Page 48 - American Conservative September/October 2015

Arts&Letters
support for the New Deal with oppo- sition to Nazi Germany, as the apogee of the American left. Ross, on the oth- er hand, sees it as the moment when American socialists sold their Jefferso- nian birthright for a mess of Bolshevik pottage.
The hero of this part of Ross’s enor- mous book is Norman Thomas, the former Presbyterian clergyman from Ohio whose political and cultural background made him more sympa- thetic to the isolationists than to FDR in the run-up to World War II, particu- larly after Roosevelt’s election to an un- precedented third term. Thomas was among the most prominent supporters of the America First movement, which drew part of its membership from the Socialist-led Keep America Out of War Committee.
Noting this almost forgotten over- lap between the Old Left and the Old Right, Ross speculates that “a Labor or Farmer-Labor Party, had it emerged before the Second World War, would have profoundly differed from postwar liberalism. It would have in all likeli- hood been a progressive-isolationist major party, having much more in common with so-called rightwing populism than Cold War liberalism.” Ross contends that such a party would have been more consistent with the historic aspirations of American so- cialism, and perhaps more appealing to ordinary citizens, than the vision of a welfare-warfare state that Communists shared with Wilson and Roosevelt.
Perhaps. But Ross’s focus on party leaders to the exclusion of the wider political setting obscures the hurdles that such a party would have faced. To begin with, noninterventionism was popular between the world wars. This does not mean socialism was popular. Rossdoesn’tseehowmarginaltheSPA was because he emphasizes its posi- tions on foreign policy to the exclusion of its domestic agenda. He forgets that antimilitarism was not a goal in itself for the Socialists but part of a larger ideological package.
Certainly this package included Jef- fersonian elements. But it also called for public ownership of large portions of the economy. Despite their shared noninterventionism, then, the SPA was not as close to the Old Right as Ross suggests. It wasn’t as close to the mainstream of progressive politics either. For many Socialists, the New Deal was objectionable less because it was centralizing as such than because it addressed some of the side effects of capitalism without replacing the profit system. In this respect, Roosevelt’s policies really were closer to European corporatism than to Marxism.
But these distinctions held little in- terest to actual voters. The Socialists lost support to Communists and Dem- ocrats because these parties supported policies that appeared to be helping people in their everyday lives. This was particularly true for union members. In addition to FDR’s White House sup- port for labor organization, unionists did well in the military buildup that preceded Pearl Harbor.
So there is little reason to think a party rooted in organized labor would have been consistently antimilitarist. It would also have been weak in the South, where unions were rare and farmers were not isolationists. Rather than a national party, the formation Ross imagines might not have been much bigger that than actual Farmer- Labor organization that the progres- sive Republican Robert La Follette and his family established in the upper Midwest. It would have been literally a middle-American radicalism.
Beyond counterfactuals, it is not obvious that the transformation of the SPA into a broad-based Labor-Farm party would have been a good thing. Norman Thomas’s nonintervention- ism and opposition to what Ross calls “state capitalism” were based on impeccable motives. But Thomas was wrong to think the United States could avoid war with Nazi Germany in the long run or that doing so was better than fighting. Ross quotes as a
kind of prophecy the SPA’s 1940 plat- form, according to which:
Defeat of Hitler will be welcomed by all anti-fascists. But defeat of Hitler will mean the defeat of Hit- lerism and a victory for democra- cy only if the roots of fascism and the war system are destroyed. The United States cannot contribute toward that end nor vindicate real democracy if it loses itself in the processes of war. If America en- ters the war, we shall be subjected to military dictatorship, the regi- mentation of labor and the ulti- mate economic collapse that must follow war. In an effort to ‘save de- mocracy,’ we shall have destroyed its only remaining citadel.
Despite its many shortcomings, it is difficult to see Truman’s America in this grim forecast.
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1952, when the SPA ran its last
his book should probably end in
presidential campaign. It was a sad af- fair: Norman Thomas was unavailable to run because he was touring Asia at the expense of the CIA-funded Ameri- can Committee for Cultural Freedom, having become a fellow traveler of Cold War liberalism. But Ross fol- lows events up to 1972, when the party formally dissolved. This is because he wants to trace another genealogy: the emergence of neoconservatism from the sects that persisted after Thomas’s defection.
It is a kind of demonic-possession story. Having fatally weakened the SPA in the ’20s and ’30s, the Bolshe- viks return to reanimate the corpse after the World War II. This time the villain is Max Shachtman, a Trotskyist whoarguedthattheSovietUnionhad become an obstacle to the very revolu- tion that it had initiated. Shachtman and his followers urged socialists to work within the Democratic Party to promote a hard line against the USSR, as well as socialization of the domestic