NERVE OF SIDNEY HOOK
251
experience. It masks the interests behind the policy, and is no less
"a
cover for power politics" than the "social consciousness of the church–
men" which Hook takes apart with a ruthless logic.
II
Hook accuses others of having abandoned their positions. The fact
is that it is he who has changed, although he has never as much as ad–
mitted this. Up to the fall of 1939, he criticized the program of a
Popular Front from a Marxist standpoint as leading inevitably to popular
support of the coming imperialist war.
If
he has forgotten this, let
him reread his article on Max Lerner in
Partisan Review
in the spring
of 1939. There he denounced the Popular Front against fascism as
"contradictory and self-defeating", "an invitation to disaster", "a
dangerous illusion". "When we remember that war means fascism
in
full military dress, the arc of Popular Front futility spirals downward to
the bloody mire it sought to avoid." "A socialist who supports a Popu–
lar Front government may find that as a result of its program of defense
of capitalism, it may open the
ga~es
to the Fascists who are even more
resolute defenders of capitalism." "Every democratic state even under
a Popular Front regime has a capitalist economy-basically like Ger–
many." A few months later, in the fall of 1939, he attacked Stalin for
having unloosed the imperialist war between Churchill and Hitler. By
the summer of 1940, he had discovered that the war was not imperialist,
but a defense of the French revolution and of "the great American dream"
against the cultural and political counter-revolution of the new managerial
order. And now in 1943, the causes of the war have become irrelevant;
only the consequences matter. Yet those who have continued to believe
what he believed in the spring of 1939 are Platonists, lunatics, bohemians,
drunkards and metaphysicians.
A political theorist has the right and the duty to change his mind as
often as new facts compel him; we question only his fairness in con–
cealing his changes when he attacks and abuses those whose position he
once shared.
But let us consider his new position on its own merits.
It comes down to a pair of alternatives:
"If
Hitler wins, democratic
socialism has no future.
If
Hitler is defeated, it is by no means
assured
that democratic socialism has a future. But
it
at least has a chance!
It is failure to grasp this simple piece of wisdom which marks the political
insanity of infantile leftism".
I must confess that I cannot grasp this simple piece of wisdom.
Hook takes it for granted that the regime which Hitler was able to
impose on Germany would be successfully imposed on the workers
in
all
the defeated nations, including England, the United States, France,
Poland, Holland and Scandinavia. He assumes that Hitler would
be
able to create the "new order" that he has promised. But the resistance
he
has met even in small countries governed by his military dictatorship
with
the help of the local fascists shows how doubtful is his assumption.
Wherever he has entered by force of arms, he has called into being a
violent struggle against his rule and reawakened among the masses a
revolutionary spirit that had been broken during the last decades after
