FRANK MEYER AND SYDNEY HOOK

But there was one great flaw in Meyer's fusionism that proved to be fatal, and destructive of fusionism itself. In an era when many, if not most, conservative intellectuals were defectors from communism, Frank took pride in being the top cadre communist of all. A veteran communist who got his start as organizer at the London School of Economics, Frank was a leading theoretician, a member of the National Committee of the Communist Party, USA, and head of the CP's second leading cadre training school, the Workers' School of Chicago. As a top defector, Frank was deeply committed to total destruction of the God That Failed, up to and including nuclear annihilation of the Soviet Union. Hence, Frank not only disagreed with the Old Right foreign policy of isolationism, his major interest was to reverse it, and he was the most pro-war of all the myriad war hawks of National Review and the conservative movement. Being militantly pro-war also meant being in favor of U.S. imperialism and of all-out military statism in the U.S.

Frank Meyer's devotion to the global crusade against communism and the Soviet Union did not only poison the conservative movement's explicit foreign and military programs. For it led Frank, even though personally strongly anti-socialist, to embrace warmly as comrades any wing of socialists who were defectors from or converts to anti-communism. In short, Frank's strategic focus, The Enemy for him and for the conservative movement, was not statism and socialism but communism. Hence, it was under Frank's theoretical and strategic aegis that the conservative movement rushed to welcome and honor any species of dangerous socialist so long as they were certifiably anti-communist or anti-Soviet. Under this capacious umbrella, every variety of Marxian socialist, whether right-wing Trotskyite, Menshevik, Lovestonite, or Social Democrat, was able to enter and infect the conservative movement. The invasion and conquest of the conservative movement by Truman-Humphrey social democrats calling themselves "neoconservatives" happened after Frank's death; but the way had been paved for that conquest by the uncritical embrace of anti-Stalinist socialists that Meyer's theoretical and strategic vision had called for and orchestrated. And so tragically, Meyer's fusionist doctrine had paved the way for its own destruction; for the tough Marxist and Leninist-trained neocons were able, by paying lip service to such venerable conservative principles as the free market, to destroy Meyer's own conservative guiding principles and replace them with warmed-over social democracy in the guise of "neoconservatism," "global democracy," "the Opportunity Society," "progressive conservatism," or whatever other slogan of the moment might prove opportune.

In opposing the old fusionism, I tried vainly to argue with conservatives that the Enemy was not communism or the Soviet Union but statism and socialism, and that once one embraces that wider vision, it would become clear that the main enemy of both American liberty and traditional Americanism resided not in Moscow or Havana but in Washington, D.C.

THE MAIN MENACE: FROM COMMUNISM TO SOCIAL DEMOCRACY

Whether or not I was right about the Soviet-communist menace, and I still believe that I was, the course of human events has, thank goodness, now made that argument obsolete and antiquarian. The sudden and heart-warming death of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe has put an end to the communist menace. We have stressed in these pages the enormous implications of this revolutionary event for our foreign and military policy, and for making viable, more than ever, the Old Right policy of "isolationism." We have also discussed the fact that the death of centralizing communism in these countries has liberated the long suppressed and oppressed ethnic and nationality groups, each of whom are once again demanding freedom and independence from their national oppressors. In many ways, we are living in a "time warp," as 1990 and beyond take on many of the features of 1914 or 1919 or 1945.

But another vital aspect of this new post-communist world is that The Enemy of liberty and tradition is now revealed full-blown: social democracy. For social democracy in all of its guises is not only still with us and has proved longer-lived than its cousin, communism, but now that Stalin and his heirs are out of the way, social democrats are trying to reach for total power. They have to be stopped, and one of the objectives of the new fusionism of the paleo-libertarian and conservative movement is indeed to put a stop to them.

