Yes, answers Diana West, in this interview. If she’s right—and I don’t see how we can avoid drawing that conclusion and preparing for the worst—then by posting this I’ve all but sealed my liberty’s doom, for the surveillance state can easily find subjects like me who qualify for the “formal deprogramming” of “cultists” that Hillary recently recommended.
If you don’t yet know who Diana West is, please consider a couple of posts from 2020:
Hard for me to believe, but her eye-opening (and engagingly written) American Betrayal is now ten years old. Events of the past decade conform to the pattern she describes in that book.
In “Alain on Monasticism,” a stimulating Substack offering, my friend and philosopher extraordinaire Bill Vallicella (“Maverick Philosopher”) asked about the fruitfulness of arguing for or against a sense of life. The occasion was his recent re-reading of On Happiness by Émile-Auguste Chartier (1868-1951), whose nom de plume was Alain. My interest is not in Alain’s antipathy toward monkish existence but rather in Bill’s (apparent) ambivalence toward mere attitudes that imply (or entail) philosophical claims. Since I’ve probably misunderstood the problem Bill was cornering, I’m hoping that what I’ve written below will move him to set me straight. He writes:
Émile-Auguste Chartier (1868-1951)
Alain . . . frankly expresses his sense of life or sense of reality. I don’t share it, but can I argue against it? Does it even make sense to try to argue against it? Probably not. In a matter such as this, argument comes too late. Alain feels it in his guts and with his “whole being” that the religion of the mournful monks, the religion Alain himself was raised in, is world-flight and a life-denying sickness.
For a worldling such as Alain, the transient things of this world are as real as it gets, and all else is unreal. The impermanence of things and the brevity of life do not impress or shock him as they do someone with a religious sensibility.
In a Schlitz ad from yesteryear Bill finds this mood summed up:
You only go around once in life So you have to grab for all the gusto you can.
He continues:
The worldling’s attitude is a matter of sensibility and it is difficult and probably impossible to argue with anyone’s sensibility. I cannot argue you out of your sense of reality. Arguments come too late for that. In fact, arguments are often little more than articulations on the logical plane of a sensibility deep in the soul that was already in place before one attained explicit logical skills. Continue reading “On arguing for one’s “sense of life”: Vallicella, Alain, Rand, and Bahnsen”
“All-Negro Comics” (1947), the first such book “to be drawn by Negro artists and peopled entirely by Negro characters” (Time Magazine).
I republish this December 11, 2020 post not only for its intrinsic historical and theoretical interest (not to mention its subject matter’s timeliness), but also its bearing on my current project of understanding the attraction of revolutionary Marxism. (Note his concise exposure of two common non sequiturs, one “racist,” the other “anti-racist.”) Marxists have avoided grappling with Rothbard’s praxeological and natural law approach to history and economics (to their detriment, in my opinion). Unlike Rothbard, it is they who are today’s conservatives: they champion oppressive statist social orders as well as or better than hired “prizefighters for the bourgeoisie” whom their rhetoric holds up to ridicule. Those who, like the present writer, lived through the 1960s, will recognize antecedents of today’s newsmakers.—A.G.F.
Election integrity, or rather the lack thereof, is the topic of the day. Some Americans are now reflecting on how we might avoid social conflagration, even secession.
Fifty-seven years ago my late friend Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995), the great economist, political philosopher, and author of Conceived in Liberty (a five-volume history of the American republic’s founding) pursued the logic of revolutionary resistance to oppression in the essay appended below.
Its relevance to our time should be clear. There is no better example of Rothbard’s historical insight, politically incorrect frankness (which would get him “canceled” today), adherence to principle, and polemical adroitness. It should go without saying that this anticommunist’s citations of communists implies no endorsement of their illiberal program (but I can’t take any chances these days).
Some readers may need to be reminded, or told for the first time, that those who identify as “African Americans” are descendants of those who once preferred “Black,” “Afro-American,” “Negro,” and “Colored.” (See this post’s initial illustration above.)
“The Negro Revolution” appeared in the Summer 1963 issue of The New Individualist Review, a classical liberal-libertarian scholarly journal edited by John P. McCarthy (another friend), Robert Schuettinger, and John Weicher; its book review editor was Ronald Hamowy. Besides Rothbard, NIR’s distinguished contributors included Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, Russell Kirk, Ludwig von Mises, Richard Weaver, and Henry Hazlitt (a far from exhaustive list).
