thenation--2020-05-05--The Making of the Radical Republicans

The Making of the Radical Republicans

There is an adage that historians write with ( at least ) one eye fixed on the present .
So it is not surprising that scholars have lately been drawn to the 1850s , a time , much like our own , of intense social and political polarization .
Kellie Carter Jackson ’ s recent study of black abolitionists , Force and Freedom , focuses on their increasingly vocal calls for slave rebellion .
Joanne B. Freeman ’ s The Field of Blood relates how nearly every session of Congress from the mid-1830s to the outbreak of civil war in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ knives and pistols .
In The War Before the War , his study of the response to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 , Andrew Delbanco suggests that armed conflict over slavery began years before the attack on Fort Sumter .
When It Was Grand : The Radical Republican History of the Civil War Today , political combat is mostly angry rhetoric , not violent deeds , even if our president galvanizes his supporters with thinly veiled invitations to take action against “ enemies of the people.
” But parallels certainly exist between @ @ @ @ @ @ @ our time .
Then as now , states and localities declared themselves unwilling to cooperate with the federal government ’ s draconian policies for dealing with fugitives seeking to escape oppression ( runaway slaves in the 1850s , migrants and refugees today ) .
The current xenophobic claims that immigrants are responsible for illness , crime , and unemployment recall the Know-Nothing Party ’ s similar complaints about Roman Catholics fleeing the Irish famine .
Today , as in the past , the Supreme Court has handed down decisions that reflect indifference or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Americans—Dred Scott in 1857 , Shelby County v. Holder in 2013 .
Today ’ s rallies calling for “ reopening ” the country , at which participants menacingly display their weapons , bring to mind the 1860 presidential election , when the Republican Party mobilized armed Wide Awake clubs , whose participants paraded through major cities dressed in quasimilitary uniforms .
And as Richard Kreitner discusses in his forthcoming Break It Up , secessionist movements are today proliferating in many parts of the country .
LeeAnna Keith ’ s new book , When @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the mid–19th century , this time to consider the history of Radical Republicanism .
In doing so , it adds to our understanding of how a rising tide of violence in the 1850s served as a harbinger of the Civil War , a conflict that culminated in the most radical act in American history : the uncompensated abolition of slavery .
The author of The Colfax Massacre , a highly praised study of the bloodiest act of carnage against African Americans during Reconstruction , Keith makes an important contribution by placing Radicals at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Contemporaries regularly referred to the Radical Republicans as a distinct group in the spectrum of Civil War–era politics .
While by the 1850s most Northerners opposed the westward expansion of slavery , the Radicals went further , insisting that antislavery action should take precedence over all other political questions and vehemently opposing any talk of compromise with the South .
When the Civil War began , they proclaimed that the Union would not emerge victorious without emancipating and arming the slaves .
By the time it ended , they helped put equal civil @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the national agenda and then took the lead in enshrining them in laws and the Constitution during Reconstruction .
Scholarly assessments of the Radicals have changed over time , reflecting the evolution of historical interpretation of their era and the changing face of American politics and race relations .
Repelled by the mass slaughter of World War I and invested in reconciliation between white Northerners and Southerners , many historians in the 1920s and ’ 30s blamed the Radicals—sometimes called the Jacobins or Vindictives—for whipping up the sectional hostility that produced a “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ suffrage on the South during Reconstruction , supposedly leading to an orgy of corruption and misgovernment .
To the followers of Charles Beard , who taught that political ideologies serve as masks for the interests of powerful economic groups , the Radicals were the shock troops of a new industrial order .
In his influential 1941 book Lincoln and the Radicals , the historian T. Harry Williams wrote that “ they loved the Negro less for himself than as an instrument with which they might fasten Republican political and economic control upon the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Abraham Lincoln was a well-meaning but ineffectual leader , outmaneuvered time and again by scheming Radicals .
By the middle of the 20th century , as the modern civil rights revolution swept across the country , historians began to upend this interpretation and take the Radicals ’ advocacy of abolition and racial equality at face value .
The Radicals , they insisted , were idealists in the best 19th century reform tradition .
In The Radical Republicans ( 1969 ) , the first book-length study of the group , Hans L. Trefousse @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Vanguard for Racial Justice.
” In her more recent and authoritative history of abolitionism , The Slave ’ s Cause , Manisha Sinha goes further .
Abolitionists and Radicals Republicans were not simply adjuncts of the Great Emancipator , she argues ; they were an independent force whose lofty ideals helped shape the era ’ s history .
In When It Was Grand , Keith offers a capacious , if not entirely coherent , definition of the Civil War–era Radicals .
Despite the book ’ s title ( an allusion to the Republicans @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Party ) , she does not confine her account to individuals working within the political system .
Her subjects include not only Radical Republicans but also abolitionists , who refused to participate in politics under a Constitution they deemed irreparably proslavery ; Transcendentalists , for whom the abolition of slavery was as much a path to intellectual self-realization as a form of political action ; and black activists , who campaigned during the war for racial equality in post-slavery America .
Casting this wide net allows Keith to include a variety of antislavery @ @ @ @ @ @ @ remains unclear at times what unites these “ culture warriors , ” as she calls them , or why particular individuals were chosen for in-depth treatment while others were neglected or ignored .
The New England philosophers Ralph Waldo Emerson , Henry David Thoreau , and the Rev .
Theodore Parker ( the last surprisingly described as a Republican “ party boss ” ) all receive considerably more attention , for example , than Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens , the leading Radical Republicans in Congress , or less familiar ones such as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as “ a wisecracking lawyer said to be secretly married to his black housekeeper ” —hardly an adequate description of one of the 19th century ’ s great egalitarians .
Along with Stevens , Julian was a leading advocate of confiscating Southern plantations and distributing the land to former slaves , yet he doesn ’ t appear at all .
Keith also devotes little attention to the Radicals ’ ideology and seems unable to decide how much political power they actually enjoyed .
At the outset , she claims they “ dominated the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ; elsewhere she makes them seem like political fringe dwellers .
Despite these weaknesses , Keith ’ s capacious definition of the Radicals enables her to center her story outside the Beltway , which yields significant benefits .
Her book is more interested in action than in ideology , more concerned with battles in the streets over fugitive slaves than with election campaigns and congressional legislation .
She includes Radical women in her account of how the nation was torn asunder .
For example , she devotes considerable attention to Jessie Frémont , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and the wife of John C. Frémont , the Republican Party ’ s first presidential candidate .
Jessie Frémont was the political equivalent of a gambler who makes the most of a weak hand .
She did her best to defend her husband against ( all too accurate ) charges of military incompetence when he commanded Union troops in Missouri , and she helped mobilize support for his quixotic effort , in 1864 , to replace Lincoln at the head of the Republican ticket .
The first part of When It Was Grand @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Keith writes , “ a state of war with slavery ” already existed .
As she points out , in this war before the war , the Radicals utilized whatever weapons they had at their disposal .
In response to the Fugitive Slave Act , they defied the Constitution and laws through violent resistance to the capture of runaways .
At the same time , they borrowed the states ’ rights doctrine usually associated with John C. Calhoun and the South in an attempt to nullify national policy through legal action .
Radical @ @ @ @ @ @ @ liberate captured fugitives .
Wisconsin ’ s highest court declared the law unconstitutional , a ruling overturned by the US Supreme Court .
The fugitive issue , Keith argues , led many Northerners to insist that what Senator William H. Seward of New York called a “ higher law ” justified resistance to man-made statutes .
In 1854 the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act opened most of the old Louisiana Purchase to slavery , from which it had been prohibited for more than 30 years by the Missouri Compromise .
The law proved @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the Republican Party , which was dedicated to halting slavery ’ s westward expansion , and it led directly to Bleeding Kansas , the battle over whether the territory would become a slave or free state .
Keith has a talent for storytelling , and she captures the drama of how the Massachusetts educator Eli Thayer and a group of Eastern Radicals organized the Emigrant Aid Company to assist antislavery settlers with the cost of travel to the Kansas territory and to provide them with supplies—including rifles .
Those were certainly needed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ violence .
In 1856 proslavery forces there sacked the antislavery town of Lawrence , whereupon the abolitionist John Brown murdered several proslavery settlers .
Two years later , he led a raid into neighboring Missouri that rescued a group of slaves , transporting them to freedom in Canada .
Violence in Kansas fed into armed conflict elsewhere .
In 1859 , Brown and 21 followers temporarily seized the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry , Virginia , hoping to spark a slave revolution .
Keith claims that the Radical Republicans “ bore responsibility for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ incendiary language ” against slavery and the fact that a number of New Englanders—including Emerson , Parker , and Bronson Alcott ( the father of Louisa May Alcott , the author of Little Women ) —participated in Brown ’ s planning or funding .
“ Our best people listen to his words , ” Alcott wrote when Brown lectured in Massachusetts .
These men , however , were hardly among the leading Radical Republicans , most of whom condemned Brown ’ s raid .
So did Lincoln in his Cooper Union address of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that Lincoln considered Brown and the Radicals “ brothers under the skin ” since they all hated slavery .
Keith ’ s conclusion that Brown was the “ idol of Republican Radicals ” also seems untenable , given the widespread Republican condemnation of his private war against the slaveholding South .
But she is correct that by 1860 , many Republicans , Radical or not , had embraced the legitimacy of violence .
In this way , the Civil War “ had already begun , ” she writes .