At the end of World War II, at a moment in history when social democrats and communists were allied, what is now called "the new world order" was already prepared for us. The idea was that a new United Nations, the old League of Nations plus enforcement power, would function as an effective world government in the form of a condominium of the world's superpowers, those blessed with a permanent seat and a permanent veto on the Security Council; the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and China. The United States, in short, was to run this world government in collaboration with its junior partner, the U.S.S.R. But the Cold War split the superpowers apart, and as a consequence the U.N. was reduced to the status of a debating society, and became an institution hated and reviled both by the conservatives and by social democrats. But now that communism and the Cold War are ended, the U.N. is back, hailed as the governor of the new world order by a conservative movement that has now been captured and ruled by the social democrat neocons.

Social democrats are all around us, and so it is all too easy to discern their reaction to the great problems of the post-Cold War era. Whether calling themselves neoconservatives or neoliberals, they stand foursquare in favor of statism in every instance: that is, strongly opposed to isolationism and in favor of U.S. intervention and war, almost as a high principle; and secondly, as bitter opponents of the ethnic nationalisms liberated at long last by the collapse of centralizing communism. Read a social democrat anywhere, and you will find hysterical attacks on nationalisms and national aspirations as against centralism everywhere, whether it be in Poland, Croatia, Lithuania, the Ukraine, or the Russian Republic. And the great smear whether it be within the United States or against emerging Eastern European nations, is almost invariably to raise the spectre of "anti-Semitism," to wield against nationalists or isolationists.

In short, on all crucial issues, social democrats stand against liberty and tradition, and in favor of statism and Big Government. They are more dangerous in the long run than the communists not simply because they have endured, but also because their program and their rhetorical appeals are far more insidious, since they claim to combine socialism with the appealing virtues of "democracy" and freedom of inquiry. For a long while they stubbornly refused to accept the libertarian lesson that economic freedom and civil liberties are of a piece; but now, in their second line of retreat, they give lip service to some sort of "market," suitably taxed, regulated, and hobbled by a massive welfare-warfare State. In short, there is little distinction between modern social democrats and the now-discredited "market socialists" of the 1930s who claimed to have solved the fatal flaw of socialism first pointed out by Ludwig von Mises; the impossibility of socialist planners calculating prices and costs, and therefore planning a functioning modern economy.

In the collectivist arsenal of the world of the twentieth century there used to be various competing statist programs: among them, communism, fascism, Nazism, and social democracy. The Nazis and fascists are long dead and buried; communism is not quite fully buried but is still dead as a doornail. Only the most insidious remains: social democracy. Amidst a liberal culture captured by crazed leftist social programs, with a conservative movement lying supine before the social democrat neocons, only the paleo New Fusionists are rising up to thwart social democrat plans for total power, domestic and foreign.

But why are the regnant social democrats worried and trembling at the upsurge of the New Fusionism? – and believe me they are. It is obviously not because of our formal numbers or our limited access to funding. The reason is that the social democrats and their ilk know full well that we express the deepest albeit unarticulated beliefs of the mass of the American people. Clever and cynical control of the opinion-moulding media and of once-conservative money sources are what enable a remarkably small group of energetic social democrats to dominate the conservative movement and to battle, often successfully, for the levers of power in Washington. But they are vastly outnumbered if only the American people were clued in to what is going on, and that is why the social democrats fear our seemingly small movement. What we need to learn is how to mobilize the overwhelming support of the mass of Americans, and thus to undercut, or short-circuit, their domination by a small number of opinion-moulding leaders.

THE LITMUS TEST: SIDNEY HOOK

If my characterization of neocons and neo-liberals as essentially social democrats seems exaggerated, let us ponder the status of undoubtedly the most beloved figure among all these groups, as well as in the modern conservative movement: the late Sidney Hook. Long a fixture at the conservative Hoover Institution, Hook was everywhere, at every conservative intellectual gathering or organization, his every word and pronouncement hailed adoringly by all respectable folk from the AFL-CIO to the New Republic through National Review and points right. (Indeed the New Republic has recently canonized Sidney in a worshipful elegy.) Sometimes it seemed that only communists or thereabouts could possibly have a sour word to say for Hook.

