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In Socialism's Twilight: Michael Walzer and the Politics of the Long New

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In Socialism's Twilight: Michael Walzer and the Politics of the Long New In Socialism’s Twilight: Michael Walzer and the Politics of the Long New Left David Marcus Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2019 ©2019 David Marcus All Rights Reserved Abstract “In Socialism’s Twilight: Michael Walzer and the Politics of the Long New Left” David Marcus In Socialism’s Twilight is a study of the thought and politics of Michael Walzer and the travails of “democratic socialism” in the second half of the twentieth century. Using the methods of intel- lectual and political history, it situates Walzer’s political theory and criticism in the context of what might be called the “long New Left,” the overlapping generations of radicals that stretched from the beginning of the Cold War to its end and that supplemented the left’s traditional com- mitments to socialism with a politics of national liberation, radical democracy, and liberalism. By doing so, the dissertation hopes to trace the development not only of Walzer’s own commit- ments but also those of the socialist left. Caught in a period of frequent defeat and bitter contro- versy, socialists found themselves forced into a state of constant revision, as they moved from the libertarian socialism of the 1950s and 60s to the social democratic coalitions of the 1970s and 80s to the liberalism and humanitarianism of the 1990s and 2000s. Opening with the collapse of the Popular Front after World War II, the study follows Walzer’s search for a new left with radi- cals around Dissent and through his involvement in civil rights and antiwar activism. Examining his arguments with an older left over Vietnam and with a younger left over Israel, it then tracks Walzer’s movement toward the left-liberal politics of the 1970s and it concludes with chapters on his major works of normative theory and his later turn to humanitarian interventionism. By revisiting his career, In Socialism’s Twilight seeks to identify some of the competing impulses of socialists in the second half of the twentieth century and explore the sometimes crea- tive, sometimes unsatisfying ways they engaged with them. It also hopes to ask some of the questions facing the left today: How did these socialists reconcile their early commitment to radi- cal democracy with their later one to the welfare state and social democracy? How did they pair their socialism with a politics of national liberation? How did a figure like Walzer, in part radi- calized by the Vietnam War, end up with a more positive view of American force? And how do the often conflicting ideals of the long New Left sit with the socialism of a new generation? Table of Contents Introduction: The Perilous Tightrope 1 I. Starting Out in the Fifties 1. Coming up for Air 16 2. The Smoke from Budapest 37 3. Out of Apathy 67 II. Obligations and Disassociations 4. Among the Philosophers 93 5. Unconventional Politics 121 6. Socialists Go to War 149 III. Liberalism and the Art of Separation 7. Whoever’s Left 168 8. The Moral Standing of States 197 9. Justice Here and Now 230 Conclusion: Banners in Prague 262 Bibliography 278 i Acknowledgements This study is a work of connected criticism and there many immediate and distant connections that have helped shape its formation. As a supervisor, Casey Blake has been a dedicated mentor, a close and critical reader, and an exemplar of the engaged historian. So have my other committee members—Sam Moyn, Eric Foner, Elizabeth Blackmar, and Ira Katznelson—and Andrew Delbanco, Alan Brinkley, and Mae Ngai, who have all been unnecessarily generous with their time, wisdom, criticism, lunches, and conversation. A teaching appointment in Columbia’s Contemporary Civilization program offered me the fortunate chance to relearn the classics in political and social thought from Plato to Freud with a dozen bright and sharp-witted sophomores, and I never ceased to find a welcome ingathering of historians, literary critics, political theorists, and other interdisciplinary interlopers at the Center for American Studies. I also owe a great debt to my fellow graduate students, whose shared interests and enthusiasm were always a spur to writing and whose solidarity, especially during our union drive, was a spur to action, and for that and more, I owe thanks to Nick Juravich, Tim Shenk, Wes Alcenat, Pollyanna Rhee, Colin Jones, Noah Rosenbaum, Ana Kielson, Lindsey Dayton, Jessica Lee, Stephen Wertheim, Jude Webre, Zach Roberts, Christine Smallwood, Tom Meaney, George Aumoithe, Matt Karp, Gabe Winant, Tony Wood, Katrina Forrester, and Jamie Martin. The Nation and Dissent have also been important intellectual and political homes. It has been at both magazines that I learned to argue as well as write and edit, and I am