Robert Nisbet: Roosevelt and Stalin: The Failed Partnership. Washington: Regnery Gateway, 1988.
Originally published in The Washington Times, March 20, 1989.
Erstwhile Republican Party presidential candidate Wendell Willkie visited Stalin during World War II. “Stalin likes a pretty heavy turnover of young people in his immediate entourage,” Willkie perceived. “It is his way, I think, of keeping his ear to the ground.”
To smile at such ineffable naivete smacks somewhat of Oscar Wilde laughing at the death of Little Nell: It is an altogether better response to a work of fiction than to events in the real world. Too-Olympian gaiety may land one in jail, or bring on some other severe test of good humor. Although Socrates triumphed at this, purchasing a sort of intellectual immortality at the cost of his physical demise, moderns (like Wilde) typically bring fewer spiritual resources to the test, ending pitiably.
In political extremities, laughter makes sense only for philosophers and tyrants. Stalin understood this, and held up the tyrants’ end. When American First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy met Charles de Gaulle at the French embassy in Washington, she asked, “General, of all the great men you have met, which one had the best sense of humor?” “Stalin, madame,” the General intoned. Willkie found that out, too: “Once I was telling him of the Soviet schools and libraries I had seen—how good they had seemed to me. And I added, ‘But if you continue to educate the Russian people, Mr. Stalin, the first thing you know you’ll educate yourself out of a job.’ He threw back his head and laughed. Nothing I said to him, or heard anyone else say to him, through two long evenings, seemed to amuse him so much.”
Still, there were limits even to Stalinist mirth. De Gaulle remembered, “Stalin said only one serious thing to me: ‘In the end, death is the only winner.'” Like any serious political man, Stalin wanted to win, so he made himself into an angel of death, a transfiguration that may account for the turnover of young people in his immediate entourage.
“Stalin was an unnatural man,” Winston Churchill said. Why did Churchill and de Gaulle see this, while Franklin Delano Roosevelt did not? ‘American innocence,’ Europeans will answer, forgetting that Stalin (and Hitler) duped more Europeans than Americans, and as a result killed more of them, too.
Name one 18th- or 19th-century American statesman who would not have recognized Stalin for what he was. The old republicans suspected political power, jealously guarded themselves against usurpations of their rights. Many 20th-century democrats trust, almost worship state power. They fawn over tyrants, not merely hoping to overcome the will-to-death with the will-to-love (Christian hope centers on that possibility) not only hoping (much less plausibly) to make Christian love politically successful, but actually mistaking the tyrannical will-to-death for a vigorous program of social improvement.
Noted conservative author Robert Nisbet brings out this tragicomic theme of unrequited love, calling Roosevelt’s policy toward Stalin a “failed courtship.” Why was it even attempted?
Nisbet narrates the matter concisely. “The Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 1939,” Nisbet writes, “was a jolt to the White House and the liberal mind in America.” Peace between the world’s arch-‘reactionary’ regime and the Fatherland of the Revolution, at the expense of European democracy, was supposed to have been the stuff of red-baiters hallucinations.
Less than two years later Hitler ended the embarrassment by betraying Stalin (who, like all con artists, couldn’t believe anyone would make a sucker out of him). This caused a new dilemma, one more amenable to a purely rhetorical solution. “The war,” Nisbet writes, “could no longer be called one of ‘democracy’ vs. totalitarianism.'” It was decided to call Leftist totalitarianism protodemocracy. FDR’s most trusted advisor, Harry Hopkins, “regretted that the Soviet Union tended toward totalitarianism, but he was hopeful for its future, given its egalitarian philosophy.” So was Roosevelt.
After fulsomely welcoming Stalin to the alliance, Roosevelt “fought hard to offset, to root out, American—especially religious—dislike of the Soviets.” At one memorable press conference, he cited Article 124 of the “Constitution of Russia” (as he called it), which guaranteed “freedom of religion.” Nisbet rightly identifies this as a deliberate lie by a rhetorician who assumed the American people would never fight unless they imagined some stark contrast between Nazis and Communists. Predictably, it didn’t take too long for the rhetorician to start listening to himself. After the notorious Yalta Conference in February 1945, Roosevelt baptized Stalin (who had studied for the priesthood) as something of a “Christian gentleman” in behavior if not conviction.
Many conservatives have denounced Yalta as the place where Roosevelt sacrificed Eastern Europe; Nisbet sees that substantial concessions had already occurred in Teheran in November 1943, where, “in less than an hour the President had given [Stalin] what he wanted in Poland and the Baltic States.” In return, Roosevelt demanded a “plebiscite” in those countries to determine their rulers; Stalin quickly agreed, stipulation that elections would be held “in accordance with the Soviet constitution.” The two men further agreed in disliking France generally, de Gaulle in particular, and the British Empire—all bulwarks against any future Soviet expansion, not so incidentally. Yalta performed the different yet “invaluable service of giving moral legitimation to what Stalin had acquired by sheer force,” compelling East Europeans to abandon democracy and sovereignty in the name of democracy and sovereignty. “Of one thing I am certain,” FDR concluded. “Stalin is not an imperialist.”