The experience of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ sensitivity to mass suffering…and heroic sacrifice , ” leading them to conclude that when full-scale war did break out , it must be “ a fight unto the death.
” The second half of When It Was Grand deals with Radicalism during the Civil War .
As the stakes become higher—the fate of slavery , the rights of emancipated African Americans , the future of the postwar South—the cast of characters expands enormously .
Black Americans for the first time become major actors in the narrative .
We encounter figures little known @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Jones , a black activist in Chicago who in January 1865 spearheaded the movement that led Illinois to repeal the state ’ s notoriously discriminatory Black Laws .
African American soldiers also become an important part of the story .
Their battle for the same pay as whites produced the first national legislation mandating equal treatment regardless of race .
Keith emphasizes how the actions of Radical military officers helped propel the Lincoln administration down the road to Emancipation and at least a partial recognition of black rights .
Determined to retain control @ @ @ @ @ @ @ overturned John C. Frémont ’ s 1861 order freeing the slaves in Missouri and a similar one the following year by Gen. David Hunter in Florida , Georgia , and South Carolina .
But their actions helped push the fate of slavery to the center of political discussion , and at ground level , these abolitionist generals also forwarded the war ’ s revolutionary dynamic .
“ Much of the truly radical policy of the Civil War years , ” Keith writes , “ took place in military settings.
” In Louisiana , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ black soldiers without authorization from higher-ups and flatly refused to carry out an order to put runaway slaves to work reinforcing levees on the Mississippi River .
The “ crimes of their masters , ” he declared , were responsible for wartime damage to the levee system , and therefore slave owners—not slaves—should take on the burden of repairs .
Encountering female refugees from enslavement in Union-occupied North Carolina , their backs scarred from whippings , Gen. Edward A .
Wild invited the women to apply the lash to their former owners .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ , another officer reported , “ not forgetting to remind the gentleman of days gone by.
” Wild allowed Abraham Galloway , who escaped from slavery in 1857 , to return to North Carolina , where he served as a spy for the Union Army and delivered speeches advocating political equality for former slaves—a demand he took directly to Lincoln when he led a black delegation that visited the White House in 1864 .
Although Keith does not mention it , Galloway went on to serve in the North Carolina Senate during Reconstruction @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of slavery inspired claims for new rights , introducing bills to protect women against violence by their husbands , to establish 10 hours as a legal day ’ s work , and to allow black people accused of crimes to be tried before all-black juries .
She notes that many of the black leaders of Reconstruction shared the wartime experience of “ engagement ” with the “ Radicalized United States government ” via military service , political organizing , and teaching in schools established for freed people .
She makes the telling point @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tended to trickle up toward the party leadership from activists in the field.
” Keith deserves praise for shifting the center of gravity of wartime Radicalism away from Washington to military encampments and upstart black gatherings in the Union-occupied South .
But in so doing , When It Was Grand seriously neglects some of the political dimensions of Radical Republicanism .
In a recent article in Catalyst , a new left- oriented scholarly journal , the Princeton historian Matthew Karp convincingly portrays the rise of the Republican Party in the 1850s and the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ revolutionary outcomes achieved on “ the field of democratic mass politics.
” The Radicals were central actors on this terrain .
Before the war , they played a large role in the creation of an antislavery majority in the North .
It was a development that made possible the election of Lincoln , a moderate Republican who worked closely with Radicals because he understood that they formed a crucial element of what would today be called the party ’ s base .
The Radicals also pushed key pieces of wartime legislation through Congress @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the conflict barring the army from returning fugitive slaves , as well as the first and second Confiscation Acts—key steps on the road to Emancipation .
When It Was Grand stops when the war ends , at the very moment the Radicals begin to achieve their greatest influence and farthest-reaching successes .
During Reconstruction , they spearheaded the rewriting of the Constitution to abolish slavery , enfranchise black men , and guarantee birthright citizenship and equal protection under the law regardless of race , bringing into being ( if only temporarily ) genuine @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Despite the book ’ s many insights into the Radicals ’ actions leading up to and during the war , one wishes Keith had followed their story into the Reconstruction years , linking the struggles for freedom on the plains of Kansas and battlefields of the Civil War with the postwar era ’ s congressional and presidential initiatives and constitutional changes .
While aware of the Radicals ’ accomplishments , Keith ends on a less than celebratory note .
In an echo of an earlier era of historiography , she writes that , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ were not pure ” and they too often succumbed to the “ love of power.
” Trying to explain how the Republican Party eventually abandoned its commitment to equality , she claims that only abolitionists like John Brown and Gerrit Smith developed truly “ collegial relations ” with black activists—a judgment quite unfair to the many Radicals who worked closely with black colleagues in the struggle for equality .
These days , the Republican Party is far from grand .
And the nation , Keith writes , has yet to “ redeem the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ those engaged in that ongoing struggle , the Radicals offer compelling lessons on how to operate simultaneously inside and outside a political system , how to function as a wing of a party without being beholden to it , and how to achieve success as an ideological vanguard , putting forward a coherent plan for radical change and compromising when necessary , though without ever losing sight of one ’ s principles and long-term goals .

This article appears in the May 18/25, 2020 issue.
There is an adage that historians write with (at least) one eye fixed on the present. So it is not surprising that scholars have lately been drawn to the 1850s, a time, much like our own, of intense social and political polarization. Kellie Carter Jackson’s recent study of black abolitionists, Force and Freedom, focuses on their increasingly vocal calls for slave rebellion. Joanne B. Freeman’s The Field of Blood relates how nearly every session of Congress from the mid-1830s to the outbreak of civil war in 1861 witnessed members exchanging punches or drawing knives and pistols. In The War Before the War, his study of the response to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Andrew Delbanco suggests that armed conflict over slavery began years before the attack on Fort Sumter. Books in Review When It Was Grand: The Radical Republican History of the Civil War By LeeAnna Keith Buy this book
Today, political combat is mostly angry rhetoric, not violent deeds, even if our president galvanizes his supporters with thinly veiled invitations to take action against “enemies of the people.” But parallels certainly exist between the decade before the Civil War and our time. Then as now, states and localities declared themselves unwilling to cooperate with the federal government’s draconian policies for dealing with fugitives seeking to escape oppression (runaway slaves in the 1850s, migrants and refugees today). The current xenophobic claims that immigrants are responsible for illness, crime, and unemployment recall the Know-Nothing Party’s similar complaints about Roman Catholics fleeing the Irish famine. Today, as in the past, the Supreme Court has handed down decisions that reflect indifference or out-and-out hostility to the rights of black Americans—Dred Scott in 1857, Shelby County v. Holder in 2013. Today’s rallies calling for “reopening” the country, at which participants menacingly display their weapons, bring to mind the 1860 presidential election, when the Republican Party mobilized armed Wide Awake clubs, whose participants paraded through major cities dressed in quasimilitary uniforms. And as Richard Kreitner discusses in his forthcoming Break It Up, secessionist movements are today proliferating in many parts of the country.
LeeAnna Keith’s new book, When It Was Grand, also returns to the mid–19th century, this time to consider the history of Radical Republicanism. In doing so, it adds to our understanding of how a rising tide of violence in the 1850s served as a harbinger of the Civil War, a conflict that culminated in the most radical act in American history: the uncompensated abolition of slavery. The author of The Colfax Massacre, a highly praised study of the bloodiest act of carnage against African Americans during Reconstruction, Keith makes an important contribution by placing Radicals at the center of these transformative events.
Contemporaries regularly referred to the Radical Republicans as a distinct group in the spectrum of Civil War–era politics. While by the 1850s most Northerners opposed the westward expansion of slavery, the Radicals went further, insisting that antislavery action should take precedence over all other political questions and vehemently opposing any talk of compromise with the South. When the Civil War began, they proclaimed that the Union would not emerge victorious without emancipating and arming the slaves. By the time it ended, they helped put equal civil and political rights for black Americans on the national agenda and then took the lead in enshrining them in laws and the Constitution during Reconstruction. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann
Scholarly assessments of the Radicals have changed over time, reflecting the evolution of historical interpretation of their era and the changing face of American politics and race relations. Repelled by the mass slaughter of World War I and invested in reconciliation between white Northerners and Southerners, many historians in the 1920s and ’30s blamed the Radicals—sometimes called the Jacobins or Vindictives—for whipping up the sectional hostility that produced a “needless” conflict and for foisting black suffrage on the South during Reconstruction, supposedly leading to an orgy of corruption and misgovernment. To the followers of Charles Beard, who taught that political ideologies serve as masks for the interests of powerful economic groups, the Radicals were the shock troops of a new industrial order. In his influential 1941 book Lincoln and the Radicals, the historian T. Harry Williams wrote that “they loved the Negro less for himself than as an instrument with which they might fasten Republican political and economic control upon the South.” In Williams’s view, Abraham Lincoln was a well-meaning but ineffectual leader, outmaneuvered time and again by scheming Radicals.
By the middle of the 20th century, as the modern civil rights revolution swept across the country, historians began to upend this interpretation and take the Radicals’ advocacy of abolition and racial equality at face value. The Radicals, they insisted, were idealists in the best 19th century reform tradition. In The Radical Republicans (1969), the first book-length study of the group, Hans L. Trefousse hailed them as “Lincoln’s Vanguard for Racial Justice.” In her more recent and authoritative history of abolitionism, The Slave’s Cause, Manisha Sinha goes further. Abolitionists and Radicals Republicans were not simply adjuncts of the Great Emancipator, she argues; they were an independent force whose lofty ideals helped shape the era’s history.
