In Decline
Grand Illusion: Critics and Champions of the American Century.
by John B. Judis.
Farrar Straus Giroux. 344 pp.$25.00.
Nostalgia haunts this chronicle of 20th-century American politics. John B. Judis, a contributing editor of the New Republic and the author of an excellent biography of William F. Buckley, Jr., begins by evoking a golden age: it occurred in the first two decades of the century, when leaders and policy-makers realized the nation could no longer go it alone as an agrarian Eden cut off from the rest of the world. This was a sobering discovery, but one that Americans met resourcefully. They
grasped, if imperfectly, the novelty of their situation and attempted to come to terms with it, participating in social movements and electing individuals of superior understanding to the presidency.
In those days, Judis writes, the preeminent social movement was progressivism, whose meliorative doctrines were set forth emphatically by Herbert Croly—author of The Promise of American Life (1909), founding editor (in 1914) of the New Republic, and advocate of a strong, centralized state. Croly believed, says Judis,
that a good society—one that exhibited brotherhood, justice, happiness, and virtue—could be created only by concerted social and government action toward those ends.
Two Presidents, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson (“individuals of superior understanding”), were captivated by Croly’s vision, premised as it was on faith in government and progress.
In our own day this faith is conspicuously lacking. “Where,” Judis asks, are the “vibrant new political and social movements? Where is the spirit of experimentation? And where are the new political leaders?” He himself sees only decline. The title of his book echoes the film La Grande Illusion (1937), Jean Renoir’s bittersweet farewell to Europe’s haute bourgeoisie and its departed graces. In his final paragraph Judis warns that “our nation’s descent” will continue as long as we remain maladapted “to an economically interdependent world in which America’s military power is increasingly irrelevant.”
The better part of Grand Illusion tries to explain how this lamentable state of affairs came to be. Judis places most of the blame on the “evangelical” policies of the cold war. These, grounded in an exaggerated fear of the Soviet Union, resulted in an overinvestment of American capital, political and economic, in a 40-year effort to defeat world Communism. It was an effort largely wasted, says Judis, for the Soviet regime began to disintegrate as early as the 1950’s and “finally collapsed under the weight of its own internal problems.” At the same time, American wellbeing was seriously impaired by setbacks at home—a sagging economy, widening class and race divisions—and by the failure of the nation’s leaders to counter the “predatory trade tactics” of Japan. The trouble, in sum, is that the second half of the “American Century” has been defined not by progressivism but by conservatism, and Judis is hard-pressed to find any virtues in conservative policies.
This is hardly a balanced argument. Judis neglects to mention that the “internal problems” of the Soviet Union were greatly magnified, and in some instances created, by the pressure of American opposition. And he scants major gains on the home front: the triumphs of the civil-rights movement in the 1950’s and 60’s; the economic boom of the 1980’s.
Judis is old-fashioned in his approach to history; in the manner of Plutarch, he interprets sweeping developments through the words and deeds of individual men. This leads to an overexuberance of praise and blame. The figures he admires—Teddy Roosevelt, Croly, the journalist Walter Lippmann, Senator J. William Fulbright—emerge as high-minded paragons, while those he deplores—Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush—are caricatured as villains or buffoons.
A chapter on the foreign policy of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger begins with Nixon creeping onstage as “the former witch hunter,” a reputed hardliner “who would stop at nothing to destroy world Communism.” In fact, Nixon hunted only one “witch,” Alger Hiss, and he prosecuted his case scrupulously. Later, as Vice President, Nixon helped de-claw Senator Joseph McCarthy. Judis does, at least, pay fair tribute to Nixon’s bold Realpolitik. He concedes nothing, however, to another skilled internationalist, George Bush, who, says Judis, gained his expertise “unconsciously—the way a boy learns to ride a bicycle.”
