Up from Liberalism

City Journal ^ | Spring 2003 | Janet Daley

[Hobsonphile]

I became a Marxist out of sheer perversity. Well, perhaps that is unfair to my adolescent self: it was a mixture of conscientiousness and perversity. The official atmosphere in the California high school where I spent my junior and senior years was—hard as it may be to imagine this now—hysterically anti-communist. This was 1961, but the sixties as we know them had not yet begun. The doctrinal orthodoxy of the day was McCarthyism in its final, decaying phase. Accordingly, my senior civics class regularly showed us propaganda films, whose crudeness constituted a provocation to (not to say an insult to the intelligence of) any potentially rebellious 16-year-old. I can remember watching lurid graphics, in which red triangles pierced through defenseless red, white, and blue balloons, and then the slogan “Socialism and communism are the same thing” flashed onto the screen—all accompanied by a triumphal musical score whose climaxes underlined the most unsubtle messages of the narration.

Such films, inevitably, caused the more independent-minded students to think, “Whoa, hang on a minute. What is this you are so determined to make me believe, and why?” As one of my more thoughtful peers put it (in a very quiet voice), “Actually, I think a bit of socialism could help to protect a country against communism by making it seem less necessary.”

So it had started. This was the beginning of the skepticism that led to cynicism and then to disaffection: the suspicion that everything your country was telling you might be blinkered at best or malign at worst. But the real damage was done for me by the hugely influential film Operation Abolition. This was the faux documentary made by the House Un-American Activities Committee to celebrate its own procedures. With a patronizing didacticism that would now seem risible, the movie recorded the HUAC hearings in San Francisco, which hauled in “known subversives” to be hectored and pilloried by some of the most unattractive legislators in U.S. history. But the clash between the “known subversives” and the congressmen—who would not allow them to finish a sentence of their “prepared propaganda statements”—was not what affected me so deeply. It was the sight of the protesters against HUAC, who had gathered outside the chamber, being attacked with fire hoses by the police. The film described the demonstrators as “dupes” of a communist plot to abolish the heroic congressional committee (hence the movie’s title). As the water swept them painfully down the marble stairs of San Francisco City Hall, we were, I suppose, expected to cheer. We didn’t. We just thought our own thoughts.

What I thought went something like this: “There is something seriously wrong here. I have been taught that we live in a free country and that, of all the freedoms, free speech is the most important. Whatever it is that these people believe, they ought to have the right to express it without being hounded into silence. And whatever objections they have to this committee, I would like to hear them. And, furthermore, I didn’t know that I lived in a country where people who disagreed with congressmen got flushed down the stairs by fire hoses.” Of course, I was in a minority in these musings. Most students watched the film in trusting passivity. To the extent that they dwelled on the issues that it raised, they were inclined to accept the notion that communism—or socialism, or whatever—was a threat to their way of life.

[Hobsonphile]

Janet Daley has followed a trajectory similar to that of many sixties leftists- what a wonderful article!

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[m1911]

Bumped and bookmarked

[Question_Assumptions]

Interesting. Almost everything she says about not helping the lower classes to get ahead and them being trapped by their own culture could be said about the urban poor in the US.

[nickcarraway]

ping