PAUL HOLLANDER
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assurance that other, new varieties of authoritarian beliefs, movements, or
political systems will not emerge.
Perhaps the most interesting reactions to the failure of communist
systems are coming from those for whom these developments should have
provided an especially rewarding occasion for informed self-examination
- those on the left, who for decades have given every benefit of doubt
to political systems claiming socialist credentials and vigorously disputed
(or muted) the critical assessments of these systems. We might designate
this sizeable and vocal group as the professional anti-anticommunists, in–
fluential since the late 1960s and nourished by the lasting discredit Sena–
tor McCarthy brought to outspoken anticommunism. They are mostly
intellectuals and other educated groups, brought together by their aver–
sion to American culture, the American political system, and American
capitalism, as well as by their belief that no other society can match the
corruptions of this one. These views have been most visibly and vocally
expressed on our elite campuses and adjacent enclaves.
Anti-anticommunists, radical leftists, and left-liberals responded in a
rather predictable way to the collapse of "existing socialist systems" in
Eastern Europe and Nicaragua. Their responses confirm once more that
groups and individuals do not surrender lightly the beliefs which provide
them with a sense of identity, meaning, communal ties, and the under–
pinnings of a moral universe. If, in addition, the public and private em–
brace of these beliefs also helps to make a living - as it has for many in
the flourishing social criticism industry (in academia, the mass media,
publishing, and so on) - there are still more substantial reasons for cling–
ing to them.
We can better understand these attitudes by recalling that - besides
the increasingly reflexive rejection of American society-the other
centerpiece of this adversarial outlook has been a belief in some sort of
socialism or "socialist alternative," often informed by what I have called
elsewhere a "god-seeking Marxism." (I will not attempt here to improve
on the insights into the religious functions and dimensions of Marxism
provided by Raymond Aron and Leszek Kolakowski.) These beliefs
survived notwithstanding the difficulty of finding countries which lived
up to the hopes of those in the West waiting for the arrival of authentic
socialism, who from time to time thought that it had finally materialized
(first in the Soviet Union, then in China, Cuba, Vietnam, or in the
undifferentiated wonderland of the third world, and finally in
Nicaragua), only to turn away, sooner or later, in disappointment from
these flesh and blood incarnations of the ideal.
Still, the desire for a "socialist alternative" (to the corruption, in–
justice, and inhumanity of Western capitalist systems) persisted. Although