What made Sidney Hook so universally beloved, so seemingly above the merest hint of criticism? Surely it was not his personality, which was neither particularly lovable nor charismatic. Indeed, in his enormously overpraised autobiography, Out of Step, Hook reveals himself as a petty, self-absorbed prig. The book is filled with brusque and remarkably unperceptive dismissals of his old friends and acquaintances, none of whom seemed to be worthy of Hook's alleged wisdom and advice. Take, for example, Hook's portrayal of his long-time colleagues at Partisan Review, once the quasi-Trotskyite, modernist center of American literary and intellectual life. That chapter is typical of this dull, flat, and monotonic book. Every one of his old colleagues is depicted as an unintelligent, quasi-ignorant dolt, all of whom stubbornly failed to follow Hook's invariably wise counsel. Hook comes across as petty, peevish, narrow, and self-important, lacking either wit or insight, either into his friends or into the world at large.

Neither can Sidney's popularity be explained by the greatness or profundity of his intellectual contributions. In political philosophy, he was a simple-minded pragmatist and social democrat, solving all social problems with the fetish of "majority rule" and "democracy." Knowing the cliches of pragmatism and social democracy he mastered little else, whether of economics, esthetics, history, or any other discipline.

What distinguished Sidney Hook was, first, that he was an ex-communist, not since the 1930s like his colleagues, but way back, from the 1920s. In short, the older and precocious Hook was a communist from his adolescence. Despite the story in his self-serving memoir, he remained close to the CP for a long time, on into the late 1930s. Contrary to his grotesque title, Sidney all of his life was In Step, always being among the first to adopt the newest intellectual fashion. In that way, he showed himself to be a good "intellectual entrepreneur." Communist, Hegelian, Deweyite, Trotskyite, defender of World War II, anti-communist after the war, Partisan Reviewnik, and finally extreme right-wing social democrat, Hook veered and tacked with the intellectual fashions, and on into the "left" fringes of neoconservatism and the conservative movement. More honest than his colleagues, he referred to himself candidly until the end as a Marxist and as a socialist. It is a measure of the intellectual and political degeneration of the modern conservative movement that Sidney put no one off by his lifelong avowal of Marxism.

Thus, Sidney Hook, the Nestor of social democracy, was in his own unimpressive person the living embodiment of what the conservative movement has become: i.e., the disastrous subordination of every cherished principle to the slogan of "anti-communism," and hence the permanent embrace of war and statism. One's attitude toward Sidney Hook, only recently deceased, therefore provides a convenient litmus test on whether someone is a genuine conservative, a paleo, or some form of neo. Needless to say, all the New Fusionists are anti-Hook to the core.

It is important to consider a final point on Hook and modern conservatism. In his odious book of the early Cold War, Heresy Yes, Conspiracy No, Hook set forth a theoretical justification for an assault upon civil liberties and academic freedom. Heresy is OK and deserves the right to dissent, maintained Hook, but "conspiracy" is subversive and evil and has no rights, and therefore it is legitimate and necessary for government to crack down upon it. Note that this is a crackdown upon speech, press, and teaching, and not upon actions such as concrete plots to overthrow the State. The overt use of this doctrine by Hook and the social democrats was to enable purges of communists. But what was overlooked at the time was Hook's general theory of "conspiracy" which included, not simply communists, but anyone whose mind, according to Hook, was enthralled to some sort of external cadre, some organization external to the person or to the university where he teaches. Such a theory could just as readily be used, e.g., to bar Jesuits from teaching as it would communists.

All this fits with an important insight of paleocon political theorist and historian Professor Paul Gottfried: that the neocon/social-democrat assault on free speech and free press "absolutism," and their insistence instead on the importance of "democratic values," constitutes an agenda for eventually using the power of the State to restrict or prohibit speech or expression that neocons hold to be "undemocratic." This category could and would be indefinitely expanded to include: real or alleged communists, leftists, fascists, neo-Nazis, secessionists, "hate thought" criminals, and eventually...paleoconservatives and paleo and left-libertarians. God knows which individuals and groups might eventually come under the "undemocratic" rubric, and therefore become subject to neocon/social democrat crackdown. To paraphrase an old leftist-interventionist slogan of the 1930s and 1940s: ask not for whom the neocon bell tolls; it tolls for thee.