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1980s on. Kramer, however, was unfair to say that Howe tried to hide
his
esteem for Trotsky, an accusation that attempted to hint that Howe had
supposedly hidden ultra-revolutionary roots. Trotskyism was a ghost
Howe had long since abandoned. As he wrote in his short book on
Trotsky, Trotskyism had become a "petrified ideology." Yet in his obses–
sive dislike for his old comrades who turned to the new neoconservatism,
Howe could not acknowledge the role played by Reagan in helping
along the demise of the Soviet Union, nor give his administration
any
credit when it was due. Evidently Howe could not see that there was
anything to be said in criticism of the inadequacies of the New Deal
lib–
eralism that had emerged from conservative circles, nor acknowledge the
obvious failure of so many old liberal bromides.
All of this might have been expected. But sadly, Howe also seemed to
repudiate many of his old, most basic criticisms that had held up with
time. An opponent of American policy in Central America, he could not
criticize the Sandinistas when it would have helped, preferring to see
them, as he once put it at a
Dissent
meeting, as a "new formulation." He
even seemed to believe that it was futile to criticize black support for
Communism, since Communists in South Africa and elsewhere fought
for black freedom when other whites were silent. That Howe himself had
answered these specious arguments years earlier seemed to matter little.
At one point during the Vietnam years, Howe and his comrades had
sought a third force - a social movement in Asia and Europe that would
provide a way to reject both capitalism and Communism. He worked for
the success of such a group in Vietnam, only to find it nonexistent or in–
capable of gaining political success. The effect was to blind his judgment
when it came to an entirely new epoch. Thus, the man who once en–
dorsed Joseph Buttinger's work against both Communist and French im–
perialism now was saying, as he said to this writer, "I have learned that
there is no third force." The implication - for Nicaragua especially - was
that one had to choose the Sandinistas. Here, Howe was endorsing the
then-conventional wisdom of the very New Left he had earlier rejected.
That this put him at odds with his Latin American counterpart, the social
democratic poet and writer Octavio Paz, was something he did not mull
over.
It
also had political ramifications for Howe's chosen political course.
It
enabled him to finally reconcile with those very elements of the New
Left that had for so many years wanted nothing to do with him. This was
acknowledged in an approving
New Yorker
piece, whose author observed
that those former "student radicals grew a little older and saw the value of
a more tolerant, less dogmatic, more democratic approach to the remak–
ing of society," and thus Howe was there to now "welcome his young