In When It Was Grand, Keith offers a capacious, if not entirely coherent, definition of the Civil War–era Radicals. Despite the book’s title (an allusion to the Republicans’ longtime identification as the Grand Old Party), she does not confine her account to individuals working within the political system. Her subjects include not only Radical Republicans but also abolitionists, who refused to participate in politics under a Constitution they deemed irreparably proslavery; Transcendentalists, for whom the abolition of slavery was as much a path to intellectual self-realization as a form of political action; and black activists, who campaigned during the war for racial equality in post-slavery America. Current Issue View our current issue
Casting this wide net allows Keith to include a variety of antislavery activists in her narrative. But it remains unclear at times what unites these “culture warriors,” as she calls them, or why particular individuals were chosen for in-depth treatment while others were neglected or ignored. The New England philosophers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and the Rev. Theodore Parker (the last surprisingly described as a Republican “party boss”) all receive considerably more attention, for example, than Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens, the leading Radical Republicans in Congress, or less familiar ones such as George W. Julian. Stevens is described as “a wisecracking lawyer said to be secretly married to his black housekeeper”—hardly an adequate description of one of the 19th century’s great egalitarians. Along with Stevens, Julian was a leading advocate of confiscating Southern plantations and distributing the land to former slaves, yet he doesn’t appear at all. Keith also devotes little attention to the Radicals’ ideology and seems unable to decide how much political power they actually enjoyed. At the outset, she claims they “dominated the Republican party,” a considerable exaggeration; elsewhere she makes them seem like political fringe dwellers.
Despite these weaknesses, Keith’s capacious definition of the Radicals enables her to center her story outside the Beltway, which yields significant benefits. Her book is more interested in action than in ideology, more concerned with battles in the streets over fugitive slaves than with election campaigns and congressional legislation. She includes Radical women in her account of how the nation was torn asunder. For example, she devotes considerable attention to Jessie Frémont, a daughter of Senator Thomas Hart Benton and the wife of John C. Frémont, the Republican Party’s first presidential candidate. Jessie Frémont was the political equivalent of a gambler who makes the most of a weak hand. She did her best to defend her husband against (all too accurate) charges of military incompetence when he commanded Union troops in Missouri, and she helped mobilize support for his quixotic effort, in 1864, to replace Lincoln at the head of the Republican ticket.
The first part of When It Was Grand deals with the 1850s, when, Keith writes, “a state of war with slavery” already existed. As she points out, in this war before the war, the Radicals utilized whatever weapons they had at their disposal. In response to the Fugitive Slave Act, they defied the Constitution and laws through violent resistance to the capture of runaways. At the same time, they borrowed the states’ rights doctrine usually associated with John C. Calhoun and the South in an attempt to nullify national policy through legal action. Radical judges issued writs of habeas corpus to liberate captured fugitives. Wisconsin’s highest court declared the law unconstitutional, a ruling overturned by the US Supreme Court. The fugitive issue, Keith argues, led many Northerners to insist that what Senator William H. Seward of New York called a “higher law” justified resistance to man-made statutes.
In 1854 the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act opened most of the old Louisiana Purchase to slavery, from which it had been prohibited for more than 30 years by the Missouri Compromise. The law proved to be the catalyst for the creation of the Republican Party, which was dedicated to halting slavery’s westward expansion, and it led directly to Bleeding Kansas, the battle over whether the territory would become a slave or free state. Related Article Congress’s History of Violence Andrew Delbanco
Keith has a talent for storytelling, and she captures the drama of how the Massachusetts educator Eli Thayer and a group of Eastern Radicals organized the Emigrant Aid Company to assist antislavery settlers with the cost of travel to the Kansas territory and to provide them with supplies—including rifles. Those were certainly needed, since the territory was racked by violence. In 1856 proslavery forces there sacked the antislavery town of Lawrence, whereupon the abolitionist John Brown murdered several proslavery settlers. Two years later, he led a raid into neighboring Missouri that rescued a group of slaves, transporting them to freedom in Canada. Violence in Kansas fed into armed conflict elsewhere. In 1859, Brown and 21 followers temporarily seized the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, hoping to spark a slave revolution.
Keith claims that the Radical Republicans “bore responsibility for Harpers Ferry” because of their “incendiary language” against slavery and the fact that a number of New Englanders—including Emerson, Parker, and Bronson Alcott (the father of Louisa May Alcott, the author of Little Women)—participated in Brown’s planning or funding. “Our best people listen to his words,” Alcott wrote when Brown lectured in Massachusetts. These men, however, were hardly among the leading Radical Republicans, most of whom condemned Brown’s raid. So did Lincoln in his Cooper Union address of early 1860, although Keith unconvincingly suggests that Lincoln considered Brown and the Radicals “brothers under the skin” since they all hated slavery.
Keith’s conclusion that Brown was the “idol of Republican Radicals” also seems untenable, given the widespread Republican condemnation of his private war against the slaveholding South. But she is correct that by 1860, many Republicans, Radical or not, had embraced the legitimacy of violence. In this way, the Civil War “had already begun,” she writes. The experience of the 1850s “quickened” the Radicals’ “sensitivity to mass suffering…and heroic sacrifice,” leading them to conclude that when full-scale war did break out, it must be “a fight unto the death.”
The second half of When It Was Grand deals with Radicalism during the Civil War. As the stakes become higher—the fate of slavery, the rights of emancipated African Americans, the future of the postwar South—the cast of characters expands enormously. Black Americans for the first time become major actors in the narrative. We encounter figures little known even among historians, such as John Jones, a black activist in Chicago who in January 1865 spearheaded the movement that led Illinois to repeal the state’s notoriously discriminatory Black Laws. African American soldiers also become an important part of the story. Their battle for the same pay as whites produced the first national legislation mandating equal treatment regardless of race.
Keith emphasizes how the actions of Radical military officers helped propel the Lincoln administration down the road to Emancipation and at least a partial recognition of black rights. Determined to retain control of the policy regarding slavery, Lincoln overturned John C. Frémont’s 1861 order freeing the slaves in Missouri and a similar one the following year by Gen. David Hunter in Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina. But their actions helped push the fate of slavery to the center of political discussion, and at ground level, these abolitionist generals also forwarded the war’s revolutionary dynamic. “Much of the truly radical policy of the Civil War years,” Keith writes, “took place in military settings.” In Louisiana, Gen. John W. Phelps organized units of black soldiers without authorization from higher-ups and flatly refused to carry out an order to put runaway slaves to work reinforcing levees on the Mississippi River. The “crimes of their masters,” he declared, were responsible for wartime damage to the levee system, and therefore slave owners—not slaves—should take on the burden of repairs.
Encountering female refugees from enslavement in Union-occupied North Carolina, their backs scarred from whippings, Gen. Edward A. Wild invited the women to apply the lash to their former owners. The “ladies” eagerly did so, another officer reported, “not forgetting to remind the gentleman of days gone by.” Wild allowed Abraham Galloway, who escaped from slavery in 1857, to return to North Carolina, where he served as a spy for the Union Army and delivered speeches advocating political equality for former slaves—a demand he took directly to Lincoln when he led a black delegation that visited the White House in 1864.
Although Keith does not mention it, Galloway went on to serve in the North Carolina Senate during Reconstruction. There he demonstrated how the abolition of slavery inspired claims for new rights, introducing bills to protect women against violence by their husbands, to establish 10 hours as a legal day’s work, and to allow black people accused of crimes to be tried before all-black juries. She notes that many of the black leaders of Reconstruction shared the wartime experience of “engagement” with the “Radicalized United States government” via military service, political organizing, and teaching in schools established for freed people. She makes the telling point that demands for black voting rights “tended to trickle up toward the party leadership from activists in the field.”
Keith deserves praise for shifting the center of gravity of wartime Radicalism away from Washington to military encampments and upstart black gatherings in the Union-occupied South. But in so doing, When It Was Grand seriously neglects some of the political dimensions of Radical Republicanism. In a recent article in Catalyst, a new left- oriented scholarly journal, the Princeton historian Matthew Karp convincingly portrays the rise of the Republican Party in the 1850s and the destruction of slavery during the war as revolutionary outcomes achieved on “the field of democratic mass politics.”
The Radicals were central actors on this terrain. Before the war, they played a large role in the creation of an antislavery majority in the North. It was a development that made possible the election of Lincoln, a moderate Republican who worked closely with Radicals because he understood that they formed a crucial element of what would today be called the party’s base. The Radicals also pushed key pieces of wartime legislation through Congress, among them a measure early in the conflict barring the army from returning fugitive slaves, as well as the first and second Confiscation Acts—key steps on the road to Emancipation.
When It Was Grand stops when the war ends, at the very moment the Radicals begin to achieve their greatest influence and farthest-reaching successes. During Reconstruction, they spearheaded the rewriting of the Constitution to abolish slavery, enfranchise black men, and guarantee birthright citizenship and equal protection under the law regardless of race, bringing into being (if only temporarily) genuine interracial democracy in the United States. Despite the book’s many insights into the Radicals’ actions leading up to and during the war, one wishes Keith had followed their story into the Reconstruction years, linking the struggles for freedom on the plains of Kansas and battlefields of the Civil War with the postwar era’s congressional and presidential initiatives and constitutional changes.
