Marty Peretz is feeling particularly bitter and vindictive today. He goes after Ned Lamont and leftists in the Wall Street Journal. He gets personal.
It’s really quite remarkable how someone like Ned Lamont, from the stock of Morgan partner Thomas Lamont and that most high-born American Stalinist, Corliss Lamont, still sends a chill of “having arrived” up the spines of his suburban supporters simply by asking them to support him.
He calls Corliss Lamont our “most “high-born American Stanlist”. I wonder, is that fair?
Corliss Lamont (March 28, 1902 – April 26, 1995), was a humanist philosopher and civil liberties advocate. He was born in Englewood, New Jersey to Thomas W. Lamont, a Partner and later Chairman at J.P. Morgan & Co.. Lamont graduated as valedictorian of Phillips Exeter Academy in 1920, and magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1924. In 1924 he did graduate work at New College University of Oxford, while he resided with Julian Huxley. The next year Lamont matriculated at Columbia University, where he studied under John Dewey. In 1928 he became a philosophy instructor at Columbia and married Margaret Hayes Irish. He received his Ph.D. in 1932. Dr. Lamont taught at Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, and the New School for Social Research (see New School University).
Lamont’s political views were socialist. During the 1930s he was sympathetic to Soviet communism, but never joined the Communist Party, and later came to reject his earlier views. In 1953 he published a pamphlet entitled Why I am not a Communist.
A leading proponent of civil rights, he served as a director of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1932 to 1954, and subsequently as chairman until his death, of the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, which successfully challenged Senator Joseph McCarthy’s senate subcommittee and other government agencies. In 1965 he secured a Supreme Court ruling against censorship of incoming mail by the U.S. Postmaster General. In 1973 he discovered through Freedom of Information Act requests that the FBI had been tapping his phone, and scrutinizing his tax returns and cancelled checks for 30 years. His subsequent lawsuit showed the surveillance had no justification in law, and set precedent for other citizens’ privacy rights. He also filed and won a suit against the Central Intelligence Agency for opening his mail.
Sounds like he was a socialist. Kind of like Rep. Bernie Sanders of the great state of Vermont. It looks like he flirted with Communism in the 1930’s, but repudiated those beliefs, even going so far as to write the famous pamphlet Why I am not a Communist. But don’t think he is going to be satisfied with smearing Corliss Lamont as a Stalinist, because he gets George McGovern too.
George McGovern, a morally imperious isolationist with fellow-traveling habits, never could shake the altogether accurate analogies with Henry Wallace. (Wallace was the slightly dopey vice president, dropped from the ticket by FDR in 1944, who ran for president on the Progressive Party ticket, a creation of Stalin’s agents in the U.S.) Mr. McGovern’s trouncing by Richard Nixon, a reprobate president if we ever had one, augured the recessional–if not quite the collapse–of such Democratic politics, which insisted our enemy in the Cold War was not the Soviets but us.
Nice. Peace candidates are all Soviet agents, and the blogosphere secretly works for al-Qaeda.
The blogosphere Democrats, whose victory Mr. Lamont’s will be if Mr. Lamont wins, have made Iraq the litmus test for incumbents. There are many reasonable, and even correct, reproofs that one may have for the conduct of the war. They are, to be sure, all retrospective.
Do we really have to go to the archives to show you that the criticisms of the war from Left Blogistan are not retrospective? Does Peretz not understand that opposition to the war (before it started) pretty much created the blogosphere?
If Mr. Lieberman goes down, the thought-enforcers of the left will target other centrists as if the center was the locus of a terrible heresy, an emphasis on national strength. Of course, they cannot touch Hillary Clinton, who lists rightward and then leftward so dexterously that she eludes positioning. Not so Mr. Lieberman. He does not camouflage his opinions. He does not play for safety, which is why he is now unsafe.
First of all, it is total horseshit to equate the center with people that put “an emphasis on national strength”. Peretz puts an emphasis on raw aggression in the Middle East. Those two things are not synonymous, no matter how easily they can conflated in the minds of the electorate. If grinding our armed forces and credibility and budget down to the bone in Iraq is a projection of national strength, then I’m Brad Pitt. And, yes, this was all predicted by Left Blogistan.
One more thing, Marty. Since you and many of your TNR buddies insist on casting charges of anti-Semitic sentiments at principled critics of Israel’s policies, why should I give you the benefit of the doubt on this?
The Lamont ascendancy, if that is what it is, means nothing other than that the left is trying, and in places succeeding, to take back the Democratic Party. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Maxine Waters have stumped for Mr. Lamont. As I say, we have been here before. Ned Lamont is Karl Rove’s dream come true. If he, and others of his stripe, carry the day, the Democratic party will lose the future, and deservedly.
Would you like it if I suggested you hate black people?
And don’t be so sure that we can’t get to Hillary.
Like progressives would take advice from Peretz.
We’re likely to get more of this stuff from him and his like over the next few months to November. I don’t know why he doesn’t simply fold up shop and merge with National Review. TNR is going down. In a year or two, people will be asking, ‘Marty who?’
Peretz’s problem is that he thinks because he married into money, he has a right to run his little part of the world; and that because Lamont was born to it, he doesn’t.
Ah, the last minute attacks are always so indicative of the high road taken.
