Review of the Book:
The Dark Side of the Left:
Illiberal Egalitarianism in America
by Richard Ellis
J. David Hoeveler
[Posted by permission. H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Pol@h-net.msu.edu (June, 1998]
In the 1960s, the New Left made full-scale assault on American
liberalism. It mostly dismissed conservatism as an errant and
inconsequential dimension of American history and focused its
attention on the mainstream. Liberalism, at least since the New Deal,
had become the consensus center of American politics and thus had to
be the main culprit in making the United States the menacing and
oppressive society it had become, by this account. Hence, we heard
such refrains as "corporate liberalism," expressing the
liberal state's partnership in the domination of the big business
interests. And we heard the term "fascist liberalism,"
linking liberalism to America's imperialist posture toward the rest of
the world. Now, in this book, liberalism fights back.
Richard J. Ellis would share with the New Left a conviction that
liberalism has almost nothing in common with a certain strand of
egalitarianism in American history. And liberalism, he warns, must
know these differences and keep its distance. He understands the
problem well. Egalitarianism seems to be liberal, or at least
progressive. It seems to resonate with the traditional ideals of our
democratic culture. Jefferson, after all, told us that we are all
created equal. But a great ideal, he finds, turned ugly.
Egalitarianism turned against its liberal roots and devoured them. It
took on qualities that we might conventionally associate with
conservatism and reactionism. Historical examples abound and that's
what this book is about. It is also about the contradictions of
egalitarianism.
Ellis begins with the abolitionists. They had a great cause--the
nineteenth's century's most inspiring moral crusade, the fight against
slavery. The abolitionists, though, early describe for Ellis the
troublesome features of radical egalitarianism. Egalitarians, the
author believes, thrive on a passion to make everyone equal, to be
sure, but they want to eradicate differences between them in doing so.
They are not content to establish mere equality of opportunity or
process; "they are committed to reducing differences between
people" (p. 5). That quest leads them in search of the larger
causes of the nation's ills. They seek holistic reconstruction. Thus,
among the abolitionists, leaders such as Lewis Tappan and William
Lloyd Garrison linked slavery to the reigning materialism in American
society. The drive to eradicate root causes, Ellis believes, will
almost always make the egalitarian impatient with the day-to-day
processes of the political system, the give and take of democratic
politics, and the reliance on a consensus among the general populace.
Such affective habits will place the egalitarian at odds with the
liberal democrat and his intellectual kin, the pragmatist. Large,
revolutionary goals replace immediate and local ones. Radical
abolitionists did not seek just the end of slavery; they sought the
end of the Old South. "The whole social system of the Gulf
states," said Wendell Phillips, "is to be taken to pieces,
every bit of it."
In radical abolitionism, writes Ellis, "utopian zeal outstripped
its liberalism" (p. 42). Utopianism, in turn, supplies the author
with another differentiation between egalitarianism and liberalism.
Political scientist Charles Frankel once commented on the tendency of
rational liberalism to take on secular millennial hopes. Ellis finds
the utopian strand in egalitarianism achieving a particular vitality
in the late nineteenth century. Edward Bellamy's classic _Looking
Backward_ in 1885 portrayed the utopian world of Boston in 2000.
Ignatius Donnelly's Caesar's Column offered a populist vision
of capitalist self-destruction. In the case of Bellamy, one wonders
how his book, so silly if it were not so frightening, attained its
great popularity. It flourishes with contempt for individuality, the
menace that underscores the chaos of Gilded Age America, in its
author's judgment. It revels in authoritarian alternatives to messy
democracy. To Ellis, Bellamy foreshadows state socialism and aspects
of Soviet-style totalitarianism. The egalitarian, Ellis believes,
smarts from all the contradictions and tensions, the mess and
disorder, of the modern society, and looks for an escape in some form
of authoritarian power. It blinds him to all the dangers therein.
