James Finn and Leonard Sussman, eds.: Today’s American: How Free? New York: Freedom House, 1986.
Originally published in The New York City Tribune, May 20, 1987.
This is a poor book in a good cause. Eleanor Roosevelt and her husband’s latest political victim, Wendell Willkie, began Freedom House weeks before the Empire of Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Then as now, Freedom House promoted political liberty in and beyond the United States. Then, threats to liberty emanated primarily from the ‘Right’: from the practice of legal, racial segregation in many part of the United States and from the advances of Fascism in Europe.
Today, threats to liberty emanate primarily from the ‘Left’: from the Soviet Union and, paradoxically, from excesses of liberty here. As Freedom House Board Chairman Max M. Kampelman remarks, “Today’s American is the freest person ever, here or elsewhere.” But of course when liberty degenerates into license, decent people and those who exploit them may react angrily, endangering liberty. Accordingly, this book’s thirteen contributors seek to defend liberty against both tyranny and anarchy—to defend what legal scholar John W. Riehm calls “the rule of reason,” resented by impassioned extremists of all ideological colors.
Unfortunately, and despite the contributors’ high reputations, the essays themselves are almost unrelievedly mediocre and tedious. Even the best of them amount to no more than rehashes of arguments advanced more tellingly elsewhere. Although the book’s dust jacket describes the contents as “always exciting,” the only excitement your reviewer could derive from these pages was of a decidedly secondary character: He had never thought that liberty could be made dull. That is an interesting realization.
Case in point: Bayard Rustin, the distinguished civil rights advocate, discusses “Equal Opportunity: What’s Happened to It?” What happened, he maintains, was that liberty revealed its down-side. Economic libertarianism does little or nothing for the desperately poor; better housing opportunities induce the black middle class to leave inner cities, taking skills and good examples with them; sexual libertarianism coupled with a family-busting ‘welfare’ system results in 58% of all black children being born out of wedlock. Quite so, but to remedy these severe problems, Rustin can only endorse a moderate-liberal Democratic Party program: national industrial policy, more money for better-quality education, more “social spending for the poor.” It is disheartening to see that after a lifetime of work advancing civil rights, Rustin hasn’t a single new proposal to offer.
Another case in point: Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Carter Administration’s lone sane voice on foreign policy, suggests that America’s ethnic diversity gives us inroads to the countries our ancestors came from enabling us justifiably to focus world attention on a geopolitically relevant form of liberty—national self-determination. Brzezinski recommends tripling the amount of money we spend for propaganda directed at nations captive to Soviet imperialism, not the least of which lie within present Soviet borders. But he follows this sensible advice with a recommendation to increase trade with Central and Eastern Europe; against all evidence, he claims this will loosen the Soviet grip on those countries. Brzezinski never bothers to substantiate this foundationless assumption.
More cases in point: Leonard Sussman on press freedom and responsibility; John Diebold on computers and privacy; Leo Cherne on intelligence gathering; James Finn on religion and civil liberties. Each of these essays belongs to the ‘on-the-one-hand-then-on-the-other’ school of school of rhetoric: bland, generalizing, uninformative, without even the energy to pontificate. The book costs fifteen dollars. Do you really want to pay even that modest sum to be reminded that during ‘loose lips sink ships’ years of World War II democracies enjoyed more press freedoms than dictatorships? That “the primary purpose of intelligence is to avert war by alerting us to any dangers to our national security”? That computers make once-private information publicly available” That “the advance of modernity and its attendant forces has not been followed by secularization and a decline of religious observance”? If your responses to the above points were, respectively: 1) “I figured that”; 2) “Do tell”; 3) “No kidding” and 4) “Baloney”; then you don’t need to read such stuff.
Two essays rise to the stop of the stew. The philosopher Sidney Hook defines academic freedom as an unusual right, “one that must be earned.” Commercial republics guarantee the natural and civil right to talk nonsense on a street corner, but “one must, so to speak, be professionally qualified to talk nonsense in a university.” Academic freedom rests on the scholar’s professional duty to seek the truth and report his findings. “During the past few decades there has emerged in some quarters a new conception of the university that discards the traditional objective of scholarship and regards the university as primarily an agent of social change to effect political goals.” Marxists, feminists, and other doctrinaires “insist on the right to use the classroom for political purposes” and to “challenge the very conception of objective truth as a superstition.” Notoriously, this means that the Communist hack Angela Davis receives a more polite hearing on many campuses than does Jeane Kirkpatrick.
Political scientist Paul Seabury shows how the same ideological mindset functions off-campus. Unlike those who imagine that Marxism-Leninism serves merely ritualistic purposes in the Soviet Union, Seabury knows that “Leninist tenets permeate [the Politburo’s] strategic planning.” These tenets reverse Clausewitz’s famous maxim. War is not a continuation of politics by the admixture of other means; politics is a continuation of war, indeed, “politics is war.” This results in the easily observable militarism of all communist states. Politics-as-war replaces scholarship and journalism with propaganda, uses negotiations as psychological weapons, encourages terrorism, and prepares for offensive not defensive war. Liberal democrats, and particularly left-liberal Democrats, ignore to these facts to their peril, and ours.
Most of the contributors to this volume are liberal Democrats. Left-liberal Democrats deride them as ‘Cold-War liberals,’ but the facts belie the charge. Freedom House originated in the struggle against fascism, not communism; unlike today’s ideological heirs to the egregious Henry A. Wallace, Freedom House consists of liberals who really do fight for liberty. America needs a Democratic Party that can distinguish among license, liberty, and totalitarianism, ready to defend liberty in deeds as much as words. This soporific volume will do nothing to strengthen the resolve of that party or to make that defense more likely.
The fifteen dollars you might spend to purchase this book would serve better as a direct and tax-deductible contribution to Freedom House. Its work is invaluable. Its latest book is not.
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