especially grateful to have worked with and continue to work with Katrina vanden Heuvel, Richard Kim, Roane Carey, Sarah Leonard, Atossa Abrahamian, Michael Kazin, Michael Walzer (who also generously lent me two mornings to conduct an oral history with him), Maxine Phillips, Marshall Berman, Mark Levinson, Tim Barker, Nick Serpe, Kaavya Asoka, Colin Kinniburgh, Natasha Lewis, Madeleine Schwartz, and Jed Purdy. Above all, I owe my gratitude to Laura Marsh, whose intellectual curiosity, editorial instincts, keen sense of humor, and shared political commitment helped fuel the work that went into this study even in the latest of moonlit hours. ii Introduction: The Perilous Tightrope From the vantage point of the late 1990s and early 2000s, American socialism had arrived at a strange impasse. Socialism in the United States had always been a quixotic enterprise, toiling more on America’s margins than its center. Yet for nearly a century and a half, it had also played its modest part in shaping American visions of equality and freedom, whether at the turn of the century as the Socialist Party began to take off, in the 1930s and 40s during the heyday of the Popular Front, or in the 1970s and 80s when a socialist-labor coalition had helped bolster the liberal flank of the Democratic Party. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, however, socialism had found itself in a moribund state. Several magazines still published under its banner—In These Times, New Politics, Dissent—and the Democratic Socialists of America, a group founded out of the rubble of the Socialist Party and the New Left (a “remnant of a remnant,” as Michael 1 Harrington put it), continued to exist as a small pressure group.1 But socialists had no significant institutional presence, no sizable electoral party or large-scale membership organization, and no nationally known avatar. Socialism, in fact, had become such a dubious appellation that some of its longtime allies had started to turn down its organizations’ endorsements. “The ‘S’ word’ is definitely not something most politicians want to have anything to do with in this climate,” a lead DSA activist told the New York Times after Jesse Jackson turned down the group’s support.2 To make matters worse, many on the left who continued to identify as socialists no longer appeared to be all that socialist. One might have thought the end of the Cold War would have liberated radicals from the failures of actually existing socialism. “We no longer have this albatross on our backs,” Cornel West, then a leading member of DSA, explained to a reporter in 1990. “Our values can now be played out.”3 But the opposite proved to be true. Witnessing the attack on the welfare state by Republicans and Democrats, socialists felt forced to form a “left wing of the possible” if they were to salvage what little remained of American social democracy. This was an understandable conclusion after the disappointments of the first two thirds of the twentieth century. But without a set of specific policies to anchor their vision, the socialists of the possible found themselves vulnerable to the whims of a political culture and, in particular, a Democratic Party that was moving ever farther to the right. Once plagued by what Daniel Bell called “the unhappy problem of being ‘in but not of’ the world,” now socialists were forced to be too much of the world: Their programs and policies were, as the New Republic reported in 2013, now “best defined as a collection of economic positions a click to the left of liberal Democrats.”4 1 Robert Fitrakis, The Idea of Democratic Socialism in American and the Decline of the Socialist Party (New York: Garland, 1993), 280 2 Michael Oreskes, “Jackson to Shun Socialist Backing,” The New York Times (December 3, 1987) 3 Frank J. Prial, “Socialists Ponder a Changed World,” The New York Times (October 10, 1990) 4 Daniel Bell, Marxian Socialism in the United States (Princeton: Princeton, 1967), 5. Marc Tracy, “The Dean of ‘Dissent,’” The New Republic (April 10, 2013) 2 On foreign policy, these socialists of the possible also appeared disoriented. Long committed to an internationalism that sought to supersede national difference, they had hoped the end of the Cold War might mark a new age of global cooperation in which the program of decolonization might finally be achieved. Likewise, as more and more governments became liberal democracies, many hoped the binaries of the Cold war would be replaced by a new world order founded on a common set of liberal, if not socialist, visions of equality and liberty. Yet, neither proved true. Far from a program of egalitarianism, the globalization inaugurated by the end of the Cold War led to regimes of enforced austerity and economic liberalization that sapped the resources and social protections of weaker southern economies to the benefit of stronger northern ones.
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