While aware of the Radicals’ accomplishments, Keith ends on a less than celebratory note. In an echo of an earlier era of historiography, she writes that, in her view, “their aims were not pure” and they too often succumbed to the “love of power.” Trying to explain how the Republican Party eventually abandoned its commitment to equality, she claims that only abolitionists like John Brown and Gerrit Smith developed truly “collegial relations” with black activists—a judgment quite unfair to the many Radicals who worked closely with black colleagues in the struggle for equality.
These days, the Republican Party is far from grand. And the nation, Keith writes, has yet to “redeem the promise” of Radical Republicanism. For those engaged in that ongoing struggle, the Radicals offer compelling lessons on how to operate simultaneously inside and outside a political system, how to function as a wing of a party without being beholden to it, and how to achieve success as an ideological vanguard, putting forward a coherent plan for radical change and compromising when necessary, though without ever losing sight of one’s principles and long-term goals.


thenation--2020-05-05--The Inner Life of American Communism

The Inner Life of American Communism

The communist stands at the crossroads of two ideas : one ancient , one modern .
The ancient idea is that human beings are political animals .
Our disposition is so public , our orientation so outward , we can not be thought of apart from the polity .
Even when we try to hide our vices , as a character in Plato ’ s Republic notes , we still require the assistance of “ secret societies and political clubs.
” That ’ s how present we are to other people and they to us .
The modern idea—that of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ may be a better guide than Marx .
For the communist , work means fidelity to a task , a stick-to-itiveness that requires clarity of purpose , persistence in the face of opposition or challenge , and a refusal of all distraction .
It is more than an instrumental application of bodily power upon the material world or the rational alignment of means and ends ( activities so ignoble , Aristotle thought , as to nearly disqualify the laborer from politics ) .
It is a vocation , a revelation of self .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the ancients the methodism of modern work .
In all things be political , says the communist , and in all political things be productive .
Anything less is vanity .
Like the ancients , the communist looks outward , but her insistence on doing only those actions that yield results is an emanation from within .
Effectiveness is a statement of her integrity .
The great sin of intellectuals , Lenin observed , is that they “ undertake everything under the sun without finishing anything.
” That failing is symptomatic of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ carelessness , ” their inability to remain true to whatever cause or concern they have professed .
The communist does better .
She gets the job done .
In their heyday , the communists were the most political and most intentional of people .
That made them often the most terrifying of people , capable of violence on an unimaginable scale .
Yet despite—and perhaps also because of—their ruthless sense of purpose , communism contains many lessons for us today .
As a new generation of socialists , most born after the Cold @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and movements and the implications of involvement , the archive of communism , particularly American communism , has become newly relevant .
So have two commentaries on that archive : Vivian Gornick ’ s The Romance of American Communism , originally published in 1977 and reissued this year , and Jodi Dean ’ s Comrade : An Essay on Political Belonging .
I first read The Romance of American Communism in the summer of 1993 .
Gornick had already written her well-regarded memoir Fierce Attachments , as well as several other works of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ she was largely a writer ’ s writer , known mostly to a smallish circle of dedicated readers .
I was one of them .
A graduate student in political science , I was living with my girlfriend , also a graduate student , in Tennessee .
She was working on a dissertation on communities in Appalachia organizing—often unsuccessfully—against plant closings , which soon turned into a meditation on political failure .
I was working on a dissertation on the political theory and practice of fear from Hobbes to McCarthyism and the Cold @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it was a bad time for the left and not just in Tennessee .
Bill Clinton and the Democrats were pivoting from deficit reduction to NAFTA .
Marxism , one of my advisers told me on the first day of graduate school , was for antiquarians .
Nobody was interested in an out-of-print oral history of American communism .
I found Gornick ’ s book entirely by accident , in a used bookstore on a highway outside Knoxville , Tennessee , and in the course of trying to figure out who the communists @ @ @ @ @ @ @ establishment so , I discovered how little they conformed to Cold War stereotypes , which , as it turns out , were also my own .
According to midcentury writers like Lionel Trilling and Arthur Koestler , communists were dead souls who had handed themselves over to an alien force , not out of any desire to see justice done or a world transformed but to escape the burdens of individuality and responsibility .
Communism was an evacuation of self , an escape from freedom .
Though many of these writers had once @ @ @ @ @ @ @ been communists—they could not , looking back , reconstruct the felt experience of living people .
Instead they pioneered a form , the autobiography of an ex-zombie , in which a desolation described from without reveals a desolation within , as if to say to the reader , as Gornick writes in the book ’ s opening chapter , “ I can taste the ashes but I can not recall the flame.
” Gornick ’ s task in Romance was clear .
She wanted to rekindle that flame not for warmth but for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the communist experience , as it was lived from the inside , from the highbrow obscurantism of Cold War liberalism .
Instead of othering and dehumanization , there would be humanism and recognition ; instead of zombies , there would be a self , a person “ who , in contact with a political vision , was made more human than he ever dreamed he could be.
” The literary mode Gornick settled on—writerly profiles of more than 40 communists , in which a diversity of men and women ( “ They Came @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an early chapter ) speak in their own words ( or Gornick ’ s version of their words ) for pages at a time—also seemed drawn from the Cold War .
With its confessional voice and authorial presence , the book could be read either as New Journalism from the 1960s and the 1970s ( Hilton Kramer called it a “ particularly odious ” instance of the form ) or as a forerunner of the social histories of the Communist Party that came out in the 1980s and sought to rescue the communist @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The only way out of the Cold War , Romance seemed to suggest , was to work through it .
That ’ s what Gornick offered : a passage through and exit from a long and lonely corridor of mind .
Today , Gornick ’ s book reads differently , less bound by the genres and concerns of the Cold War .
Her effort to reconstruct the communist experience seems less a rescue operation of the self than a reconfiguration of the self in classical terms .
One former communist , for example @ @ @ @ @ @ @ there was little discussion of personal life ; there was only politics .
But despite knowing almost nothing of his comrades ’ lives , he “ felt an intimacy ” with them that he will “ never feel again.
” His point is obvious : Members of the Communist Party may not have issued reports from the interior , but they did disclose themselves , through action , through the dailiness of their lived commitments .
Though mindful of the psyche and the originality of its demands—one communist tells Gornick , “ The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the Bronx we said , ‘ Yeah , yeah , but your mother ’ s important anyway ’ ” —communists found their confessional in public life .
People became “ real to me only in political engagement , ” says another communist .
Such testimony recalls the literature of ancient Greece , in which character is revealed , not destroyed , through political action .
And if character is destroyed through politics , it is not because the actor has recklessly sought wholeness in a place where wholeness is not to be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have claimed .
It is because politics is a compression chamber of the self .
There we grapple with our conflicting duties to one another , cope with failure and loss , imagine and honor the presence of others , and struggle to distinguish what is from what must be , with no sheltering warmth of privacy , no safe rooms for experiment or error .
Our everyday fumblings are enacted in the brightest , most unforgiving light .
The pressure is enormous ; the insight , nearly blinding .
“ The Communist @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to pity and terror , ” Gornick writes .
“ It is a metaphor for fear and desire on the grand scale , always telling us more—never less—of what it is to be human.
” Her title invokes romance , but her content is also tragedy .
Even her use of pseudonyms takes on an archaic cast : What seemed during the Cold War an effort to protect the anonymity of individuals ruined or threatened by the blacklist now appears as a gallery of archetypes , with resonant names like Blossom Sheed and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ singular and whose knowledge ( or failed attempt at knowledge ) is less personal .
The Greeks believed that the political self is a philosophical self , someone who turns the world into a question in the hope of identifying what is amenable to political art and what lies beyond it , what is transitory and what is permanent .
While the Greeks were assured of an ongoing , often aristocratic physical space for that reflection , the modern world finds that space in the serendipity of subaltern struggle .
In the newly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ people once again could , as Fanon put it , ask a set of “ theoretical questions.
” Schooled in a power they never thought they possessed , they could now begin to wonder , “ Why did certain regions never see an orange before the war of liberation , whereas thousands of tons were shipped annually ; why had so many Algerians never seen grapes , whereas millions of grapes were dispatched for the enjoyment of Europeans ?
” So it goes with Gornick ’ s communists .
One woman was obsessed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ poor .
Initially , she was alone with her thoughts ; her husband refused to speculate about it with her , so she walked out on him and her child .
But then she discovered that she could ask such questions in the party , and not only that : She could ask such questions in concert , sometimes with the immediacy of the Greeks but more often in the mediated spaces of modern politics .
“ There I was in West Virginia , for Chrissake , ” one communist tells Gornick , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ attending party meetings , “ I knew what was going on in New York , Moscow , Hungary.
” Communism created a different agora on a different scale .
It traversed the world , and it made work and the workplace—topics so charged for the Greeks that they approached them only with the greatest trepidation and confusion—the centerpieces of reflection and action .
But communism also offered the closest approximation to the ancient intimacy between philosophy and politics the modern world has seen .
“ Marx was their Socrates , ” writes Gornick @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , world socialism their Athens.
” Toward the end of Republic , the perfect city deteriorates into a variety of lesser regimes .
People begin to care more for their own wealth and power than the well-being of the whole .
The rot sets in with the family , where an alliance of ambition between sons and mothers conspires against the father who struggles , virtuously if haplessly , to hold on to civic values .
