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Union is usually not regarded as a major threat to the West, nor, for
that matter, as a malevolent totalitarian state. Thus Bloom refers to
the liberal anticommunists as "cold war liberals," or "cold war intel–
lectuals ." (He often dismisses conservative anticommunists as "cold
warriors.") It is interesting that he does not call fellow-travellers "cold
war fellow travellers ." Nor is it always clear whether he thinks the
cold war is a purely American concoction. And while he refers to our
criticism of the communists as "abuse," he does not cite the actual
abuse heaped on us by the communists. (Philip Rahv and I, for ex–
ample, were called "literary snakes" and "lackeys of imperialism,"
and Diana Trilling was described as a "mad dog of imperialism,")
He also refers to the Nazi-Soviet pact not so much as a cynical and
corrupt act but as an occasion for the"
PR
intellectuals to gloat over
it." On the McCarthy episode, Bloom makes it seem that the
"Par–
tisan Review
liberals" were against civil liberties, which, according to
Bloom, the Stalinists and fellow-travellers championed. He does not
mention the fact that the Stalinists were not for civil liberties for their
opponents . He also implies that the anti-Stalinism of
Partisan Review
served McCarthy's purposes, while he praises fellow-travelling anti–
McCarthyism. At times his bias leads him to reduce the politics of
the
Partisan Reviewers
to simple hawkishness or intolerance. Thus, at
one point he says Sidney Hook's "call to action" against Stalinism
"sounded like a call to war." At other times he describes the anti–
Stalinism of Diana Trilling- among others - as dogmatic and allow–
ing for no disagreement . And so on .
Bloom also makes a number of mistakes-that, perhaps , are
inevitable if one has not lived through the earlier period . Some of
these are due to the difficulty of sorting out the complicated political
movements of the past, others to his own political assumptions . For
example, Bloom appears to believe that the anti-Stalinists around
Partisan Review,
like myself, were opposed to the Popular Front be–
cause it was not revolutionary enough. The fact is that the Popular
Front was a typical Stalinist reversal of "line" (directed from Moscow)
from a revolutionary anti-American position to an embarrassing
eulogy of America. It also was not a genuine united front: it was a
euphemism for a tricky Stalinist maneuver to gather liberals into
organizations under communist control. Bloom argues , too, that the
turn away from the radicalism of the thirties came because of some
genetic urge to become conservative and fall in love with America,
and not because the transformation of the Soviet Union into a totali–
tarian state with an expansionist foreign policy made it necessary to