Churchill was an imperialist. Imperialism was ‘reactionary.’ Therefore, FDR deduced, Soviet communism must offer a greater potential for democracy than the British Empire. Churchill replied, “British imperialism has spread, and is spreading democracy more widely than any other system of government since the beginning of time.” FDR failed to see things that way, telling his son (in an incident Nisbet does not mention) that the end of British and French imperialism would bring unheard-of wealth to the United States and the democracies generally.
Nisbet finds the “intellectual roots” of Rooseveltian illusions regarding Leftist totalitarianism in the thought of Woodrow Wilson, whom FDR had served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy during the First World War. “Making the world safe for democracy” meant making it safe from the old empires whose ambitions had ignited that war. “It never occurred to Roosevelt to see the structure of Soviet society as being close to that of Nazi Germany, as, in other words, totalitarian in both cases.” The new liberalism of Wilson and Roosevelt was a boneless liberalism. It admired not stability under prudently designed institutions but forward flow, resolute ‘progress,’ a secular equivalent of the Holy Spirit called ‘History.’
Without the resistance of stable institutions or individuals who claim unalienable, natural rights, progressivism seeks discipline from ‘leaders.’ For the new statesmen, leadership replaces governing. Nisbet remarks that FDR’s unconstitutional “National Recovery Act” would have further empowered the president. When the Supreme Court struck it down, Roosevelt made one of his few unpopular domestic moves, trying to add to the number of justices in order to pack the Court with progressives. FDR wanted constitutions, American or ‘Russian,’ to mean what he said they meant, the better to lead Americans where he wanted them to go.
De Gaulle considered Roosevelt a man whose idealism cloaked ambition, first of all from Roosevelt’s own eyes. Roosevelt never saw the dangers of Marxist ideology because his own ideology resembled it. Marxism and progressivist liberalism share a genealogy—not simply “socialism, populism, nationalism, and the whole idea of ‘redemptive revolution,'” as Nisbet writes, and not only a dreamed-of egalitarian society, but an underlying commitment to the Left-Hegelian current of German historicism. In the highest sense, Germany had already conquered Russia’s and America’s ‘Left’ elites before a shot was fired—in World War I, let alone World War II.
Hegel had responded philosophically to the Christian critique of both classical and modern rationalism. Reason—thought animated by the principle of non-contradiction—appears too rigid, in Hegel’s view, to account for the Holy Spirit that blows where it listeth, giving eternal life as surely as the breath of God animated clay on the sixth day of Creation. Replacing the Holy Spirit of the providential, Creator-God who rules the course of events from a position ‘above’ it, with the ‘Absolute Spirit’ he held to be immanent in all things, Hegel invents a logic that eschews the principle of non-contradiction in the classical sense. ‘History’ becomes the dialectical unfolding of the Absolute Spirit. In Hegelian or ‘historical’ logic, contradictory forces and things at first clash but then combine or ‘synthesize’ to produce new and higher forms of life, including human beliefs, thoughts, customs, and institutions. The stable structure or forms of nature as conceived by previous philosophers give way to movement, fluidity, a series of historical changes that will eventuate in the ‘end of history,’ the culmination of all previous events into one coherent and stable whole.
It seems paradoxical to find that this attempt to do justice to life would itself ‘evolve’ into the most malignant, death-dealing political ‘movements,’ Nazism and communism. This happened because what gives human life its movement is usually not reason but passion. In becoming ‘dialectical’ in the evolutionary, Hegelian way, thinking became impassioned. In politics, where the spirited passions of indignation, ambition, and rage predominate, this can easily lead to death, and on a mass scale. The spirited passions blinded and used the reasoning powers which might have corrected them. Reason in effect blinded itself by imitating passions, by denying itself the very power of abstraction which enables human beings to detach themselves from their passions and to judge. This is why historicists of all varieties denounce ‘abstraction,’ make a fetish of ‘concrete’ thinking and, even more resolute action guided only be ‘concrete,’ i.e., immanent thought. In the end, death is the only winner. With neither a Creator-God nor rational human minds capable of rising above the course of events to judge them, whatever ‘is’ is right.
Under the aegis of certain forms of historicism, fatality animated modern tyranny or totalitarianism. I mean by this fatality both in the sense of something held to be inevitable, irresistible, and something that ends in death. Churchill and de Gaulle knew this, or at least sensed it, and they resisted it, in both its Leftist and Rightist forms. In alliance with Roosevelt, they defeated the Rightist form. They lacked the power to block Roosevelt’s immediate designs in misjudged alliance with the Leftist form. They did succeed in delaying those designs and in limiting their effects. Today we live on the political and strategic margin provided by statesmen who understood totalitarianism better than progressives can. Statesmen can widen that margin only if they attend to the lasting structures of regimes, to whether and how those structures actually secure the rights of individual human beings.
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