A recurring problem in radical egalitarianism is its approach to
people as they actually live. On one hand, Ellis finds a romantic
attachment to "the people." Bellamy believed that an
underlying harmony exists among individuals, so that the new state,
his utopian state, must be a benevolent one because it will inherit
that harmony. On the other hand, probably most egalitarians move
within such a hope of revolutionary renewal that they they come to
harbor a contempt for people as they actually are. Walt Whitman
provides Ellis with a portrait of this mentality. Mild Gold provides
another one. Gold edited the magazine named for the people he actually
held in contempt, "the new masses." A genuine voice of
American radicalism, Gold looked for a revolution to overthrow
capitalism. But he saw an American working class mesmerized by the
cheap thrills of a hedonistic culture and the materialism fueled by
the economic system. Like so many on the egalitarian left, Gold then
turned away from the United States and looked elsewhere for a model of
redemption. The Soviet Union provided it, of course, and Gold mimicked
the party line in the 1930s and 40s.
Herein is another aspect of the radical egalitarian--the willingness
to be duped. So dispirited with the conditions at home does the
egalitarian become that other people and movements inherit the great
hopes. Waldo Frank despaired that the American masses had become a
dumb, docile herd. In recoil, he invested the revolution in Russia
with poetic purpose and mystical meaning. Some of Frank's
pronunciations on the Soviet Union really give one pause. He could see
the same wretched industrial conditions there that he might find in
the United States, but in his 1932 book Dawn in Russia
(significant title), Frank could write: "in these dismal halls
there is a whole humanity. Dream, thought, love, collaborate in the
tedious business of making electric parts, since these toilers are not
working for a boss--not even for a living; the least of them knows
that he is making a Worker's Union, that he is creating a world."
With such "consciousness of the whole" so powerful, why
should anyone care about individual liberties and the contentiousness
of the democratic process? Frank didn't.
It's disheartening, to say the least, to recall such ridiculous
sentiments. But the later egalitarian left did not escape them either.
It constantly looked for that locus of innocence and purity in the
population that could furnish its hope of redemption. Always in quest
of its own purity as well and dreadfully fearful of co-optation by the
System, the egalitarian left searched desperately for the uncorrupted.
The civil rights movement found them in the rural blacks of
Mississippi. The environmentalists (Earth First! is the focus) found
them in the American Indian. The Economic Research and Action Project
(ERAP) of Students for a Democratic Society found them in the urban
poor--people so far outside the System that they remained uncorrupted
by it. Or so they thought. When ERAP failed, New Leftists gave up on
the American locus and looked abroad--to Cubans or the the Vietnamese
peasantry. As Tom Hayden would say of the latter: "we felt they
were like us." Indeed.
\ Ellis presses his case against the egalitarian left unrelentingly.
All the groups that come under his scrutiny bear an animosity toward
liberalism. The feminist movement of the 1960s and 70s supplies
another example. Ellis focuses on the contest between the liberal
faction, represented by Betty Friedan, with its goal of bringing women
into the mainstream of American life, and radical feminists. Disgusted
with the "tyrannies" of male hegemony, the radicals
denounced the integration effort. Radical feminism became totalitarian
feminism as in the splinter group "The Feminists," led by
Ti-Grace Atkinson, and in the anti-liberal animus and general
inanities of Catharine McKinnon.
Ellis begins his book by describing himself as a liberal and a
Democrat. He anticipates the question of whether his book, with its
sustained critique of the left, supply ammunition to the
conservatives. Ellis, though, clearly wants to save the best in
liberalism from association with its worst features. The Dark Side
of the Left recalls Arthur Schlesinger's book of 1949, The
Vital Center, in which a centrist liberal sought to show the
incompatibility of American liberalism with support of the Soviet
regime. It is a curious twist of our history that Ellis must go to
such lengths to demonstrate that incompatibility. I wish Ellis would
state more emphatically that the radical egalitarian temperament, and
the consequences of it as chronicled in this book, in fact has very
little to do with liberalism. Liberalism respects individuality; it
questions authority and renounces ideology; it upholds the democratic
process, however unwieldily and however disappointing in producing
ideal solutions; its mentality is pragmatic, not utopian; it neither
worships nor despises the masses and the society they have produced. I
believe that this is liberalism at its best and most useful. All these
qualities help to keep society together. I think Ellis would agree,
for his book is ultimately about the destructive side of the
egalitarian left. Writing in his 1924 book Democracy and
Leadership, the conservative Irving Babbitt observed that when one
starts with the assumption that men are naturally good and virtuous,
one ends by wishing to kill them all. Conservatives and liberals can
both make a case against the egalitarian left. This very useful book
makes the liberal case.
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