CHRISTOPHER LASCH
191
tarian liberalism," he did not notice that American opmIOn had
undergone a complete transformation-or more accurately, that an
older enmity to the Soviet Union, partially submerged by the wartime
alliance, had broken out again in a peculiarly virulent form. In the
forties and fifties, it was no longer sentimental fellow-traveling but
precisely a revulsion against the grand alliance, a militant and crusad–
ing anticommunism, that constituted the principal threat to American
democracy from within.
Undertaking neither an analysis of postwar politics nor a theoreti–
cal reconsideration of Leninism, which still shaped his own reactions
to events, Rahv in the Cold War period retreated to a singularly
unprofitable style of argument, intensely parochial in its preoccupa–
tion with sectarian literary feuds, its indifference to large political
trends in the United States, and its weakening grasp of the historical
reality which the editors of
Partisan Review
had so often urged
intellectuals to master. The collapse of the socialist movement in the
United States (such as it was) had isolated left-wing intellectuals from
any semblance of political responsibility. In Rahv's case, an increas–
ingly uncritical attachment
to
"modernism" -to what William Phil–
lips in 1940 called "the intellectuals' tradition" -reinforced this isola–
tion and transformed every issue, every controversy about politics or
culture, into factional disputation designed not so much to clarify
issues as to identify one's ideological friends, castigate political en–
emies, and defend positions taken in the past.
After the " betrayal" of the Russian revolution, Rahv transferred
his hopes for the future
to
the modernist avant-garde, condemned as
"irresponsible" by socialist critics of the thirties (including for a time
himself ) but "a thousand times more progressive," in his allegedly
more mature view, "than the shallow political writing of our latter
days." Confronted with mounting evidence that the modernist tradi–
tion was itself "fast breaking up," as he himself occasionally admitted,
Rahv made no effort to analyze this breakup or its consequences.
Instead he turned to the more congenial task of berating the critics of
modernism-"whole-hog leftists, " "impassioned party-liners," and
"advocates of Stalinist social-mindedness." As in his defense of Lenin–
ism, he confronted criticism of modernism only in its debased versions,
ignoring or dismissing out of hand the more serious criticism raised by
Lewis Mumford, Van Wyck Brooks, and Waldo Frank. A passing
reference, in an essay written in 1939, to the "visibly decaying bour–
geois" might have raised the possibility that avant-garde intellectuals,
without their historic adversary, would soon lose their very raison