On the 28th of August in the summer of ’63, millions of Americans heard and saw Martin Luther King, Jr. deliver his memorable “I Have a Dream” speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. I’m happy to promote Rothbard’s essay on the eve of another march in that city, one that portends another revolution. [That would be January 6, 2021, which (as I wrote about at the time) predictably provoked a counterrevolutionary reaction that reverberates to this day.—A.G.F.]
—Anthony Flood
The Negro Revolution
Murray N. Rothbard
In his thirties; he wrote this article when he was 37.
DESPITE INCREASING USE of the term, it is doubtful that most Americans have come to recognize the Negro crisis as a revolution, possessed of all the typical characteristics and stigmata of a revolutionary movement and a revolutionary situation. Undoubtedly, Americans, when they think of “revolution,” only visualize some single dramatic act, as if they would wake up one day to find an armed mob storming the Capitol. Yet this is rarely the way revolutions occur. Revolution does not mean that some sinister little group sits around plotting “overthrow of the government by force and violence,” and then one day take up their machine guns and make the attempt. This kind of romantic adventurism has little to do with genuine revolution.
Revolution, in the first place, is not a single, isolated event, to be looked at as a static phenomenon. It is a dynamic, open-ended process. One of its chief characteristics, indeed, is the rapidity and acceleration of social change. Ordinarily, the tempo of social and political change is slow, meandering, inconsequential: in short, the typical orderly America of the political science textbooks. But, in a revolution, the tempo of change suddenly speeds up enormously; and this means change in all relevant variables: in the ideas governing the revolutionary movement, in its growth and in the character of its leadership, and in its impact on the rest of society.
Another crucial aspect of Revolution is its sudden stress on mass action. In America, social and political action has taken place for a long while in smoke-filled rooms of political parties, in quiet behind-the-scenes talks of lobbyists, Congressmen, and executive officials, and in the sober, drawn-out processes of the courts. Outside of football games, the very concept of mass action has been virtually unknown in the United States. But all this has been changed with the onset, this year, of the Negro Revolution. Continue reading “Rothbard’s anti-statist theory of revolution, 60 years on”
On the 84th anniversary of the German invasion of Poland I find myself embarking on a study that will be roughly equal parts philosophical, historical, theological, and personal. It will immerse me in the writings of 20th century American Marxists who, despite the path they took, have fascinated me. They thought, wrote, and fought in a world that headed inexorably toward the Second World War, was embroiled in it, and then emerged from it, knocked for a loop. It seemed that, directly or indirectly, these writers were always trying to make sense of the conflagration and its aftermath.
This project will involve me in the risky business of imputing motives to people who claimed to know how the world worked, how it ought to go, and where history was heading. I want to be fair to people I deem mistaken, for I was once mistaken (if that’s not a euphemism) in just the way they were. Some American revolutionaries will admit the failures of their revolutions, but never reevaluate the conceit that human beings can “remake the world.” The day I gave up that conceit is the day I ceased to be a revolutionary.
Professor Alexander Riley, Bucknell University
I distinguish the merely mistaken from those who compound their mistakes with crimes enabled by the power (governmental, academic, and cultural) they wield. Such social outlaws are to be defeated, not refuted. I’m therefore concerned that what’s called “Wokeism” marks, not a break with Marxism, but an organic outgrowth thereof. What would allay my apprehension is a Marxist condemnation of Wokeism. Until I find one, I must take comfort in the writings of Bucknell University sociology professor Alexander Riley, especially his illuminating “Why Wokeism is Not Marxist” and his scorched-earth discrediting of Mark Levin’s American Marxism,“Marxism Misunderstood.” (Please also consider taking a look at my “Marksism Levinism,” an earlier review that complements Riley’s.)
A Marxist critique of the so-called “1619 Project,” which Riley adduces as evidence for his antithesis, is only implicitly against Wokeism. I’ve been amazed to find attacks on the weaponization of the Department of Justice against Donald Trump on the front page, not of The Wall Street Journal, but of The Militant, organ of the Castroist Socialist Workers Party. (Here’s the latest; friends will attest that it’s not the first such article I’ve forwarded to them.) My mental jury’s still deliberating.
