Mini-Review: Up From Communism

No one is loved—or hated—like a convert. The receiving side hails him as a hero; the losing side hisses him as a traitor. The higher the stakes, the greater the praise and damnation, a truth born out in John P. Diggins’s “Up From Communism: Conservative Odysseys in American Intellectual History.” Diggins follows four intellectuals on their path from the Communist Party to the National Review masthead, and a very twisting path it is.

Many historians have noted the ironic fact that the brightest lights of American anti-communism began their political lives reading the Daily Worker and singing the Internationale. Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Frank Meyer, and Whittaker Chambers were all among “Stalin’s gift to anti-communism,” as such defectors were popularly known.

Four other gifts—particularly rich ones—are the subject of this book. Max Eastman was a ladykiller who, in his spare time, published highbrow titles like Marx and Lenin: The Science of Revolution. John Dos Passos authored the U.S.A. trilogy, which dripped bitter radicalism in lines like “all right we are two nations.” Will Herberg was nicknamed “the Rabbi” for his encyclopedic knowledge of Marxist texts and his mastery of debate. And James Burnham was prominent enough in the Communist Party to receive a rebuke from Trotsky himself.

What drove these men from Joe Stalin to Joe McCarthy? Stalin takes much of the blame. All four men were repulsed by his brutality; the stunning venality of the Nazi-Soviet Pact was another heavy weight in the anti-communist scale. But their conversion was more than a gut reaction. For each man, the road to the right passed through his own soul. And each found shelter in a different room within the newly built conservative household.

The journey might have been easiest for Burnham. A student of realpolitik, he had embraced hard-headed realism in books like The Machiavellians. To Burnham, power was the only thing that mattered in world affairs; not surprising, then, that he became an ardent Cold Warrior and advocate for “liberating” Eastern Europe. Max Eastman was drawn by economics. Disillusioned by communism, he became a spokesman—his enemies would say shill—for free enterprise.

Dos Passos and Herberg took more convoluted paths to the right, each traveling down many byways before reaching their destination. Dos Passos had always harbored a faint blue streak of conservatism. It was an older kind of conservatism, the kind that regarded modernity as a wasteland smelling of gasoline. The man who once declared “organization is death” found a kindred spirit not in Stalin but in Washington, Madison, and Jefferson; Dos Passos became an avid historian of the Founding Fathers. As to Herberg, he concluded that religion was all that mattered. “The Rabbi” converted to Judaism and enlisted his debating skills in God’s cause.

Diggins seems a little bemused by all this. He wonders how four men, so evidently brilliant, could wind up in thrall to a “pompous young man” named Bill Buckley. Diggins also argues that the four men suffered a sort of mental arteriosclerosis in their later years, their conservatism becoming hard and dogmatic—as if communism was a flexible faith. Still, he tells their stories well, explaining Marxian dialectics and the Niebuhrian irony with equal ease. Consider this book a gateway drug to harder varieties of conservative intellectual history.