A bit of trivia re Corliss Lamont. He was the author of the “Crime Against Cuba” Oswald was passing out when he got into the altercation that led to his arrest in New Orleans.
The pamphlet had had several printings. Curiously, or not, the CIA had purchased quantities of exactly that particular edition that Oswald was handing out.
For sourcing on that, see Jim DiEugenio’s book “Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case.”
More trivia. Jim originally did the research for that project in the context of preparing a screenplay. But when he opened the trades one day and read that Oliver Stone was doing JFK based on the same story, Jim turned his research into a book instead.
that’s good trivia.
to the general voter is:
Pay no attention to the men behind the curtain. And don’t even think about challenging the Status Quo.
The blogosphere may be lending their support to Lamont, in terms of time, talent and treasure, but there hasn’t been a mass exodus of “leftists” moving to CT to vote for him; it’s still going to be up to the people of Connecticut to decide tomorrow. It’s time for people over patronage…democracy is messy, Marty…
I wish I could find the exact quote, so forgive me if I got this wrong, but I’m pretty sure Pete Seeger said “Anybody with any sense back in the 1930s was a Communist.” (Or words to that effect) So I wouldn’t exactly hold Corliss Lamont’s brief affiliation with and subsequent repudiation of the Communists against him.
It sounds like this Peretz guy hasn’t gotten over the 1950s yet.
I wish I could find the exact quote, so forgive me if I got this wrong, but I’m pretty sure Pete Seeger said “Anybody with any sense back in the 1930s was a Communist.”
Not quite. Anybody with little sense back in the 1930’s was a communist. That is anybody who looked at the pretty slogans and ignored the reality. That episode in Lamont’s life shows that back in the thirties Corliss Lamont showed stupendously bad judgement. Doesn’t make him a bad person, just someone who for a brief period of time sipped a bit of the Kool-Aid, and soon afterwards realized its sweet taste was concealing a poisonous essence.
In fairness, reporting out of Russia in the 1930’s was not particularly good. The essentially totalitarian nature of communism, as opposed to its basis in utopian ideals, only became truly clear as the 1930’s unfolded. During the period of the Great Depression, capitalism certainly looked fatally flawed to a good many people, and the pro-labor aspects and effective rhetoric of Marxist thinkers, as opposed to, say, Leninist thinkers, had a great deal of appeal.
It wasn’t really until Kruschev came out against Stalin that the true brutality of Stalin’s regime became fully known and fully accepted.
It wasn’t just the right that conflated all progressive ideas as communist, for a while the left wasn’t certain where the boundaries lay either.
FDR found a middle path, but it wasn’t clear it would work while it was being unrolled.
In fairness, reporting out of Russia in the 1930’s was not particularly good. The essentially totalitarian nature of communism, as opposed to its basis in utopian ideals, only became truly clear as the 1930’s
No. The fact that collectivization was a man made catastrophe wasn’t clear. The sheer scale of the Terror wasn’t truly clear. But the totalitarian nature was on proud display. The Bolsheviks made no secret of the fact that all political dissent, of any political stripe – from left wing socialist and out – was punishable by death. For me this is little different than the flirtation of many conservatives (e.g. Churchill) with fascism in the twenties and thirties.
Take it up with the author of the quote. He was there, you and I weren’t (or at least I’m guessing you weren’t unless you are a lot older than I am). In a situation where huge numbers of people were unemployed and Hoovervilles and hobo jungles were common features of the landscape, it’s not hard to see how the idea of a workers’ paradise would catch hold, especially when you consider that this was before reports of things like famines in the Ukraine were making it to the Western world (and after unions like the IWW were making a small-c communistic dent in the American psyche, enough so that one of Roosevelt’s postmaster generals looked at Wobbly activity out here on the Left Coast and described the country as “47 states and the Soviet of Washington.”)
The fact that Lamont, Seeger and pretty much anyone but the hard-core Kool-Aid drinkers repudiated Communism suggests that they were more a product of their times than victims of bad judgment. Sure, it looks that way to us in 2006, but in the middle of the Depression I dare say times was different.
First Peretz became unhinged somewhere in the late 1990’s. He managed to hold on to me and many other subscribers because of his support of Gore (one of his former students).
When he sold most of the TNR to a pair of conservatives and started hiring people like Sullivan and Beinart it was clear that there was no point in reading the magazine anymore. That’s why subs are down by over half.
Leaving all that aside, what do Lamont’s father and grandfather have to do with his positions on the issues? Isn’t that guilt by association, the cheapest type of ad hominem trick?
What Peretz represents is the death rattle of the neo-conservative ideology. They see that their program for world domination has failed and rather than admitting a flawed goal they are looking for scapegoats. The current theme seems to be blaming the Bushies for bad implementation, blaming the left blogosphere for being prescient and/or blaming the democrats for trying to bring back democracy.
Unfortunately policy reverses like this can result in a new wave of rightwing repression. We have the examples of “who lost China” in the 1950’s which led to McCarthy, “who lost Vietnam” in the 1970’s which led to Reagan, and now “who lost Iraq” which will lead to ???
Oh, you mean like “Neoconservativism hasn’t failed, it hasn’t even been given a chance yet?”
Heh. I can’t wait for that excuse to be trotted out. (In fact I’d be surprised if it hasn’t been already.)
Not unlike the inhabitants of the White House today IMHO.
The Perpetually Perfervid Peretz by Jack Schaeffer