LIBERAL SOAP OPErRA
During the Roosevelt-Truman era, there were two kinds of
liberals in America: the "practicals," who made the New Deal-poli–
ticians like Ickes, labor leaders like Reuther, college professors like Berle
and Tugwell-and the "intellectuals" (the quotes are also in order here)
who wrote and argued about it-Max Lerner, Freda Kirchwey, Bruce
Bliven and the like. The "practicals," who in a decade wrought a social
revolution which took generations in Europe, were not much affected
by Communism, indeed not much interested in it; they had power, they
were changing things right here, they were pragmatists rather than
idealists or doctrinaires. The "intellectuals," however, were often drawn
to Communism because they felt impotent and the idea of "one-sixth
of the globe" being on their side was comforting, because they were
more internationally-minded than the "practicals" and so desperately
hoped in the Soviet Union as the axis of world anti-fascism, and because
they needed an ideology. The work of the "practicals" has endured;
Eisenhower's victory has chipped the New Deal but has not shattered
or even cracked it. But the faith of the "intellectuals" has turned sour
as Soviet Communism has emerged as a totalitarian system like Nazism.
But, although this kind of liberalism has disappeared as a political force,
it survives as a nostalgic myth, so that in most liberal-intellectual circles
it is still risky to say a good word for Whittaker Chambers or a bad
one for Owen Lattimore. The myth survives because the liberals have
never honestly confronted their illusions in the '30s and '4Os about
Communism but have instead merely counterposed a disingenuous de–
fense, a blanket denial to McCarthy's equally sweeping attack. One does
not learn from experiences which one refuses to examine. The survival of
the liberal myth, which glosses over Soviet Communism's shortcomings
and correspondingly exaggerates those of American capitalism, is a big
factor in delaying that political reorientation that our liberal ideology
has so long needed.
Charles Wertenbaker's
The Death of Kings/
although of less than
no interest as a novel, is of considerable significance in the above con–
text. For it presents the liberal myth with an enthusiasm that is all the
more extreme precisely because the author has never been a practicing
liberal, who might by now have lost a few illusions by sheer dint of un–
happy experience, but rather a Virginia-type gentleman who wears his
1 Random House. $3.95.
