By Walter Russell Mead
Unde malum et quare? Where does evil come from and why does it exist? That has always been one of the big questions; over at Bloomberg News,
former White House macher and Samantha Power super-spouse Cass Sunstein
says he’s solved at least one part of the riddle: he’s figured out the
from whence and why of the Tea Party.
The Tea Party is a huge intellectual problem for blue model liberals.
It sprang up out of nowhere, it lacks a formal leadership structure,
and despite many obituaries in the MSM, it remains a significant force
in the Republican Party and in American politics as a whole. It is
everything Occupy Wall Street hoped to become, and the MSM did
everything possible to make OWS flourish. It was hailed as a movement of
historic impact, the start of a global trend, one of those epochal
developments after which nothing will ever be the same—and it guttered
out ignominiously.
The Tea Party, on the other hand, has flourished despite non-stop
efforts to smother it in the media. While its record is mixed and, from a
Democratic point of view not all bad (arguably, without unqualified Tea
Party-backed candidates, the GOP would now have control of the Senate),
its persistence annoys. It is almost as if the MSM’s power to shape
American politics is on the wane.
Professor Sunstein (he teaches at Harvard Law) has a theory, though,
about where the Tea Party comes from. It all goes back to Alger Hiss, a
State Department official under Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry
Truman. After playing an important role in US policy in the Middle East
and East Asia, he chaired the international committee that established
the United Nations. On leaving the government in 1946 he went on to head
the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, then as now one of the
most respected institutions of the foreign policy establishment.
In his 1948 testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Whittaker Chambers, a writer and editor for Time magazine and a former Communist, identified Hiss as a Communist. Hiss adamantly denied the charge. He said he didn’t know anyone named Whittaker Chambers. Encountering his accuser in person, Hiss spoke directly to him: “May I say for the record at this point that I would like to invite Mr. Whittaker Chambers to make those same statements out of the presence of this committee without their being privileged for suit for libel?”Chambers took Hiss’s bait. In an interview on national television, Chambers repeated his charges. In response to the libel suit, he produced stolen State Department documents and notes that seemed to establish not merely that Hiss was a Communist, but that he had spied for the Soviet Union. Hiss was convicted of perjury.The conviction was stunning, for Hiss had been a member of the nation’s liberal elite. A graduate of Harvard Law School and a law clerk for the revered Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, he held positions of authority in the Agriculture, Justice and State departments. He was tall, handsome, elegant, gracious, even dashing.
So how do we get from a perjurious traitor and his apologists to the Tea Party?
Well, for one thing, the liberal establishment stood by its man. Again, Professor Sunstein:
At his 1949 perjury trial, an extraordinary number of liberal icons served as character witnesses for Hiss, including two Supreme Court justices (Stanley Reed and Felix Frankfurter); John W. Davis, who was the Democratic presidential nominee in 1924; and Adlai Stevenson, who was to become the Democratic nominee for the presidency in 1952 and 1956.
But the real problem, says Sunstein, wasn’t that the liberal
establishment was too clueless and too self-protected to recognize a
dangerous traitor in its midst. It was that Hiss’s accuser, Whittaker
Chambers, was “polarizing.” Here’s how Sunstein closes:
Chambers’ broader charge — that liberalism was a species of socialism, “inching its ice cap over the nation” — polarized the nation. His attack on the patriotism of the Ivy League elite reflected an important strand in American culture, and it helped to initiate suspicions that persist to this day.
Liberals are no longer much interested in Hiss’s conviction, yet they are puzzled, and rightly object, when they are accused of holding positions that they abhor. We can’t easily understand those accusations, contemporary conservative thought or the influence of the Tea Party without appreciating the enduring impact of the Hiss case.
This is a surprisingly lame ending to the piece. After all, if
Chambers’ attack on the Ivy League “reflected an important strand in
American culture,” then the Tea Party must have deeper roots than one
half-forgotten cause célèbre. It’s also not clear what he means by the
reference to false accusations against liberals for holding positions
that they abhor. Is that what Sunstein thinks the Tea Party is about?
That if those unfortunate and paranoid folks understood liberals better,
they would oppose them less?
There are some tinfoil hat types out there who think that President
Obama and his cohorts are hiding Qu’rans in the White House and looking
to introduce both socialism and Sharia as soon as they can. Nut jobs on
both the left and the right and all kinds of cranky positions in between
are an enduring part of American politics. But if Sunstein thinks that
this is the energy that powers the Tea Party, he is very far from
understanding either this phenomenon or American politics as a whole.
