Props to the liberal anticommunists of the 1930s-1950s

In the 1930s and 1940s, there were many prominent communist sympathizers: leading scientists such as J. B. S. Haldane and J. Robert Oppenheimer, powerful labor leaders, influential intellectuals, and various popular-front politicians, including at one period the vice-president of the United States. There was also a lot of tolerance for communists among people on the left who were not themselves communist supporters.

There was a logic to all of this: sure, the Soviets did a lot of bad things, but they were standing up for world socialism etc. and, except for that awkward 1939-41 period, they were on the front lines in protecting the world from a Nazi takeover. When it came to national politics in the U.S., Britain, and other western countries, neither fascists nor communists were ever about to take over, and there was a logic to considering communists as allies of the left, supporting labor unions and economic development. Meanwhile, the communists’ most visible opponents were conservative politicians who supported some mix of isolationism, racism, and economic austerity, and communist sympathizers had the option of dismissing the news reports of Soviet brutality and instead following the journalists who were sympathetic to the Soviet regime.

At the same time, yeah, liberals were bothered by communists. Communism was an uncomfortable ally of liberals: repressive policies in the Soviet Union, destruction of democracy in Eastern Europe, and manipulative tactics in the U.S. and western Europe, not to mention the annoying way that communists were trying to get propaganda value out of racial discrimination in the United States, even while liberals in the Democratic party were maintaining an electoral alliance with the white Democrats in the south. With great effort, the liberals were able to expel the communists from the Democratic party and mainstream liberal organizations in the United States. One step was the establishment of the liberal but firmly anti-communist Americans for Democratic Action in the late 1940s.

Years later, commenters on the left took issue with mainstream liberal Democrats’ success at kicking out the communists, as it was a step to dismantling the powerful New Deal coalition. Even at the time, there was something awkward about the ejection of communist from the Democratic party, in that the liberals who were doing the ejection seemed to be in accord with right-wing Republicans such as Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy—and, in any case, no amount of communist-bashing would satisfy Nixon, McCarthy, and their allies.

And, in retrospect, the Soviet threat to the United States was nothing like what had been imagined in the Cold War period. So the whole expelling-the-communists thing seemed like some combination of unnecessary from a military and political perspective, ridiculous and inhumane as with the Hollywood blacklist, and contrary to the progressive project by depriving liberals of a set of potential allies.

But, now, in light of political events in the past few years . . . I don’t know about that. Even setting aside straight-up concerns about policy influence—communist policies are generally associated with a restriction in political liberty and various forms of economic disaster—; beyond all that, maybe the communists were closer to taking over the Democratic party, and, ultimately, the United States, than it seems.

I base this speculation not on any historical information from the 1930s-1950s but rather by considering what’s been happening with the increasing acceptance of authoritarianism in the Republican party today, most dramatically on 6 Jan 2021 and continuing to this day, with leading Republicans associating with Alex Jones etc. Whatever chance there was for conservative Republicans to draw the line, in the way that liberal Democrats did in the late 1940s and early 1950s did against the communists, seems to have passed.

This is not necessarily a question of character; the situation matters too. Authoritarianism in the U.S. is strongly associated with Donald Trump, and any organized conservative anti-authoritarian movement would need to confront a figure who was very popular among Republican voters. There was no comparable communist-associated figure in the Democratic party of the 1930s-1950s. Henry Wallace was vice president and was popular among Democrats, but party leaders were able to remove him from the ticket in 1944 without taking personal risks. Also, nowadays there are presidential primary elections so it’s harder to get around the ideological voters within the party.

The closest comparison to Trump from that era is Joe McCarthy, and at the time the Republican party didn’t do much to disown him; they just let him flame out, which I guess might have happened to Trump had he just been a publicity-hound but didn’t run for president. McCarthy got big during the Truman administration and thus had the advantage of being an outsider, but he was in no position to run for president against Eisenhower. I assume that conservative Republicans were following the same strategy with Trump, many decades later: get the benefits of his political stances and let him burn out on his own. But somewhere between Ted Cruz’s 2016 primary election campaign and the leadership of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2023, something changed: the party went all-in.

After dispatching Henry Wallace in 1948, the liberals in the Democratic party kicked out the communists and ruled out any future popular-front strategy. They did this at a time when such a move was relatively easy, but . . . good for them! Sometimes the time to make a hard decision is when it’s least difficult. A key difference, perhaps, is that Trump came as such a surprise. Communists had been doing their best to infiltrate U.S. politics since the 1930s: it was a low-level rumbling that offered both opportunity and concern to liberals. In contrast, the recent authoritarian push seems to be mostly a response to Trump, and conservatives weren’t ready to deal with it.

Anyway, all this history made me appreciate the 1940s-era liberals who put country before party and threw out the communists. They chose the right time to do it. They didn’t wait until it was too late.

It’s easy for people nowadays to criticize liberal or left anti-communism—for example, I happen to come across a book review that says:

[George Orwell’s] reputation took a hit early this century from a document that became known as Orwell’s List. This was a list of names of people Orwell believed to be fellow travellers of the Soviet regime. It was compiled in the late 1940s, known about from 1996 and published in 2003. Orwell gave it to Celia Kirwan shortly before his death. Kirwan was working for the Information Research Department, the decidedly Orwellian name for a section of the Foreign Office that sought to manipulate public impressions of the Soviet Union through propaganda. . . .

[T]o provide a list of names of communist sympathisers in 1949 to a government department – a list presumably based chiefly on gossip and inference and private conversations – is an act that some might find hard to reconcile with Orwell’s conception of the ‘decent’, or with his repeatedly expressed horror at a totalitarian society which has eyes on every wall and spooks at every street corner. Indeed, in the public-school vocabulary which came naturally to Orwell, it would be more natural to describe passing that list to Kirwan, in full awareness of who she worked for, as the act of a sneak.

I disagree with this criticism. There was a cold war going on, and communists really were doing their best to infiltrate left parties. I’m cool with Orwell passing these names along, just as I’d be cool if Kevin McCarthy or Elise Stefanik or Rupert Murdoch or whoever would denounce authoritarian moves in the U.S. today. The situations are different—Orwell had already publicly denouncing Stalinists for more than 10 years before then, and he held no political office—; my point is that, seeing how difficult it is for U.S. conservatives today to resist the authoritarian takeover of their party, I have more appreciation for the liberals who took a stand back in the 1940s. Call them “indecent,” call them “sneaks,” call them “red-baiters,” call them “RINOs,” whatever: that’s part of the point, that they were putting country before party. Just as there were many leftists in the 1930s-1950s with strong communist sympathies—maybe they didn’t think Stalin was perfect, but they saw him as a strong counterweight to conservative aspects of western society, an appealing strongman, etc.—, similarly now there are leading rightists who are sympathetic to fascist leaders, conspiracy theorists, etc., for some mixture of tactical reasons and deeper affinities. As we’ve seen in recent years, taking on the extremists can come at a real political cost, and we should appreciate the leaders who did that.