Here follows a translation (substantive rather than literal) of the latest in an occasional “Letter from America” (Lettre d’Amérique) that I send to the website of a think tank in Paris, Histoire & Liberté, which is best described as the heir of the Institut d’Histoire Sociale, the base for many years of one of the last century’s most remarkable anti-communist intellectuals, Boris Souvarine.
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Born in Kiev (now Kyiv) in 1895, Boris Konstantinovich Lifsitch was brought to Paris as an infant by his emigrant parents. Destined for the jeweler’s trade, he was a socialist militant as a teenager. One of the founders of the French Communist Party (Parti communiste français) in 1920, he returned to Russia, threw his lot in with the Bolsheviks, and became a top Comintern leader.
Souvarine was one of the first leading communists to undergo a personal Kronstadt. Expelled from the party in 1924, five years before the American Jay Lovestone left, he wrote the first authoritative biography of Joseph Stalin, wherein he laid out practically every lesson relearned by generation after generation on the nature of communism, the Soviet Union, and, more broadly, totalitarian and illiberal movements worldwide.
Souvarine died in 1984; in the post–World War II years, when communist parties, notably in France and Italy, were at peak strength, he was an indispensable adviser to the U.S. and European politicians, free-trade unionists, and security agents who saved — with some serious help from the U.S. Army — western Europe from the fate of the captive nations in the east.
Pierre Rigoulot, an occasional contributor to The American Spectator, was one of Souvarine’s last associates and has become, in his own right, one of the most erudite and prolific anti-communist, anti-totalitarian blades in France as a member of The Black Book of Communism team and the author of many unfashionable books, ranging from critical assessments of the Cuban Revolution and the myth of Che Guevara to, most recently, an examination of the Stalinist roots of Vladimir Putin’s regime, written with fellow historian Florence Grandsenne.
An outspoken defender of the USA and Israel, Rigoulot, like the late Jean-François Revel, who served as the Institut d’Histoire Sociale‘s president, mistrusts those, from the extreme right to the extreme left, who would abandon the liberal-democratic currents in Europe that, notwithstanding critiques of the official European institutions, reject the authoritarian temptation that remains, to this day, the Old World’s recurring nightmare.
*****
Mon cher Pierre,
Quite honestly, I scarcely know how to begin this month’s lettre d’Amérique. Our great Republic is torn in two by what the press calls “divisions” but which seem to me more akin to “amnesia” and “ambition.” Power and greed overwhelm public affairs. In our great Capitol, the people’s representatives cannot stop spending money the people have not even given them yet, nor can they even agree on what to spend it, other than their obscene personal needs.
But is it different in France? I read of President Emmanuel Macron spending some $8 million on a dinner for the king of England. Bon sang, those two would have spent their time better watching a staging of Henry V.
But sanctimony will not get me anywhere. What you want to know is that the campaign to replace the hapless President Joe Biden next year is commencing. There was debate the other night among the candidates for the opposition party’s nomination, the Republicans.
Donald Trump did not participate in the discussion because he is ahead of his rivals’ combined poll numbers. This led Chris Christie, former governor of New Jersey, one of the pretenders and a heavy weight in some respects, to refer to the former president, who still insists that he is the legitimate winner of the 2020 election, with a pun on our word for éviter, to duck, a homonym of the avian beast. You might want to change topics at this point.
But to stay on this matter of “division” a bit longer, the only precedent to what seems be going on here would be the 1850s, when a series of errors by the political class took us to the brink of civil war, as, indeed, Abraham Lincoln warned: “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” he said in a famous speech in Springfield, Illinois, in 1858. By then, enough people were eager to mix it up, rendering war almost inevitable.
As a historian, you appreciate how inexact such comparisons can be. We are not on the brink of calamity, but we can, with some reason, worry about doing irreparable damage to the country that justly represents the Bible’s city on the hill (Matthew, but who am I to tell you). Nothing is inevitable in human affairs, however, even our airhead foreign policy. As our political system appears at times to be in a self-destructive race to the bottom, I persist in thinking that we can hold a clean election next year, with cleared slates and clean voting.