If Platonic politics elicits an ever-wider consciousness of worlds beyond one ’ s own , the family @ @ @ @ @ @ @ public of its civic energy .
This was not the cause of communism ’ s undoing .
But Gornick still locates a troubled family romance at the center of her book , one that focuses on the dyad between fathers and daughters .
Romance begins with a memory of Gornick ’ s father working hard all day and the sacred place of that work in the family lore .
When she was 13 , her father died .
In 1956 , Khrushchev revealed Stalin ’ s crimes , and a twentysomething Gornick finds @ @ @ @ @ @ @ still-committed communist aunt ; neither is willing to denounce Stalin or the Soviet Union .
Her aunt responds with the most desperate curse she can imagine : “ Louie Gornick must be turning over in his grave , that his daughter has become a Red-baiter.
” Fathers figure in many of the stories Gornick hears from the women she interviews .
Some are remembered as inspirations , loving examples of proletarian virtue that the daughters try to honor in their party work .
Others are remembered as tyrants whom these women have to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ selves .
But whether the fathers ’ contributions are negative or positive—and most of the stories here are positive—they are a critical element in the political formation of their daughters .
“ Oh , these Communist women and their fathers !
” Gornick writes .
She dedicates the book “ to the memory of Louis Gornick.
” That , it turns out , may be the real romance of American communism .
But if the bond between fathers and daughters is a romance , it is also a threat .
The promise of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the offer of a new identity that would unfasten ties of kinship and family .
Not only would the party become the “ overriding element of identity , the one which subsumed all others , ” but it would also be an identity that men and women could partake in equally .
All that mattered was doing the work .
It didn ’ t matter if the work was high or low , intellectual or manual ; all work had “ the same value , ” as long as it contributed to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fathers and daughters reveal , then , is not just the differential impact of gender on self—Gornick shows that the inspiration of the father in the family does not always mitigate the subordination of the daughter in the party—but the persistence of competing forms of identity as well , including , as Benjamin Nathans wrote in The New York Review of Books several years ago , the most ancient one of all : the family .
In Ernst Lubitsch ’ s 1939 film Ninotchka , three Soviet officials are sent to Paris on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the work , they ’ re bewitched and bourgeoised by the City of Lights .
They drink , they dance , they stay out late .
Moscow dispatches an envoy to set the rogues straight .
They anxiously await the envoy ’ s arrival at the train station .
When they discover the envoy is a striking woman nicknamed Ninotchka ( played by Greta Garbo ) , they ’ re enchanted .
A “ lady comrade !
” one exclaims .
But Ninotchka is not amused .
“ Don ’ t make an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tells them .
“ We ’ re here for work , all of us.
” That struggle—between an identity based on gender ( or nation , race , or class ) and the solidarity of doing the work—is at the heart of Jodi Dean ’ s Comrade .
One of the most innovative and imaginative political theorists on the contemporary scene , Dean uses this scene in Ninotchka and a thoughtfully curated library of other texts , from the writings of the Soviet avant-garde to oral histories of the Black Belt , to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ yet pleasurable , joyous yet disciplined .
Like Ninotchka , Dean ’ s here for the work .
Like Lubitsch , she makes it fun .
Comrade is part of a trilogy of texts Dean has written over the past decade on the political theory of communism .
In The Communist Horizon , she identified the transcendence of capitalism as the ambit of the left ’ s actions .
In Crowds and Party , she located those actions in the party form .
In Comrade , she examines the relation between members of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ force fields .
The first lies between members of the party , where a regulative ideal of being a “ good comrade ” not only governs the actions of each but also binds the actions of all .
That binding creates a massive amount of power , which then projects a second force field—against the agents and institutions of capitalism that comrades seek to overthrow .
The attraction of the first force field is necessary for the repulsion of the second .
Seasoned union organizers know the truth of these force fields all @ @ @ @ @ @ @ so did anti-communists like George Orwell .
Yet it is a truth many on the left ignore or evade .
“ If the left is as committed to radical change as we claim , ” Dean insists , “ we have to be comrades.
” All politics require a space—a place where people can assemble , deliberate , and if necessary , move—and domains of action , which may include the economy , religion , sexuality , health , and more .
What makes comrades unique is that it is the relationship among @ @ @ @ @ @ @ : where they assemble and what they assemble for .
The word “ comrade , ” Dean explains , “ derives from camera , the Latin word for room , chamber , and vault.
” ( Much like “ cadre , ” from the Latin quadrum , or square . )
Rooms and vaults can be identical and easily reproducible .
They provide cover or shelter .
They differentiate those within from those without .
Comrades create all of these effects by their affect , “ a closeness , an intensity of feeling @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by their activity .
Whereas work in a capitalist society is sustained by the coercion of the market , the work of comrades is powered by their commitment to one another , which derives from their close quarters ( psychically speaking ) and their commitment to the task at hand .
The two commitments are mutually reinforcing .
“ One wants to do political work , ” Dean writes , because of one ’ s attachment to one ’ s comrades , and one is attached to one ’ s comrades because one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ comradeship exceeds those affects and attachments .
It must , for our sympathies are momentary , our purposes inchoate .
Sometimes we fly to the assemblies , ready to do the work of the collective ; other times , we laze about at home , succumbing to other desires or hesitation about our aims .
Comradeship turns longing into intention and sustains that intention after the originating rush has dissipated .
Comradeship extends the life of the crowd .
It fulfills the function that labor historians have ascribed to the best union bureaucracies @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and that Arendt ascribed to constitutions , which institutionalize the aims and ambitions of the revolutionary moment after that moment has ceased .
Comradeship does that work without the law or the state .
It is instead an “ ego ideal , ” to use Dean ’ s Freudian language , maintained by the comrades themselves .
That attempt to create a political space without relying on the law or the state is where we find the most intense unity of the ancients in all their outwardness and the moderns in all @ @ @ @ @ @ @ communism—and left politics in general—is most vulnerable to criticism and complaint .
The effort of comrades to create and sustain a public space entirely through the psychic mechanisms of the ego ideal puts tremendous , almost inhuman pressure on them and their work .
Without the customary supports of public life—whether the institutions of the state ( after communism comes into power is a different story ) or familiar sources of identity and attachment—comrades must ensure that each and every waking hour of their lives is dedicated to the common work of comrades @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ideal , for much is at stake in any one person ’ s withdrawal from it .
Yes , the work is performed in common with comrades , and the force field between them is mighty in its effects .
Yet the force field is vulnerable to the competing energy of other forms of identification and attachment .
Our other identities and attachments don ’ t simply disappear because the comrade declares them gone .
They constantly clamor for our attention .
Conversely , if those identities and attachments don ’ t sap @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , they may become all too tempting substitutes for the true work of comradeship .
How many communists and leftists have taken this shortcut , forsaking political argument for simpleminded appeals to a worker ’ s identity or to national citizenship or gender or ethnic affiliation as the basis for action ?
How many activists have spoken those words of promise and threat— “ You ’ re one of us ” —that are so resonant in families yet so dangerous to politics ?
Tribalism comes in many varieties , and it would be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ immune to its calls .
That moment of Ninotchka ’ s arrival in the Paris train station offers Dean another instructive mise-en-scène .
As the three Soviets scan the platform , wondering who the comrade from Moscow might be , they spy a passenger who fits their expectations .
They ’ re just about to extend a welcome when the passenger greets someone else , with a salute of “ Heil Hitler.
” The Soviets freeze .
“ That ’ s not him , ” one of them says .
Their mistake is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ assuming the comrade is a specifiable type—a gender , a face , a look—but comrades are “ generic ” ; they don ’ t look like anyone or anything .
They don ’ t have a specific identity .
Comrades can be anybody , though not , Dean adds wryly , with a nod to that fascist , everybody .
Anybody can do the work , and anyone who does the work will enjoy the solidarity of comrades .
“ We don ’ t even need to know each other ’ s names @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ We ’ re comrades.
” The solidarity of political work is not a subject well examined in the canonical literature of politics—Weber , one of the few theorists to think about politics as work , focused almost exclusively on charismatic leaders , not collectives—but it is a concern of vital interest to the left .
Socialists of varying stripes have often looked to the workplace ( or warfare ) as laboratories of solidarity .
So taken by the coordinated nature of modern work were the Saint-Simonians , for example , that they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ so that no one could dress without the cooperation of others .
In the physicality of concerted labor , many a socialist has caught a glimpse of a more solidaristic future .
Dean ’ s model derives from neither the workplace nor warfare but from the political work and testimony of communists themselves , which yields an eclectic blend of voices—part republican , part romantic .
On the basis of that testimony , she concludes that comradeship enables us to take on the perspective of others , to see our actions “ through @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the place from which one sees.
” That enlarged perspective has been the calling card of thinkers ranging from Rousseau and Kant to Arendt and Habermas .
Whereas these thinkers often find that perspective in the legislative institutions of the state or the organs of public opinion or the heroic moments of civic action , Dean locates it , as does Gornick , in the slow boring of hard boards , in the work of politics that escapes the limelight but where comrades dedicate themselves to a task and hold themselves accountable to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ comrades can come to experience the joy of collective action and the enjoyment of one another .
The joy is so intense that it spills onto other entities .
Drawing on the work of artists and writers from the early Soviet avant-garde , which she compares to the poetry of Whitman , Dean describes an extension of ecstasy to “ comrade objects ” and “ comrade things.