The Tea Party is mostly something much more conventional: a
libertarian, small government protest against the centralization of
federal power, and a populist resentment of snooty Ivy League professors
who think the common people aren’t very smart. We’ve had these
movements in America ever since colonial times; when Andrew Jackson
defeated John Quincy Adams’ re-election bid in 1828, the 19th century
forerunners of the Tea Party were in full cry.
We aren’t seeing a right-leaning populist surge today because of
Alger Hiss; we are seeing it because many Americans believe that
President Obama’s liberal and technocratic agenda represents a threat to
a way of life they value. We are seeing it because many Americans blame
the establishment of both parties both for the financial crisis and for
the vast transfer of resources to the wealthy that came after the
crash. We are seeing it because whether you look at foreign or domestic
policy, the technocratic suggestions of the Great and the Good have not
been helping ordinary Americans much for the last 20 years.
Via Meadia isn’t a Tea Party house organ, and any tea
parties at the stately Mead manor are more about Earl Grey than Ayn
Rand. But we don’t think Tea Partiers are wrong to see President Obama’s
political goals as fundamentally opposed to their own vision of what
America should be. They aren’t angry because they are stupid, and deep
disagreement with technocratic liberalism is not a mental disease.
Some zealous Tea Partiers put two and two together and get eight,
giving the Obama administration and its liberal backers credit for more
foresight and cunning than they possess. There were those in 1800 who
thought that John Adams was planning to introduce a monarchy into the
United States. There were those on the right who thought that Franklin
Roosevelt was a socialist; there were those on the left who thought
Ronald Reagan was a fascist and that Margaret Thatcher hated poor
people. But to confound a major current of American politics with the
lunatic fringe is not a recipe for healing the nation or even for
helping your side put some points on the board. There are birthers in
the Tea Party, but the Tea Party is not the voice of birtherism.
But Professor Sunstein does have a point. The Hiss case was not a
cause of the Tea Party, or even of the anti-intellectual tradition in
American politics that Richard Hofstader analyzed in the early 1960s. It
was, however, a prominent manifestation of the class snobbery and
intolerance that so often shapes elite liberal responses to political
events and that so frequently fills so many Americans with loathing and
disgust.
For a generation after Alger Hiss was convicted on two counts of
perjury, American liberals went on to defend him as a plumed knight and a
martyr. They slimed his accusers as knuckle dragging know-nothings and
McCarthyite enemies of freedom. They never forgave Richard Nixon for
helping Whittaker Chambers. As the evidence against Hiss mounted, they
fought a long rear-guard defense. Even today, Cass Sunstein doesn’t
quite come out with the ugly truth. Instead he gives us a mealy-mouthed
formulation:
Most of those who have carefully studied the case, and who have explored evidence emerging long after the trial itself, have concluded that Chambers was telling the truth and that Hiss did indeed perjure himself.
No, as Sunstein says,
Liberals are no longer much interested in Hiss’s conviction, yet they are puzzled, and rightly object, when they are accused of holding positions that they abhor.
Yes, liberals are the victims here. After decades of vicious
invective and bile-spewing, liberals find the whole Hiss subject dull
and don’t want to think about the case anymore—but they just hate it when other people don’t appreciate their selfless dedication to the public good.
Over the years more and more liberals quietly reached the conclusion
that Hiss was a perjurer and a traitor; John Kenneth Galbraith once told
me that he thought that Hiss was guilty—though he still stood up for
Harry Dexter White, another highly placed Stalinist mole of the era. But
liberalism as a movement never really came to grips with the
foolishness and ugliness of liberal behavior in the Hiss Affair. Even
today it is rare to hear serious liberals asking just what it was that
made so many prominent liberals so blind to the possibility that there
were spies and traitors in their ranks. We haven’t had a good history—by
a liberal—about the nastiness of the liberal response in the case and
the class prejudice and ideological blindness that it laid so
distressingly bare.
Liberal apologists for Hiss do bear some significant responsibility
for the virulent anti-Communism of Joseph McCarthy and his ilk. Seeing
so many powerful liberals defend an obvious traitor and deny the
possibility that Communists were active in the FDR and Truman
administrations drove many people to embrace McCarthy and other
overzealous investigators. Blacklists and anti-Communist hysteria (as
opposed to rational and necessary anti-Communist vigilance) must be laid
in part at the door of the vain and feckless liberals who let the
country down in a critical time.
If Professor Sunstein is hoping to launch a broader conversation
among liberals about ways their own missteps have contributed to
American polarization, then I certainly wish him the best. But it’s
important to remember that the kind of behavior so painfully on display
in the Hiss era is still with us today; it was not all that long ago
that those who doubted that President Obama’s plans for humanitarian
intervention in Syria constituted a masterful plan for ending the mass
death were dismissed as raving loons and partisan hacks.
Related:
No comments:
Post a Comment