activist judges ramming through the latest schemes from the social-science departments.

It is this family resemblance that answers the question asked by Richard Bernstein in the New York Times: "Has the agenda proclaimed by the coalition of forces that made up American conservatism lost its purpose now that its chief foreign-policy enemy has been vanquished? Will the movement survive? And if it does, what will be its issue in the future?"

The new conservative agenda is clear. With socialism on the ropes abroad, now is the time to focus on socialism at home. Why, exactly, do we have so much of it? That should make The New Yorker happy.