” When the “ love and respect ” among comrades is “ so great that it can ’ t be contained in human relations , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ galaxies ( bees and stars ) .
” Up to the 1990s , Dean ’ s commitment to the generic nature of the comrade would have raised the hackles of those in the liberal center and on the right , who would have seen it as a threat to the individual .
Today , it will press buttons for some on the left , who will see it as a challenge to the claims of certain forms of identity .
The comrade , Dean insists , seeks to equalize relationships across race , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and gender .
It creates a sameness , the sameness of those who are doing the work .
The only difference that remains salient is between those who are on one side of the struggle and those who are on the opposite side .
The mobility of that metaphor—of being on one side or the other—allows Dean to insist on forms of affiliation and attachment that are neither identitarian nor exclusive .
Anyone can be a comrade ; all one has to do is move to the other side .
Though this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Bernie Sanders campaign arrived too late for Dean to use , it offers a helpful instantiation of her claim : “ Sanders is a candidate who presents himself less as a personality than a conduit for a movement .
And in the Bernie bubble , [ Alexandria ] Ocasio-Cortez is seen as the future of the movement embodied .
What makes her so effective as a surrogate , beyond her star power , is that if you campaign on electing a movement rather [ than ] a person , there ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the 78-year-old white male candidate or his 30-year-old Latina supporter.
” The comrade , Dean makes clear , is not a description but an ideal .
Comrades do not eliminate gender or race or conflicts .
But what they can do is name a common horizon ; they can state a destination to which they are collectively heading , an aim toward which they are working .
Comradeship is the announcement of another way of being : not one in which difference is eliminated but in which it becomes the stuff of political @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to do the work for which all have come .
Though it is anarchists who are best known for emphasizing the prefigurative elements of radical politics—arguing that how we do the work now will shape the society to come—Dean ’ s analysis also has a prefigurative element , with Lenin as its seer .
The discipline of comrades , he said , “ is a victory over our own conservatism , indiscipline , petty-bourgeois egoism , a victory over the habits left as a heritage to the worker and peasant by accursed capitalism.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ defeat of the old regime .
The left has good reason to be wary of the stern antinomies of the comrade .
The freedom that goes by the name of discipline , the suppression of difference in the name of solidarity , the words of emancipation as window dressing for authoritarian constraint—we ’ ve been down this road before .
We know where it ends , and neither Gornick nor Dean denies that ending .
Nor do they provide an easy way around or out of it .
Gornick interprets the tragedy of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in Paris an intense love , one he never knew before .
He is turned outward , directed to another soul in a way he is not accustomed to .
He becomes larger than himself .
Then the love takes on a life of its own , eclipsing its object .
Love becomes the object , the feeling and need ; Helen disappears from view .
All manner of mayhem and destruction follow .
Dean interprets the tragedy through psychoanalysis : The healthy ego ideal of the comrade becomes the ravenous superego .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ feeds off the transgressions of the id , growing ever more powerful from the punishment of impurity , so do comrades turn inward , generating a feeding frenzy of their own .
Collective power , once a source of freedom , becomes a prison .
There ’ s a reason Gornick and Dean turn to myth and psychoanalysis , respectively .
Each , in its way , is a story of unhappy endings , in which the conclusion is written from the start .
Yet even if we don ’ t head down @ @ @ @ @ @ @ if we avoid that unhappy ending , we ’ re still left with other bad endings that neither psychoanalysis nor myth can account for .
Not only has capitalism run rampant since the fall of communism , and not only has the left yet to find a replacement for the parties and movements that once created socialism in all its varieties , but even the contemporary left has not left behind the challenge of reconciling freedom and constraint .
Today , many on the left deploy a robust vocabulary of personal liberty—of expression @ @ @ @ @ @ @ simply unthinkable to cadres past , whether in communist Eastern Europe or working-class Detroit .
At the same time , some on the left are ready , at least online , to enforce norms of mutual respect and personal dignity through practices of ostracism and collective shaming .
This is hardly a criticism of the left , and nowhere do these sanctions rise to the level of repression claimed by the liberal center and the right .
It is simply a recognition of the challenge the left faces : how to steer toward @ @ @ @ @ @ @ element of discipline and constraint .
In the past , the left brought together these elements of freedom and constraint .
It had no choice .
Whether it was contesting for state power or wielding that power , the left was serious about its purposes .
It intended to do the work .
It sought to generate those force fields .
It imposed discipline , and by doing so , it created power .
Today ’ s left is more hesitant , for reasons good and bad , about state power .
It @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the past ; it is understandably , if less legitimately , fearful of taking on the responsibility—and judgment of history—that power entails .
As a result , the left struggles to generate those force fields , seeking the warmth of solidarity without the cold and sometimes cruel poles of attraction and repulsion that sustain it .
This hesitation has liberated the left from the need to reconcile freedom and constraint .
But it has also left it without power .
At some point , that may change .
The left may become @ @ @ @ @ @ @ If it does , these questions of freedom and discipline will once again become salient .
For better and for worse .

This article appears in the May 18/25, 2020 issue.
The communist stands at the crossroads of two ideas: one ancient, one modern. The ancient idea is that human beings are political animals. Our disposition is so public, our orientation so outward, we cannot be thought of apart from the polity. Even when we try to hide our vices, as a character in Plato’s Republic notes, we still require the assistance of “secret societies and political clubs.” That’s how present we are to other people and they to us. Books in Review The Romance of American Communism By Vivian Gornick Buy this book Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging By Jodi Dean Buy this book
The modern idea—that of work—posits a different value. Here Weber may be a better guide than Marx. For the communist, work means fidelity to a task, a stick-to-itiveness that requires clarity of purpose, persistence in the face of opposition or challenge, and a refusal of all distraction. It is more than an instrumental application of bodily power upon the material world or the rational alignment of means and ends (activities so ignoble, Aristotle thought, as to nearly disqualify the laborer from politics). It is a vocation, a revelation of self.
The communist brings to the public life of the ancients the methodism of modern work. In all things be political, says the communist, and in all political things be productive. Anything less is vanity. Like the ancients, the communist looks outward, but her insistence on doing only those actions that yield results is an emanation from within. Effectiveness is a statement of her integrity. The great sin of intellectuals, Lenin observed, is that they “undertake everything under the sun without finishing anything.” That failing is symptomatic of their character—their “slovenliness” and “carelessness,” their inability to remain true to whatever cause or concern they have professed. The communist does better. She gets the job done.
In their heyday, the communists were the most political and most intentional of people. That made them often the most terrifying of people, capable of violence on an unimaginable scale. Yet despite—and perhaps also because of—their ruthless sense of purpose, communism contains many lessons for us today. As a new generation of socialists, most born after the Cold War, discovers the challenges of parties and movements and the implications of involvement, the archive of communism, particularly American communism, has become newly relevant. So have two commentaries on that archive: Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism, originally published in 1977 and reissued this year, and Jodi Dean’s Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging.
I first read The Romance of American Communism in the summer of 1993. Gornick had already written her well-regarded memoir Fierce Attachments, as well as several other works of criticism. But at the time, she was largely a writer’s writer, known mostly to a smallish circle of dedicated readers. I was one of them. A graduate student in political science, I was living with my girlfriend, also a graduate student, in Tennessee. She was working on a dissertation on communities in Appalachia organizing—often unsuccessfully—against plant closings, which soon turned into a meditation on political failure. I was working on a dissertation on the political theory and practice of fear from Hobbes to McCarthyism and the Cold War. Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann Popular "swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe → The Evisceration of a Public University The Evisceration of a Public University Lisa M. Corrigan The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks The Patronizing Moralism of David Brooks Chris Lehmann “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash “The Blind Side” Was Always Trash Dave Zirin How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection How the “Brooks Brothers Riot” Set the Stage for Insurrection Chris Lehmann
As these topics suggest, it was a bad time for the left and not just in Tennessee. Bill Clinton and the Democrats were pivoting from deficit reduction to NAFTA. Marxism, one of my advisers told me on the first day of graduate school, was for antiquarians. Nobody was interested in an out-of-print oral history of American communism. I found Gornick’s book entirely by accident, in a used bookstore on a highway outside Knoxville, Tennessee, and in the course of trying to figure out who the communists were and why they frightened the American establishment so, I discovered how little they conformed to Cold War stereotypes, which, as it turns out, were also my own.
According to midcentury writers like Lionel Trilling and Arthur Koestler, communists were dead souls who had handed themselves over to an alien force, not out of any desire to see justice done or a world transformed but to escape the burdens of individuality and responsibility. Communism was an evacuation of self, an escape from freedom. Though many of these writers had once been communists—or probably because they had once been communists—they could not, looking back, reconstruct the felt experience of living people. Instead they pioneered a form, the autobiography of an ex-zombie, in which a desolation described from without reveals a desolation within, as if to say to the reader, as Gornick writes in the book’s opening chapter, “I can taste the ashes but I cannot recall the flame.” Current Issue View our current issue
Gornick’s task in Romance was clear. She wanted to rekindle that flame not for warmth but for illumination, to retrieve the truth of the communist experience, as it was lived from the inside, from the highbrow obscurantism of Cold War liberalism. Instead of othering and dehumanization, there would be humanism and recognition; instead of zombies, there would be a self, a person “who, in contact with a political vision, was made more human than he ever dreamed he could be.” The literary mode Gornick settled on—writerly profiles of more than 40 communists, in which a diversity of men and women (“They Came From Everywhere” is the title of an early chapter) speak in their own words (or Gornick’s version of their words) for pages at a time—also seemed drawn from the Cold War. With its confessional voice and authorial presence, the book could be read either as New Journalism from the 1960s and the 1970s (Hilton Kramer called it a “particularly odious” instance of the form) or as a forerunner of the social histories of the Communist Party that came out in the 1980s and sought to rescue the communist from the enormous incomprehension of posterity. The only way out of the Cold War, Romance seemed to suggest, was to work through it. That’s what Gornick offered: a passage through and exit from a long and lonely corridor of mind.
