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Katha Pollitt and Andrew Sullivan

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Re: Crumbling

By Andrew Sullivan
Posted Tuesday, May 5, 1998, at 1:33 PM ET

Katha,

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Oh, come on. You're the sly one, telling me I should like Clinton for "bashing the poor" as if welfare reform was anything of the kind. I was just responding in kind.

Of course, you're right about the American context to our being soft on communism. We do have nice, fuzzy memories of those lefties in the 1930s. And Stalin was, of course, our ally in World War II. Nevertheless ... Remember what those 30s communists were excusing in the Soviet Union--a hideous state terror. Are we fuzzily indulgent of fellow-traveling Nazis in the 1930s? Of course not. And think also of what Soviet Communism extracted from America over five decades: stupendous military and economic resources, which could have been far better spent elsewhere; a morally corrupting political division over the response to communism; the deaths of many thousands of Americans in the Vietnam and Korean wars; and the continuing threat of nuclear devastation for decades. Even the deficit of the 1980s seems to me to be essentially a consequence of a final military buildup to defeat the Soviets. Why, I wonder, are we not more enraged by this? Is it entirely magnanimity in victory?

I think it's because the Left has done a good job of white-washing the evil empire--even now--and associating collectivism with good rather than bad things. Think of the fuss when Reagan used the e-word. Do you now concede he was completely right? We've also, I think, become beaten down with state power in a way previous generations would have been shocked by, and so numb to the Left's continuing assault on individual economic freedom. We think there's a spectrum on the Left--nice, cuddly New Dealers, who have nothing to do with nasty fascist Soviets--whereas on the Right, there's merely, er, racists. But of course, Stalin was not a red fascist, he was a totalitarian socialist. Hitler, too, was, one recalls, a national socialist and an enemy of the free market as well as the free society. The slipperiest slope, in other words, as Hayek predicted, is still on the Left. Anyone really prosperous and hard-working in this country now has almost half their money expropriated by the state. In 1910, that would have been regarded as little short of communism. Why do we now accept it as a given?

So we're soft on them because your side has done a brilliant job at spinning the terrors of the far left, and because we have slowly acquiesced to an increasingly powerful state which has sapped Americans of their outrage at its rapaciousness. So we laugh at young communists, and are sickened by young fascists. We should be sickened by both equally.

unrepentantly,
Andrew

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