George Novack, 1905-1992
Exhibit A in my study is Marxist educator George Novack (1905-1992) under whose influence by God’s grace I did not fall. Alan Wald, whom I mentioned the other day, befriended Novack and began corresponding with him in the late 1960s and would visit him in New York City—my city—and in the end eulogize him warmly and at length, facts I learned only yesterday. (This originally appeared in the magazine In Defense of Marxism in 1992 and anthologized in 2016 here.) I now know exactly where he lived in his last years and how easy it would have been for me to look him up.
Poster announcing symposium for Alan M. Wald on the occasion of his retirement from UMichigan in 2013. https://events.umich.edu/event/12956
The life of Marxist revolutionaries, especially intellectuals, has a negative theological or atheological dimension. They are almost never unsocialized “village atheists,” but unbelief is ever in the background, or under the floorboards, of everything they think, even it only implicit or taken for granted. (It’s impolite, even beneath their dignity, to argue against religion.) In the case of the Novack, the philosophical writer, however, it had to surface sooner or later. I will foreground the fundamental question of worldview, which foregrounding will have a Christian-apologetical purpose.
Worldview is a topic to which Wald adverts every so often, but so far I haven’t caught him exploring it philosophically. That’s not his patch. He suggests that what marks off people he admires from the rest is commitment to remaking the world. Not to improving what they can, but to overhaul the whole.
James T. Farrell (1904-1979), ex-Catholic, ex-Trotskyist novelist and social theorist, a quintessential “New York Intellectual” (by way of Chicago).
Immersed as I now am in the world of American Marxist creatives in the ’20s, ’30s, and beyond (e.g., James T. Farrell, his friend George Novack, their rival [my professor] Sidney Hook, et al.), I’m struck by their appeal to philosophical naturalism (materialism) to anchor their work in reality, thereby giving their work ultimate meaning. That’s their touchstone. This presupposition is rarely laid bare and argued for; when it is, its rationale wears its inadequacy on its face. I’ll explore this in future posts.
They all wanted, as I once did, to bring about a more just, more beautiful world, one of peace and prosperity for all, even though they and their revolutionary projects, according to their metaphysics, bore no more significance than the bathroom insect I crushed this morning. As an event, neither its crawling nor my crushing was less significant than, say, Beethoven’s composition of his Ninth Symphony or any performance thereof. When leftists achieve anything they deem success, they crush, not insects, but human beings, by the dozens, hundreds, thousands, and millions.
Created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27), however, they know in their hearts that they’re divine intentions, not byproducts of a cosmic explosion, the extrapolation to which their veneration of Received Scientific Opinion drives them and constrains them to honor.
Their symbol-making and -using nature, without which neither science nor art is possible, is just a “lucky accident”; the very effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences, the “fit” of number and matter, is admitted to be “unreasonable” on naturalistic terms.
They’d go mad if they believed they were accidents. To inoculate themselves against this cosmic nightmare, they tell themselves stories, including one about how man became a storyteller. These “scientific materialists” project romantic images of themselves in every sentence they dream, utter, or write. In so doing they suppress what they know, wickedly (Romans 1:18).
Before Moses wrote a word of Genesis, God had beheld “every thing that he had made” and said “it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). The first esthetic judgment was divine. Human esthetic judgment, if untethered to that primordial truth, may tickle the fancy of its hearers or readers, but it inevitably floats back into in the void from which it emerged—which evacuates it of any noble sentiment it may have borne for a cosmic split-second.
I wished Herbert Aptheker a happy 60th in person in 1975 and called Isaac Asimov on his five years later. I had just finished reading the latter’s memoir, his number was listed, and he answered immediately and amiably. I also participated in Murray Rothbard’s surprise celebration (same milestone) in 1986.
For mine in 2013, my wife and I went to Nam Wah Tea Parlor on Chinatown’s Doyers Street on the recommendation of Mark Margolis, the recently deceased actor with whom only the week before we had shared a common table (i.e., with “strangers”) at Joe’s Shanghai (around the corner on Pell Street).
For me, reaching 70 has not been like hitting 60. I’m neither living nor working where I was then; I had no clue of how (if ever) those transitions would go. Between then and now I got a few things published, books that had been pipedreams and might have remained so. Herbert lived to 87; Isaac, 71; Murray never made it to 69. Each man finished many projects, but also left some unfinished. I’m thinking especially of the “missing” (that is, unwritten) third volume of Murray’s history of economic thought.
I remember talking about Asimov’s books to a youngster working in the mailroom of Sargent Shriver’s law firm. He was stunned to learn that Asimov was a person: the spines of hundreds of books in his school’s library bearing Asimov’s name suggested the name of a publishing house.