Today, Gornick’s book reads differently, less bound by the genres and concerns of the Cold War. Her effort to reconstruct the communist experience seems less a rescue operation of the self than a reconfiguration of the self in classical terms. One former communist, for example, tells her that in the party there was little discussion of personal life; there was only politics. But despite knowing almost nothing of his comrades’ lives, he “felt an intimacy” with them that he will “never feel again.” His point is obvious: Members of the Communist Party may not have issued reports from the interior, but they did disclose themselves, through action, through the dailiness of their lived commitments. Though mindful of the psyche and the originality of its demands—one communist tells Gornick, “The party was down on Freud, but in the Bronx we said, ‘Yeah, yeah, but your mother’s important anyway’”—communists found their confessional in public life. People became “real to me only in political engagement,” says another communist.
Such testimony recalls the literature of ancient Greece, in which character is revealed, not destroyed, through political action. And if character is destroyed through politics, it is not because the actor has recklessly sought wholeness in a place where wholeness is not to be had, as liberal anti-communists so often have claimed. It is because politics is a compression chamber of the self. There we grapple with our conflicting duties to one another, cope with failure and loss, imagine and honor the presence of others, and struggle to distinguish what is from what must be, with no sheltering warmth of privacy, no safe rooms for experiment or error. Our everyday fumblings are enacted in the brightest, most unforgiving light. The pressure is enormous; the insight, nearly blinding. “The Communist experience is of epic proportions, arousing to pity and terror,” Gornick writes. “It is a metaphor for fear and desire on the grand scale, always telling us more—never less—of what it is to be human.” Her title invokes romance, but her content is also tragedy. Even her use of pseudonyms takes on an archaic cast: What seemed during the Cold War an effort to protect the anonymity of individuals ruined or threatened by the blacklist now appears as a gallery of archetypes, with resonant names like Blossom Sheed and Belle Rothman, whose suffering is less singular and whose knowledge (or failed attempt at knowledge) is less personal.
The Greeks believed that the political self is a philosophical self, someone who turns the world into a question in the hope of identifying what is amenable to political art and what lies beyond it, what is transitory and what is permanent. While the Greeks were assured of an ongoing, often aristocratic physical space for that reflection, the modern world finds that space in the serendipity of subaltern struggle. In the newly liberated zones of the decolonized world, people once again could, as Fanon put it, ask a set of “theoretical questions.” Schooled in a power they never thought they possessed, they could now begin to wonder, “Why did certain regions never see an orange before the war of liberation, whereas thousands of tons were shipped annually; why had so many Algerians never seen grapes, whereas millions of grapes were dispatched for the enjoyment of Europeans?” Related Article Can Humanitarianism Address Inequality? Bruce Robbins
So it goes with Gornick’s communists. One woman was obsessed with the question of why people are poor. Initially, she was alone with her thoughts; her husband refused to speculate about it with her, so she walked out on him and her child. But then she discovered that she could ask such questions in the party, and not only that: She could ask such questions in concert, sometimes with the immediacy of the Greeks but more often in the mediated spaces of modern politics. “There I was in West Virginia, for Chrissake,” one communist tells Gornick, but by reading the Daily Worker and attending party meetings, “I knew what was going on in New York, Moscow, Hungary.” Communism created a different agora on a different scale. It traversed the world, and it made work and the workplace—topics so charged for the Greeks that they approached them only with the greatest trepidation and confusion—the centerpieces of reflection and action. But communism also offered the closest approximation to the ancient intimacy between philosophy and politics the modern world has seen. “Marx was their Socrates,” writes Gornick, “the Party was their Plato, world socialism their Athens.”
Toward the end of Republic, the perfect city deteriorates into a variety of lesser regimes. People begin to care more for their own wealth and power than the well-being of the whole. The rot sets in with the family, where an alliance of ambition between sons and mothers conspires against the father who struggles, virtuously if haplessly, to hold on to civic values. If Platonic politics elicits an ever-wider consciousness of worlds beyond one’s own, the family sustains a competing enterprise, sapping the public of its civic energy. This was not the cause of communism’s undoing. But Gornick still locates a troubled family romance at the center of her book, one that focuses on the dyad between fathers and daughters.
Romance begins with a memory of Gornick’s father working hard all day and the sacred place of that work in the family lore. When she was 13, her father died. In 1956, Khrushchev revealed Stalin’s crimes, and a twentysomething Gornick finds herself confronting her ambivalently left-wing mother and still-committed communist aunt; neither is willing to denounce Stalin or the Soviet Union. Her aunt responds with the most desperate curse she can imagine: “Louie Gornick must be turning over in his grave, that his daughter has become a Red-baiter.”
Fathers figure in many of the stories Gornick hears from the women she interviews. Some are remembered as inspirations, loving examples of proletarian virtue that the daughters try to honor in their party work. Others are remembered as tyrants whom these women have to overthrow in order to become their communist selves. But whether the fathers’ contributions are negative or positive—and most of the stories here are positive—they are a critical element in the political formation of their daughters. “Oh, these Communist women and their fathers!” Gornick writes. She dedicates the book “to the memory of Louis Gornick.” That, it turns out, may be the real romance of American communism.
But if the bond between fathers and daughters is a romance, it is also a threat. The promise of the communist experience was, in part, the offer of a new identity that would unfasten ties of kinship and family. Not only would the party become the “overriding element of identity, the one which subsumed all others,” but it would also be an identity that men and women could partake in equally. All that mattered was doing the work. It didn’t matter if the work was high or low, intellectual or manual; all work had “the same value,” as long as it contributed to the cause. What these stories of fathers and daughters reveal, then, is not just the differential impact of gender on self—Gornick shows that the inspiration of the father in the family does not always mitigate the subordination of the daughter in the party—but the persistence of competing forms of identity as well, including, as Benjamin Nathans wrote in The New York Review of Books several years ago, the most ancient one of all: the family.
In Ernst Lubitsch’s 1939 film Ninotchka, three Soviet officials are sent to Paris on a mission. But instead of doing the work, they’re bewitched and bourgeoised by the City of Lights. They drink, they dance, they stay out late. Moscow dispatches an envoy to set the rogues straight. They anxiously await the envoy’s arrival at the train station. When they discover the envoy is a striking woman nicknamed Ninotchka (played by Greta Garbo), they’re enchanted. A “lady comrade!” one exclaims. But Ninotchka is not amused. “Don’t make an issue of my womanhood,” she tells them. “We’re here for work, all of us.”
That struggle—between an identity based on gender (or nation, race, or class) and the solidarity of doing the work—is at the heart of Jodi Dean’s Comrade. One of the most innovative and imaginative political theorists on the contemporary scene, Dean uses this scene in Ninotchka and a thoughtfully curated library of other texts, from the writings of the Soviet avant-garde to oral histories of the Black Belt, to argue for a communism that is stringent yet pleasurable, joyous yet disciplined. Like Ninotchka, Dean’s here for the work. Like Lubitsch, she makes it fun.
Comrade is part of a trilogy of texts Dean has written over the past decade on the political theory of communism. In The Communist Horizon, she identified the transcendence of capitalism as the ambit of the left’s actions. In Crowds and Party, she located those actions in the party form. In Comrade, she examines the relation between members of the party. That relation creates two force fields. The first lies between members of the party, where a regulative ideal of being a “good comrade” not only governs the actions of each but also binds the actions of all. That binding creates a massive amount of power, which then projects a second force field—against the agents and institutions of capitalism that comrades seek to overthrow. The attraction of the first force field is necessary for the repulsion of the second. Seasoned union organizers know the truth of these force fields all too well; as Dean shows, so did anti-communists like George Orwell. Yet it is a truth many on the left ignore or evade. “If the left is as committed to radical change as we claim,” Dean insists, “we have to be comrades.”
All politics require a space—a place where people can assemble, deliberate, and if necessary, move—and domains of action, which may include the economy, religion, sexuality, health, and more. What makes comrades unique is that it is the relationship among them that creates both types of space: where they assemble and what they assemble for. The word “comrade,” Dean explains, “derives from camera, the Latin word for room, chamber, and vault.” (Much like “cadre,” from the Latin quadrum, or square.) Rooms and vaults can be identical and easily reproducible. They provide cover or shelter. They differentiate those within from those without. Comrades create all of these effects by their affect, “a closeness, an intensity of feeling and expectation of solidarity,” and by their activity. Whereas work in a capitalist society is sustained by the coercion of the market, the work of comrades is powered by their commitment to one another, which derives from their close quarters (psychically speaking) and their commitment to the task at hand. The two commitments are mutually reinforcing. “One wants to do political work,” Dean writes, because of one’s attachment to one’s comrades, and one is attached to one’s comrades because one wants to do the work. Related Article A Starting Point for Politics Bruce Robbins
Yet comradeship exceeds those affects and attachments. It must, for our sympathies are momentary, our purposes inchoate. Sometimes we fly to the assemblies, ready to do the work of the collective; other times, we laze about at home, succumbing to other desires or hesitation about our aims. Comradeship turns longing into intention and sustains that intention after the originating rush has dissipated. Comradeship extends the life of the crowd. It fulfills the function that labor historians have ascribed to the best union bureaucracies, which prolong solidarity after the strike, and that Arendt ascribed to constitutions, which institutionalize the aims and ambitions of the revolutionary moment after that moment has ceased. Comradeship does that work without the law or the state. It is instead an “ego ideal,” to use Dean’s Freudian language, maintained by the comrades themselves.