We are producing new men in the time-honored manner of a society founded on principles of free men and free markets — both, admittedly, at risk these days. The names I would mention would mean nothing to you, so never mind, though you may want to remember that my list would include several women, immigrants, Southerners, and Midwesterners, all-American as we could hope for, sensible. In fact, one of them was among those on the Republican debate stage, Nikki Haley, former governor of South Carolina. She said quite candidly that listening to that made her feel dumb. I understand she was addressing one of her rivals, but the candid realism of the line, applied to the political class, could be spoken by many voters.
Observe the irony of Ms. Haley being the voice of such candor. The women who are rising in American politics are what you would call center-right conservatives, anti-feminist. Feminism, which originally recognized women’s superior qualities in certain areas and the avowal of men’s duty to prize and protect them, went off the rails. To qualify for leadership in the private and public sectors — and they are needed in both — women must perforce be anti-feminist.
The center right, in fact, is the only position on the political map that produces sensible people these days. The reason for this, superficially, is that the radical tails of both parties are wagging the dog, sending him off on fools’ errands or rampages of destruction.
Interestingly enough — but sociologically not at all surprising — the extreme Left has usurped the center Left and consequently holds the command posts of the liberal, or Democratic, side, of our politics. Its program is increasingly understood as a road to ruin.
By contrast, the center Right is no less inept at holding its own against its extremist challengers, but it is more likely to restore order if its political vehicle, the Republicans, returns to power.
Primaries, the domain of zealots and activists, are a threat to democracy. They promote extremes against the middle. This goes very much against the good sense — and common goodness — of the American people.
Americans are not by nature inclined to extremes — there is too much to do, too much opportunity, too much decency and fairness, despite the alarming bad examples of our political class, the lawlessness that is promoted by abdication and immorality. We are under attack from crime waves, an epidemic of imported drugs, an invasion across our southern border. Yet most of us remain calm, expecting the system to find its way once again.
Even in 1861, most Americans would have avoided the extremes had it not been for activist minority of desperados. In case you are interested, the election of 1860 was won by Abraham Lincoln, running as the moderate voice of opportunity-seeking pioneers. He won, however, on the strength of his northern votes. In the South, where he was not even on the ticket in several states — he did not complain of “rigged” elections — several candidates split the anti-Republican vote.
They thought Lincoln’s party was controlled by its extremist, or abolitionist, wing. Playing on this fear, the fire-eating secessionists took charge in the media and the state assemblies, confirming the dogmas of their opposite numbers in the north.
This is a recurring story, of course. Extremists find ways of setting the agenda, and then there is no stopping the disaster that follows. I do not doubt this will be understood to have happened in Ukraine, if that orgy of death and destruction can be viewed objectively. Admittedly, over there the main extremist happened to be Russia’s dictator.
Your commitment to Ukraine’s freedom is one I share, both on its own merits and because our side’s inability to stop unprovoked aggression can only encourage more, from East Asia to Africa and who knows where else.
However, after soon three years of war (10, counting from 2014), there exists no clear U.S. strategy other than to trip up Putin and pour enough money and arms into Ukraine to keep killing Russian and Ukrainian conscripts. This is not sustainable.
It would be well if worries over a change of government in Washington were to concentrate minds in both Moscow and Kyiv on a cease fire. I suppose Korea is the best, or, rather, the least bad, model.
The return to a center-right center of gravity here will have least-bad-option consequences for foreign affairs generally. Small consolation, but preferable to what we have been living with. Les extrêmes se touchent, your aphorism has it. Just so: The reds’ aggrieved sense that the world is too wicked for America, and the blues’ self-hating belief that America is too wicked for the world, open the gates of mischief. They can be closed if the center holds.
Boris Souvarine never ceased warning about the threat of communist expansionism because he understood that the regimes depended on terrifying the democracies into bailing them out of their hopeless economic stagnation. Hence his support for Ronald Reagan’s arms build-up and democracy offensive, just as he had supported Harry Truman’s Atlantic policies. You will let me know if I err on that.
In the meantime, you needn’t worry; we’ll recover, and, once again, America will be the promised land toward which everyone aspires, and you can go and faire l’Américain with impunity. In the original:
Tu vuo’ fa’ ll’americano
‘mericano, mericano
Sient’a mme chi t’ ‘o ffa fa’?
Tu vuoi vivere alla moda …You want to be American
American, American
Listen to me: Who asks you to be?
You want to be fashionable …