Aptheker is and will be (except perhaps for his progeny and the dwindling number of those who knew him) a subject of specialized interest, a function of a broader interest in Africana studies and Communism.
Burton Blumert, Lew Rockwell, David Gordon, Murray Rothbard; undated, but probably late 1980s.
Of these three, only the writings of the polymath economist, historian, and political philosopher Rothbard have convinced thousands of scholars to work in his intellectual tradition (natural rights, praxeology, and antistate, antiwar revisionism). At a memorial in ’86, Lew Rockwell told me that “he [Murray] needs his [Robert] Skidelsky,” referring to Keynes’s biographer. Twenty years later, Murray’s mentor and former Gestapo target Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) got his Hülsmann. Murray’s oeuvre will need a team of Hülsmanns (as I learned the hard way). Continue reading “Milestones and Memory’s Millstones”
The first three men listed in the title meant something to me at different times, and today’s date, August 27th, is significant in the lives of all three.
Kugler lithograph of Hegel (1770-1831) with students.
A Marxist undergraduate in philosophy in the early ’70s, I naturally took an interest in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whose “dialectical method” Karl Marx claimed to have put on a materialist foundation. Etymology alone should have suggested to me immediately that διαλεκτική (dialektikē), rooted in λέγειν (legein,“to speak”) cannot find fertile soil in a cosmos consisting exclusively and exhaustively of ὕλη (hyle, “matter”). But materialists take for granted their reasoning ability, even though what they presuppose renders reasoning problematic. August 27th is Hegel’s birthday.
Brand Blanshard (1892-1987)
Breaking with Marx in the mid-’70s, I was seduced by the elegant prose of the rationalist Brand Blanshard. His doctrine of internal relations was more hospitable to dialectic than materialism, but no more rationally satisfactory. It was an undemonstrated, and indemonstrable, working hypothesis that requires omniscience to be in back of everything (for which Blanshard never argued). Every particular is the way it is just because everything as a whole is the way it is. This is worthless as an explanation unless one happens to be omniscient. August 27th is also the date of Blanshard’s nativity.
W. E. B. Du Bois, 1907
In 1963, however, it was the deathday, if you will, of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, in whom scholarship, civil rights activism, Pan-Africanism and, ultimately, Communism of the Stalinist species coalesced. He left the herculean task of his editing his literary estate to Herbert Aptheker. This generated work for about a dozen research assistants, including the teenaged edition of yours truly. Du Bois died in Ghana the day before Martin Luther King memorably addressed the quarter-million souls thronged at the Lincoln Memorial after their March on Washington. King was the event’s last speaker; a few hours earlier Roy Wilkins, Executive Secretary of the NAACP (which Du Bois co-founded in 1909), had informed the crowd of Du Bois’ passing. (See the program below.)
Sixty years on, I remember that day. Tomorrow will mark a personal milestone, one I’ll leave my readers to sleuth out.
Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003) and Murray Rothbard (1926-1995)
For over forty years, my political history had two Jewish New York intellectual “bookends,” the communist Herbert Aptheker and the libertarian Murray Rothbard. In 2009 “Austro-Athenian” libertarian philosopher Roderick T. Long, in a blog post that first bore this one’s title, noted the overlap of their thought, at least on the subject of slavery, without noting the irony of that convergence.
Before going our separate ways home after a session of Murray’s seminar on the history of economic thought (at New York University in 1984), I gingerly mentioned to Murray that ten years earlier I had worked as Aptheker’s research assistant. His eyes widened in delight. He then told me how “interesting” he had found aspects of Aptheker’s The American Revolution, a subject on which he, Murray, had written Conceived in Liberty (five volumes). This was more cognitive dissonance than I could handle, so I didn’t pursue the topic. (I now regret passing on that opportunity, but then my association with Aptheker was still something I want to move away from.)[1]
[1] “. . . [T]he ‘Consensus’ school of historians . . . became ascendant in the 1940s and 1950s. Just as the Progressives reflected the Marxian outlook of American intellectuals of the 1930s, so the Consensus school reflected the neo-Conservative ‘American celebration’ that typified intellectuals in post-World War II America. . . . [B]y deprecating the revolutionary nature of the American Revolution, the Consensus school could isolate it from the indisputably radical French Revolution and other modern upheavals, and continue to denounce the latter as ideological and socially disruptive while seeming to embrace the founding heritage of America. The leading Consensus historians were Daniel J. Boorstin and Clinton Rossiter. . . .
