A Conservative History of the American
Left
by Daniel J. Flynn
(Crown Forum, 480 pages, $27.50)
Daniel J. Flynn is one of the Right’s rising stars. Still under
40, he has produced three books, each more perspicacious than the
last. There are conservative journalists who write for a mass
audience and conservative scholars who write for a narrow one. But
Flynn writes for both: his books combine original research — on
the streets interviewing leftist protestors as well as in libraries
combing through archives — with stylistic flair and common sense.
A Conservative History of the American Left is his best
book yet.
Histories of the Left as a whole, as opposed to volumes tackling
one or another subgenre of the sinister side of politics, have been
in short supply. In part, as Flynn shows, that’s because the Left
itself prefers to forget its past. Today’s secular liberals are
embarrassed to discover that they are descended from believers:
apocalypse-awaiting religious sects, Bible-thumping Temperance
nags, and even Christian communists. The Left has not always been
racially progressive, either: antebellum utopian communities often
banned blacks, while later socialists insisted that the struggle
for racial equality was a distraction from the really important
fight against the freedom to buy and sell.
A left that did remember its past might avoid making the same
mistakes over and over again — which could be a dangerous thing.
Thankfully, not too many liberals will read A Conservative
History of the American Left. Those who do will be surprised:
Flynn has written this book in as fair a spirit as his enemies
could ask. There are traitors (Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs, to
name a few), murderers, and hucksters aplenty in the history of the
American Left, yet “the story contains heroes” too, says Flynn:
“Eugene Debs running for president from an Atlanta jail; William
Jennings Bryan dramatically sermonizing easterners not to crucify
their countrymen on a cross of gold; Martin Luther King Jr. laying
down his life for the better world possible.” Flynn separates the
free-loving, hard-drinking, sometimes street-fighting “Freedom
Left” of Wobblies, hippies, and Yippies from the killjoy and
coercive “Force Left” of Prohibitionists, Communists, and other
statists.
BY FORCE OR BY FREEDOM, however, leftists pursue the same ends: the
abolition of private property, marriage, and traditional religion.
There’s some irony there, since the Left, both in its historical
roots and its often Puritanical attitudes, is deeply religious.
“The Religious Left” is the subject of Flynn’s first chapter.
Small-c communism came to America early, with the Pilgrims of
Plymouth colony in the 1620s. They didn’t practice communism for
theological reasons — perversely enough, the colony’s capital
investors back in the mother country imposed that policy, thinking
it would protect profits. But other religious settlers who followed
the Pilgrims often did embrace collectivism as an article of faith:
these sects, explored in colorful detail by Flynn, included
Labadists, Ephratans, and “the Woman in the Wilderness” — which
unfortunately had nothing to do with nymphs or dryads but was an
all-male Christian community. Later came Rappites, Zoarites, and
Shakers, the last of whom hailed an actual woman, one Ann Lee, as
Christ’s second coming.
On the banks of the Wabash in 1814, the Rappites founded a
commune they called Harmony. The turn to the irreligious Left would
be marked there a decade later, when the Indiana town was bought
wholesale by British industrialist and secular socialist Robert
Owen, who in a dazzling display of creativity rechristened the town
“New Harmony.”
Owen’s July 4, 1826 “Declaration of Mental Independence”
encapsulated the Left’s worldview. “Man up to this hour has been in
all parts of the earth a slave to a trinity of the most monstrous
evils,” he averred, namely, “private property, absurd and
irrational systems of religion and marriage founded upon individual
property, combined with some of these irrational systems of
religion.” New Harmony would have none of that. Indeed, Flynn
recounts, the New Harmonists even “separated children from their
parents at an early age,” lest familial bonds corrupt the
egalitarian experiment.
The settlement had everything going for it: arable land in a
bucolic setting; ready-made houses and buildings; and Owen’s vast
personal fortune to subsidize the venture. Still it failed. With
Owen’s wealth providing whatever was needed, nobody farmed. Free
housing at New Harmony, like public housing today, turned into a
slum. Why look after property that you don’t own? Even Owen soon
lost interest, disappearing on sabbatical from June 1825 to January
1826 before bringing the ill-fated project to an end in June
1827.
OWEN’S FAILURE DID NOT END the dream of building heaven on earth.
French socialist Charles Fourier, who imagined a secular millennium
of friendly lions and oceans made of lemonade, inspired further
experiments. The most famous Fourierite effort in the U.S. was
Brook Farm, fictionalized and immortalized by Nathaniel Hawthorne
in The Blithedale Romance. The most successful, however,
was the “North American Phalanx,” which lasted an impressive — by
voluntary commune standards — twelve years from 1843 to 1855,
largely thanks to rigorous selection criteria that turned away 70
percent of applicants.
