Lobotomies, Socialist and Capitalist

A gossipy journey from left to right.

Jesse Walker from the December 2001 issue

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Yet Radosh's first friendly contacts with the right did not come in the '80s or '90s. They came in the '60s, when the group around the journal Studies on the Left, which included Radosh, pioneered the idea of "corporate liberalism." This was the notion that, as Radosh puts it here, "the dominant worldview of American political leaders was not one of laissez faire, but rather a managerial form of liberalism." In its "cruder form," Radosh continues, the theory "was used to argue that in the United States, the true enemy of the left was not the 'reactionaries,' i.e. old-style Republicans and conservatives, but rather the liberals who comprised what they liked to call the 'vital center.'"

This stance allowed a certain measure of cooperation between the Studies leftists and Murray Rothbard's circle of isolationist libertarians. Rothbard contributed to Studies on the Left, and in 1967, Radosh in turn contributed to Rothbard's Left and Right. In 1972, the two co-edited A New History of Leviathan, with contributions from both sides of the anti-liberal aisle; three years later, Radosh published Prophets on the Right, a sympathetic study of the conservative critics of American imperialism.

Virtually all of this is missing from Commies. Perhaps Radosh felt he did not know enough gossip about the libertarians to include them. More likely, it would have unduly complicated his conversion narrative to acknowledge the existence of anti-imperialists outside the left.

It is such carefully obscured complications that make this book worth reading, even after the gossip has been absorbed or forgotten. At times, Commies seems less interesting for its insights than for those moments when insight suddenly, intriguingly disappears.

Consider Radosh's adventures in Nicaragua. This was not the first socialist regime in Latin America that Radosh visited: In the mid-'70s, he tells us, he and some other leftists toured Cuba. He entered the island expecting to find a vibrant social model; he left it with a considerable collection of doubts. The defining moment of his trip came after a tour of a Cuban madhouse, where a doctor had bragged that "in our institution, we have a larger proportion of hospital inmates who have been lobotomized than any other mental hospital in the world." Most of the tour group was horrified, but a revolutionary loyalist stood up for the asylum. "We have to understand," she explained, "that there are differences between capitalist lobotomies and socialist lobotomies."

Radosh wrote about his doubts in the pacifist magazine Liberation, prompting a horde of hostile letters. But he remained a supporter, albeit a critical one, of the Cuban regime, and he did not sever his ties with the left. The Sandinistas were autocrats, but they were never as oppressive as Castro. So why did they prompt the ideological shift that Cuba didn't?

The answer may have something to do with the intervening contretemps over the Rosenbergs: It's harder to feel loyal to a movement when large segments of it are already attempting to excommunicate you. But Radosh did not merely attack the Sandinistas. He supported U.S. aid to the contras. A man who for his entire life opposed American intervention abroad -- a leftist who had found more to admire in the isolationist critics of World War II than in its socialist supporters -- was now calling for military action against a sovereign country. This clearly represents more than disillusionment with Third World revolution or left-wing groupthink. It's a fundamental shift in a political worldview. Yet Radosh never explains what provoked it.

Meanwhile, he attacks anyone on the left who disagreed with his take on Nicaragua -- even where the actual disagreement is hard to discern. He thus writes with considerable venom about Paul Berman, a lefty journalist who, Radosh claims, refused to criticize the Sandinistas when Radosh urged him to. "Eventually," Radosh adds, "Paul Berman would become something of a critic of the Sandinistas, and would use this as proof of how he exemplified a truly independent and critical left wing. But his tepid criticism would be too little and too late, coming after it could do any good." The problem: Radosh says he asked Berman to criticize the Sandinistas in 1987. That's a year after the latter published a much-debated article in Mother Jones that, er, criticized the Sandinistas. Just when exactly is "too late"?

Radosh never mentions the Mother Jones article, nor Berman's earlier criticisms of the Sandinistas in The Village Voice. One gets the impression that Radosh didn't merely want people on the left to attack the Sandinistas; he wanted them to adopt his own critique, including his support for the contras. (Of course, one needn't even be a leftist to oppose contra aid. Conservatives as well as leftists can wonder why the U.S. should meddle in another nation's affairs; conservatives as well as leftists can object to contra atrocities.) Perhaps there is more to Radosh's unkind words than he is letting on, a personal reason for his attacks on Berman (who himself has evolved from an anarchist into a social democrat, a supporter of "humanitarian" wars, and a voter for Al Gore). Or perhaps Radosh became as narrow-minded in his pursuit of a contra victory as his erstwhile comrades had been in their defense of Soviet spies and socialist lobotomies. Either way, he sometimes sounds as rigid as the left he abandoned.

Commies is, at its best, a study of the mind-numbing effect of dogma, of the ridiculous things people can bring themselves to do or think because of the intellectual systems they subscribe to. It is also a study of how loyalties -- personal, political, social -- can disguise themselves as ideology, with similarly deranging effects. In a quieter way, it shows how a man perspicacious enough to see these faults in his former comrades can fail to see them still lurking within himself.