“. . . But the Consensus historians did make one important contribution. They restored the older idea of the American Revolution as a movement of the great majority of the American people. It replaced the view held by Progressives and Imperialists alike that the revolution was a minority action imposed on a reluctant public. Particularly important in developing this position was the judicious work by John Richard Alden, The American Revolution, 1775–1783, still the best one volume book on the revolutionary war period. On the left, the Marxian historian Herbert Aptheker also advanced this position. He chided the 1930s Progressives for their opposition to the revolution as a minority class movement in The American Revolution, 1763–1783.” Murray Rothbard, “Modern Historians Confront the American Revolution: Bibliographic Essay,” Literature of Liberty, No. 1, March 1, 1978, https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/modern-historians-confront-american-revolution. (Emphasis added.—A.G.F.)
Not wanting this month to fade away without my having posted something, I reproduce my critique of Sean Gabb‘s epistemological musings from twenty years ago. I’m not picking on him, just rummaging through old essays to see if any are worth being worn in public again on this site. On my old one I wrote that the “firmest hand in England writing on behalf of classical liberal ideas belongs to Dr. Sean Gabb. Only when he wandered near philosophy proper did I find something to disagree with him about.” Below is my reply to his “On Being Uncertain: A Case for Scepticism,” Free Life Commentary, No. 105, 26 May 2003. He graciously published this criticism in his Free Life: A Journal of Classical Liberal and Libertarian Thought, Issue 47, 4 August 2003. (The links given on my old site are as dead as doornails.)
Dogmatic Uncertainty
“Murderous conviction” are the last words of Sean Gabb’s odd rhetorical exercise, but we must begin with them to understand what precedes them.
He argues that if no one knows anything for certain, then that’s true of agents of the State. Having no convictions at all, one can have no murderous convictions. For those who value their lives and property, utter lack of conviction is therefore a mental state it would be good for everyone to be in.
At first this reminded me of Jackie Mason’s comic observation that if there weren’t any food, there wouldn’t be any garbage. Upon reflection I noticed more serious difficulties. For one, lack of knowledge and lack of conviction do not correlate. One may be full of conviction on matters of which one has the weakest grasp, and cautious to the point of immobility where one is expert. Nescience is therefore no sure impediment to conviction, murderous or otherwise.
There are other problems with Mr. Gabb’s deduction. For one, he cannot, except arbitrarily, restrict nescience to agents of the State. If the State’s victims are equally ignorant, then they cannot ever hope to learn that the State exploits them. He may, of course, retort that while they may not know with certainty that they are victims of the State, they can come to know it, and many other things, “as surely as they need to.” The qualifier “with certainty” now becomes a false knot, and the slightest tug undoes the whole modern “problem” of knowledge and its latent skepticism. And into this crevice pours all that we normally count as knowledge, namely, fallible, probable judgment.
Mr. Gabb implicitly believes that we leap beyond the evidence when we claim to know with certainty the things he claims to doubt. The implicit norm, of course, is that one ought not leap beyond the evidence, but rather proportion one’s belief to it. That is, he values the exigent mind, but unfortunately conceives it according to the modern fixation with theoretical doubt. Of course, he never lets that doubt immobilize him, any more than Hume’s philosophy ever caused him to miss his appointment with the gaming room.
Mr. Gabb’s excruciatingly subjective, personal position, to the effect that he is cognitively holed up in his mind, intends a real world in which things are what they are, and wishing them otherwise will not make them so. This dynamic of self-transcendence is a homing device that orients us toward reality. It is as inescapably his as it is ours. It marks us as human. But he has ideas that lead him to misinterpret that inner compass’s readings. Continue reading “Dogmatic Uncertainty”
In November of 1943, Dr. Rufus Clement (1900-1967), President of Atlanta (now Clark Atlanta) University, forced W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) to resign his professorship effective the end of June 1944. Their views on the best course of action for Black Americans were incompatible, and Clement had the upper hand.
Pondering his next move, Du Bois conferred with James E. Shepard (1875-1947), a longtime friend and founder of North Carolina College (now North Carolina Central University) in the spring of 1944. Du Bois could have any position he wanted, Shepard promised. Perhaps Du Bois could continue editing Phylon, which he had founded at Atlanta U in 1940. Intrigued by this unforeseen offer, Du Bois replied in the affirmative, but said he’d need an assistant: at 76, he still had many plans but had to be realistic about how much sand remained in the upper bulb of his life’s hourglass.