That attempt to create a political space without relying on the law or the state is where we find the most intense unity of the ancients in all their outwardness and the moderns in all their inwardness. It is also where communism—and left politics in general—is most vulnerable to criticism and complaint.
The effort of comrades to create and sustain a public space entirely through the psychic mechanisms of the ego ideal puts tremendous, almost inhuman pressure on them and their work. Without the customary supports of public life—whether the institutions of the state (after communism comes into power is a different story) or familiar sources of identity and attachment—comrades must ensure that each and every waking hour of their lives is dedicated to the common work of comrades. It is a demanding and unforgiving ideal, for much is at stake in any one person’s withdrawal from it. Yes, the work is performed in common with comrades, and the force field between them is mighty in its effects. Yet the force field is vulnerable to the competing energy of other forms of identification and attachment.
Our other identities and attachments don’t simply disappear because the comrade declares them gone. They constantly clamor for our attention. Conversely, if those identities and attachments don’t sap the comrade of her energy and commitment, they may become all too tempting substitutes for the true work of comradeship. How many communists and leftists have taken this shortcut, forsaking political argument for simpleminded appeals to a worker’s identity or to national citizenship or gender or ethnic affiliation as the basis for action? How many activists have spoken those words of promise and threat—“You’re one of us”—that are so resonant in families yet so dangerous to politics? Tribalism comes in many varieties, and it would be foolish to think the comrade is not immune to its calls.
That moment of Ninotchka’s arrival in the Paris train station offers Dean another instructive mise-en-scène. As the three Soviets scan the platform, wondering who the comrade from Moscow might be, they spy a passenger who fits their expectations. They’re just about to extend a welcome when the passenger greets someone else, with a salute of “Heil Hitler.” The Soviets freeze. “That’s not him,” one of them says. Their mistake is productive for Dean. They’re assuming the comrade is a specifiable type—a gender, a face, a look—but comrades are “generic”; they don’t look like anyone or anything. They don’t have a specific identity. Comrades can be anybody, though not, Dean adds wryly, with a nod to that fascist, everybody. Anybody can do the work, and anyone who does the work will enjoy the solidarity of comrades. “We don’t even need to know each other’s names,” an activist tells her. “We’re comrades.”
The solidarity of political work is not a subject well examined in the canonical literature of politics—Weber, one of the few theorists to think about politics as work, focused almost exclusively on charismatic leaders, not collectives—but it is a concern of vital interest to the left. Socialists of varying stripes have often looked to the workplace (or warfare) as laboratories of solidarity. So taken by the coordinated nature of modern work were the Saint-Simonians, for example, that they designed vests with buttons in the back so that no one could dress without the cooperation of others. In the physicality of concerted labor, many a socialist has caught a glimpse of a more solidaristic future.
Dean’s model derives from neither the workplace nor warfare but from the political work and testimony of communists themselves, which yields an eclectic blend of voices—part republican, part romantic. On the basis of that testimony, she concludes that comradeship enables us to take on the perspective of others, to see our actions “through their eyes,” which “remakes the place from which one sees.” That enlarged perspective has been the calling card of thinkers ranging from Rousseau and Kant to Arendt and Habermas. Whereas these thinkers often find that perspective in the legislative institutions of the state or the organs of public opinion or the heroic moments of civic action, Dean locates it, as does Gornick, in the slow boring of hard boards, in the work of politics that escapes the limelight but where comrades dedicate themselves to a task and hold themselves accountable to its completion.
Through that work, comrades can come to experience the joy of collective action and the enjoyment of one another. The joy is so intense that it spills onto other entities. Drawing on the work of artists and writers from the early Soviet avant-garde, which she compares to the poetry of Whitman, Dean describes an extension of ecstasy to “comrade objects” and “comrade things.” When the “love and respect” among comrades is “so great that it can’t be contained in human relations,” it “spans to include insects and galaxies (bees and stars).”
Up to the 1990s, Dean’s commitment to the generic nature of the comrade would have raised the hackles of those in the liberal center and on the right, who would have seen it as a threat to the individual. Today, it will press buttons for some on the left, who will see it as a challenge to the claims of certain forms of identity. The comrade, Dean insists, seeks to equalize relationships across race, class, nation, religion, ethnicity, and gender. It creates a sameness, the sameness of those who are doing the work. The only difference that remains salient is between those who are on one side of the struggle and those who are on the opposite side. The mobility of that metaphor—of being on one side or the other—allows Dean to insist on forms of affiliation and attachment that are neither identitarian nor exclusive. Anyone can be a comrade; all one has to do is move to the other side. Though this quote from a Washington Post report on the Bernie Sanders campaign arrived too late for Dean to use, it offers a helpful instantiation of her claim: “Sanders is a candidate who presents himself less as a personality than a conduit for a movement. And in the Bernie bubble, [Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez is seen as the future of the movement embodied. What makes her so effective as a surrogate, beyond her star power, is that if you campaign on electing a movement rather [than] a person, there’s no difference between hearing the message from the 78-year-old white male candidate or his 30-year-old Latina supporter.”
The comrade, Dean makes clear, is not a description but an ideal. Comrades do not eliminate gender or race or conflicts. But what they can do is name a common horizon; they can state a destination to which they are collectively heading, an aim toward which they are working. Comradeship is the announcement of another way of being: not one in which difference is eliminated but in which it becomes the stuff of political art, of mediating conflicts in order to do the work for which all have come. Though it is anarchists who are best known for emphasizing the prefigurative elements of radical politics—arguing that how we do the work now will shape the society to come—Dean’s analysis also has a prefigurative element, with Lenin as its seer. The discipline of comrades, he said, “is a victory over our own conservatism, indiscipline, petty-bourgeois egoism, a victory over the habits left as a heritage to the worker and peasant by accursed capitalism.” The comrade contains within herself the defeat of the old regime.
The left has good reason to be wary of the stern antinomies of the comrade. The freedom that goes by the name of discipline, the suppression of difference in the name of solidarity, the words of emancipation as window dressing for authoritarian constraint—we’ve been down this road before. We know where it ends, and neither Gornick nor Dean denies that ending. Nor do they provide an easy way around or out of it.
Gornick interprets the tragedy of communism through Greek myth. Helen awakens in Paris an intense love, one he never knew before. He is turned outward, directed to another soul in a way he is not accustomed to. He becomes larger than himself. Then the love takes on a life of its own, eclipsing its object. Love becomes the object, the feeling and need; Helen disappears from view. All manner of mayhem and destruction follow. Dean interprets the tragedy through psychoanalysis: The healthy ego ideal of the comrade becomes the ravenous superego. In the same way that the superego feeds off the transgressions of the id, growing ever more powerful from the punishment of impurity, so do comrades turn inward, generating a feeding frenzy of their own. Collective power, once a source of freedom, becomes a prison.
There’s a reason Gornick and Dean turn to myth and psychoanalysis, respectively. Each, in its way, is a story of unhappy endings, in which the conclusion is written from the start. Yet even if we don’t head down the path of authoritarian communism, even if we avoid that unhappy ending, we’re still left with other bad endings that neither psychoanalysis nor myth can account for. Not only has capitalism run rampant since the fall of communism, and not only has the left yet to find a replacement for the parties and movements that once created socialism in all its varieties, but even the contemporary left has not left behind the challenge of reconciling freedom and constraint.
Today, many on the left deploy a robust vocabulary of personal liberty—of expression, relationships, difference—that would have been simply unthinkable to cadres past, whether in communist Eastern Europe or working-class Detroit. At the same time, some on the left are ready, at least online, to enforce norms of mutual respect and personal dignity through practices of ostracism and collective shaming. This is hardly a criticism of the left, and nowhere do these sanctions rise to the level of repression claimed by the liberal center and the right. It is simply a recognition of the challenge the left faces: how to steer toward emancipation with tools that necessarily involve some element of discipline and constraint.
In the past, the left brought together these elements of freedom and constraint. It had no choice. Whether it was contesting for state power or wielding that power, the left was serious about its purposes. It intended to do the work. It sought to generate those force fields. It imposed discipline, and by doing so, it created power.
Today’s left is more hesitant, for reasons good and bad, about state power. It is legitimately fearful of repeating the repression of the past; it is understandably, if less legitimately, fearful of taking on the responsibility—and judgment of history—that power entails. As a result, the left struggles to generate those force fields, seeking the warmth of solidarity without the cold and sometimes cruel poles of attraction and repulsion that sustain it.
This hesitation has liberated the left from the need to reconcile freedom and constraint. But it has also left it without power. At some point, that may change. The left may become intentional; it may become dangerous. If it does, these questions of freedom and discipline will once again become salient. For better and for worse.