Enduring even longer was the Oneida Community, a throwback to
the religious socialism of an earlier era. Oneida persisted for 32
years under founder John Humphrey Noyes’s system of “Bible
Communism.” Life at Oneida previewed much of the Marxist
totalitarianism to come in the next century. Noyes established the
practice of “mutual criticism” — later adopted by Chinese Maoists
— a “formal, public procedure involv[ing] a single community
member facing a gauntlet of criticism,” Flynn reports. “Everything
from reading novels excessively to spending too much time on
artistic pursuits to wearing hair beyond acceptable lengths was
fair game.” And although Noyes coined the term “free love,” even
sex at Oneida was “obligatory, directed, monitored — everything
but free.”
Flynn’s chapters on these antebellum communards are his most
enjoyable, in part because this is little-reviewed history and in
part because, noxious as these sects may have been, they did little
harm to themselves or their country. The Lefts that arose in the
late 19th and early 20th centuries were another matter. In Europe,
Karl Marx displaced Charles Fourier as the leading socialist
theorist, while his intellectual followers seized the First
International Workingmen’s Association from actual workingmen. In
the U.S., labor unions, Prohibitionists, populists, and
Progressives demanded concessions from society at large rather than
retreating into communities of their own. The Left was getting into
politics. Taxes and bloodshed would follow.
A CONSERVATIVE HISTORY of the American Left is a book of
admirably concise chapters and pithy prose. Suffragettes,
Single-Taxers, labor-union agitators, and Temperance “hatchetators”
like Carry Nation all receive just enough space and not a line
more. Only Flynn’s penultimate chapter bites off too much, trying
to cover every left-wing fad from the Vietnam War to 9/11 in under
20 pages. Otherwise, Flynn’s volume is as well planned as it is
well written.
Four chapters on Communist subversion in the United States from
the time of the Russian Revolution to the 1950s drive home one of
Flynn’s key themes, that the American Left only prospers when it
grounds itself in American history and identity. The Communists
enjoyed much success with their espionage programs, but as agents
of an alien ideology, they never captured the hearts and minds of
the American people.
Neither did the 1960s New Left, though it had greater success
transforming American culture. Rage against the Vietnam conflict
fueled the New Left, though until Nixon the war had only been
prosecuted by liberals. “The original commitment in Vietnam was
made by President Truman, a mainstream liberal,” Flynn quotes
Students for a Democratic Society president Carl Oglesby reminding
an antiwar march in 1965. “It was seconded by President Eisenhower,
a moderate liberal. It was intensified by the late President
Kennedy, a flaming liberal. Think of the men who now engineer that
war…Bundy, McNamara, Rusk, Lodge, Goldberg, the President
himself….They are all liberals.” The Vietnam era might well be
considered the Left’s civil war.
The period abounded with ironies. The Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee segued into the very violent Black Panthers.
Students for a Democratic Society increasingly admired
nondemocratic societies in North Vietnam, Cuba, and Communist
China. Radicals who started out opposing the Vietnam War ended the
decade by convening a “War Council” in Flint, Michigan and
launching a terror-bombing campaign against their own countrymen —
though the inept Weathermen, a violent offshoot of SDS, wound up
detonating three of their own comrades instead.
COMING DOWN FROM the 1960s was a nightmare for the Left. Black
Panthers Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton became addicted to crack,
with Newton getting blown away by a dealer in 1989. Depressed and
irrelevant, Abbie Hoffman, “the New Left’s clown prince,” killed
himself with an overdose of barbiturates that same year. Not that
all the '60s radicals met with such fates, though: “Mark Rudd,
Bernardine Dohrn, and Bill Ayers, three of the most visible
Weathermen, landed faculty positions,” Flynn reminds us. Thousands
of other '60s leftists, and society at large, were not so lucky.
“Only the most sentimental ex-hippie could fail to recognize the
prices paid on the road to the new freedoms,” Flynn quotes ex-SDS
president Todd Gitlin as saying. “The booming teenage pregnancy
rate; the dread diseases that accompanied the surge in promiscuity;
the damage done by drugs; the undermining of family commitment…”
Those lessons went unlearned well into the 1980s, as
homosexual-rights activists responded to the AIDS crisis by
demanding that gay bathhouses not be shut down and the Lambda
Defense Fund and National Gay Task Force sued to prevent the
release of the first AIDS test in 1985.
“Nobody learns,” an older and disillusioned Carl Oglesby tells
Flynn. “Nobody learns anything from anybody. All the mistakes that
are made have to be made all over again, in a new key, in a new
tempo. What can I say?” As elegantly written and compelling as it
is, the greatest virtue of A Conservative History of the
American Life is that it may prove Oglesby wrong by allowing
the Right to learn from the Left’s mistakes, so that the country
does not have to repeat them.