Shepard recommended John Hope Franklin (1915-2009). His parents had named him after Du Bois’s friend, co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), past president of Atlanta and then of Morehouse College until 1936. Shepard suggested that the young scholar could take over editing duties when Du Bois retired. (No mere mortal knew that almost two decades of activism and writing still lay ahead of him.) Shepard introduced the men to each other, and they seemed to have hit it off, but Franklin knew he was but one of several men under consideration, and no decision was forthcoming for two years.
Suddenly, however, this prospect evaporated. Walter E. White (1893-1955), NAACP Executive Secretary, met with Du Bois during his trip to New York later that spring (1944), inviting him to return to the organization he had co-founded in 1909—the one he resigned from acerbically a decade earlier. White offered him the position of Director of Special Research with an office in its Manhattan headquarters on West 40th Street across the street from the main building of the New York Public Library.
The reservations Du Bois may have had about returning did not prevail. “Had Dr. Du Bois returned to North Carolina College,” Franklin wrote, “founded a magazine [sic: Phylon had already been founded], and subsequently retired, leaving the periodical in my hands, I can only surmise that my future would have been quite different.” (Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005, 116-118.)
And not just his future. Moving to New York, Du Bois was back in the same city as Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003), the white author of American Negro Slave Revolts, which Columbia University published in 1943. Aptheker asked to meet; they kept their appointment sometime in mid-1946.
Franklin, a Harvard Ph.D., who was racially prevented from serving in the army at a level commensurate with his research training, but had years of teaching under his belt by the war’s end. Contrast his situation with that of Aptheker, a combat veteran of that war and a Columbia Ph.D., but one whose Communist Party affiliation in the early years of the Cold War made him academically radioactive. Also, a condition of his Guggenheim Fellowship (1946-1947) was that he couldn’t take any other employment.
In their conversations about editing Du Bois’s correspondence and papers, Aptheker suggested that he consider Black scholars not weighed down by Aptheker’s political baggage. Du Bois wouldn’t hear of it: Aptheker was “by far the best fitted person” for the job. (Gary Murrell, “The Most Dangerous Communist in the United States”: A Biography of Herbert Aptheker, UMass Press, 62-63)
Ironically, Du Bois regarded his decision to return to the NAACP to be, as Franklin put it, “the worst decision he ever made.” Franklin says Du Bois’s “second autobiography,” that is, Dusk at Dawn, attests to this, but a book published in 1940 could not report on an event that lay five years in its future. Chapter XIX of his third autobiography, however, written 1958-1959, is entitled “My Return to the NAACP.” (Therein one finds much evidence supporting the judgment “worst decision,” but not those very words.) The contrast between Du Bois’s satisfaction with Aptheker and dissatisfaction with White’s abuse of the privilege of hiring him could not be starker.
But for White’s invitation to Du Bois—unexpected, given their strongly divergent views on the priority of Black education and racial desegregation—it is virtually certain that Hugh Murray and I would not have worked as Aptheker’s research assistants on the Du Bois projects in the early 1970s. What shape those projects would have taken under another’s editorial supervision and institutional connections and resources is a matter of speculation. But it is speculation that invites reflection on the seeming contingencies of history.
Yes, answers Diana West, in this interview. If she’s right—and I don’t see how we can avoid drawing that conclusion and preparing for the worst—then by posting this I’ve all but sealed my liberty’s doom, for the surveillance state can easily find subjects like me who qualify for the “formal deprogramming” of “cultists” that Hillary recently recommended.
In a Schlitz ad from yesteryear Bill finds this mood summed up:
embarking on a study that will be roughly equal parts philosophical, historical, theological, and personal. It will immerse me in the writings of 20th century American Marxists who, despite the path they took, have fascinated me. They thought, wrote, and fought in a world that headed inexorably toward the Second World War, was embroiled in it, and then emerged from it, knocked for a loop. It seemed that, directly or indirectly, these writers were always trying to make sense of the conflagration and its aftermath.
evidence for his antithesis, is only implicitly against Wokeism. I’ve been amazed to find attacks on the weaponization of the Department of Justice against Donald Trump on the front page, not of The Wall Street Journal, but of The Militant, organ of the Castroist Socialist Workers Party. (
