A Letter to Ron Radosh

Dear Ron,

I have just finished your wonderful memoir Commies, which gives as vivid a sense of the communist-descended 1950s and 60s left as will be found anywhere.

Though far less dramatically than yours, my life, too, has been marked by political transformations?disappointments with old beliefs and allies, the problematic forging of new ones. There are rough parallels to your experience: I grew up (at least in part) in a left-wing household, with Pete Seeger and Paul Robeson on the phonograph, and a radical and fellow-traveling stepfather who was an occasional speaker at the rallies organized by your friends in the left's inner sanctums. Half a generation younger than you, I was part of the antiwar movement in the late 60s, had "second thoughts" in the 70s and became?in the 80s and early 90s?an enthusiastic neoconservative. But I now tell my teenage daughters that my present views (which are somewhat Buchananite) are probably closer to what they were in 1970 than to what they were during the Reagan era.

I last saw you when we shared a ride to Eric Breindel's gravesite. You asked me then if Buchanan's isolationism was something I agreed with. I answered no, though even in 1998 I was uncomfortable with the hubris and "indispensable nation" rhetoric emanating from the main conservative opinion journals. A year later, after the administration picked a fight with Serbia and began bombing in the Balkans with hardly a nod toward consultation with Congress, I would have answered you differently. When you asked, I was not aware that one of your many books (Prophets on the Right) was a sympathetic profile of five conservative critics of American globalism?written in the early 70s when you were an avowed socialist.

I now wonder whether your present rejection of the lies and self-deceptions involved in being pro-communist leaves room for any remaining sympathy for those Americans who opposed an imperial foreign policy without any illusions about communism.

I have other questions as well. In your memoir's final pages you describe your eyes welling with tears of recognition while reading in the ex-Marxist Sidney Hook's autobiography his conclusion that despite the West's many failings and limitations, "its defense and survival" had become the "first priority."In that context, the "defense of the West" meant bolstering the Western democracies against fascism and communism. But fascism died long ago, and communism is finished.

What then does "defense of the West" mean in our time, and what most threatens Western survival?Is the West merely a geographic concept, as in "west of the Urals"?Or is it a civilization that grew out of the Western cultural and religious past, from Christianity, or more broadly, the Judeo-Christian tradition? Can the West be said meaningfully to survive if its official culture (monuments, school curricula, etc.) is assertively "multicultural" and Western-descended peoples make up only a minority of its population?

I don't think there are simple answers to these questions?but I would suggest that numbers make a difference, and that America's ability to accommodate tens of millions of non-Western immigrants and remain part of the West cannot simply be assumed.

Let me approach this subject from another direction. We used to say, or knew people who did, that socialism is "about equality." But there was a comparatively high degree of equality in 1950s and 60s America which had nothing to do with socialism. I wonder what is your reaction to the recent story in The Wall Street Journal about an Iowa tire-factory owner who decided to bust his (largely white) workers' union by hiring Laotian immigrants. When the Laotians confounded his plan by joining the union themselves, he hired more immigrants from another country (Bosnia) as strike-breakers. The point is his ability to use mass immigration, which in certain fields is creating a kind of reserve army of the unemployed, to bring the wages and bargaining power of American workers down toward what they are in the non-Western world. Not surprisingly, the Journal is enthusiastic about this process, as are, implicitly at least, most of the conservative magazines where you now publish and I used to. Labor unions were appreciated as anticommunist assets in the Cold War, but not when they try to protect the living standards of American working people in the new global marketplace.

These two issues?immigration and foreign policy?mark my essential disagreements with the neoconservatives who make up the reigning American conservative establishment in the world of political journals and ideas. I have had ample time to learn that no one who diverges from their "line" will ever be accused of opportunism. While one is usually not subjected to the personal nastiness you experienced in breaking with the left, there are unpleasant chills, polite brush-offs from editors who used to welcome one's work and a dearth of places to publish: I wouldn't recommend it. But I do wonder how you?whose experience in politics and life is immeasurably broader than most of the neoconservative gate-keepers?turn these questions over in the privacy of your own mind.