What, then, does Judis make of those other, outsize cases of arrested adolescence, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson? It is impossible to say. Grand Illusion includes scattered commentary on several Democratic Presidents but offers sustained analysis of none—even though it was a Democratic President, Harry Truman, who initiated the cold-war policies Judis abhors and another, Kennedy, who led us to the brink of war with the Soviet Union. Judis treats at length only two Democrats, both disappointed in bids for higher office: Henry Wallace, who in 1948 mounted a disastrous third-party bid for the presidency, and Fulbright, whom Kennedy passed over in 1960 for the job of Secretary of State. Grand Illusion gives the impression that “our nation’s descent” has been wholly a Republican free-fall.
_____________
The book is strongest when Judis leaves off his analysis of political actors and takes up the writings of political thinkers. His chapters on Croly, Lippmann, and the diplomat George F. Kennan are comprehensive and animated. And Judis writes with remarkable sympathy about two ex-Communists who became leaders of the postwar conservative movement, Whittaker Chambers and James Burnham.
The chapter on Chambers is one of the handful of really illuminating writings on this difficult subject. In it, Judis looks beyond the shopworn iconography of the Hiss case and instead explores Chambers the political intellectual, whose views had a far wider gauge than is commonly supposed. This Chambers is best seen through the series of letters he wrote in his last years to William F. Buckley, Jr. (who later published them in the volume Odyssey of a Friend). They have been celebrated for their world-weary sonorities and wry pensées, but Judis has detected in them something else.
Toward the end of his life Chambers began to revise the claustrophobic vision of a future suspended between Communist damnation and Christian salvation that had informed his classic memoir, Witness (1952). It was a vision essentially alien, says Judis, to the American political temper, long characterized by moderation, not extremism. Chambers himself saw this and adjusted his sight lines. Unlike many on the Right, he backed President Eisenhower’s overtures to Nikita Khrushchev in 1959; upheld Hiss’s right to a passport upon his release from prison; favored price supports for American farmers. Above all, says Judis, Chambers tried to show that the proper “role of conservatives” was “not to try to block or revoke” the changes wrought by modernity, but rather “to shape them according to conservative ideas and principles.”
_____________
James Burnham was an academic of “encyclopedic powers” and, like a number of his fellow Trotskyists, a contributor in the 1930’s to Partisan Review. At the outset of World War II he detached himself from the political Left and drifted steadily rightward without ever abandoning the Trotskyist theory of the Soviet Union as a permanently revolutionary state. When the Communists consolidated an Eastern bloc after the war, Burnham, now intensely anti-Communist, addressed the threat in a number of monitory books, among them The Struggle for the World and Suicide of the West.
Burnham argued that Soviet Communism, implacable enemy of the West, should not simply be “contained,” as prevailing wisdom held, but directly challenged—militarily, if need be. Thus was born the “rollback” doctrine. But Burnham grasped the difference between belief and action, ends and means, and even at his most apocalyptic, says Judis, he dispensed “tactical advice to the Right” that
was almost unfailingly based upon concrete and realistic assessments of the American and world situation, framed in terms of what was historically possible rather than transcendentally ideal.
_____________
Chambers and Burnham are both presented in Grand Illusion as thinkers at odds with themselves, torn between “realistic” and “evangelical” outlooks. But the borders between “realism” and “evangelism” are not fixed, subject as they are to changes in the political climate. In the wake of the events that have transformed Russia and the nations of Eastern Europe, a generation of post-Communist “realists” has arisen who sound remarkably like the American anti-Communist “evangelists” of the 1950’s. Chambers’s “crackpot” notions in Witness, much derided in their day, anticipate arguments advanced in the essays of Vaclav Havel—models, it has been said, of intellectual clarity and skeptical wisdom. And the massive exhumation of Russian archives authorized by Boris Yeltsin has sought to confirm, in effect, the accuracy of Burnham’s dark picture of the Soviet Union as fomenter of global revolution.
Judis, for his part, sometimes evangelically overstates his case for realism and so can seem more judgmental than analytical. But even at his most disapproving, he examines conservatism seriously, something few others on the Left can claim to have done.
