Belief In Hell As The Basis For Faith

Our Corey is in The New Yorker! I was going to boost it for him but he got to it first.

But I’ll do it anyway.

The political convert was the poster child of the Cold War. The leading ideologues of the struggle against Communism weren’t ancient mariners of the right or liberal mandarins of the center. They were fugitives from the left. Max Eastman, Arthur Koestler, Whittaker Chambers, Sidney Hook, James Burnham, and Ignazio Silone—all these individuals, and others, too, had once been members or fellow-travellers of the Communist Party. Eventually, they changed course. More than gifted writers or tools of Western power, they understood what Edmund Burke understood when he launched his struggle against the French Revolution. “To destroy that enemy,” Burke wrote of the Jacobins, “the force opposed to it should be made to bear some analogy and resemblance to the force and spirit which that system exerts.”

Corey’s puzzle, per the subtitle: “defectors from the left have often given the right a spark and depth. Why doesn’t it work the other way around?”

We’ll get to that. But first I would like to report a coincidence. I’ve just been brushing up on Max Eastman myself. (Here’s a good Dissent piece, in case you need a refresher or introduction.) That’s because I’ve been reading about a different forgotten figure — the great cartoonist Art Young! Young is the subject of a new Fantagraphics books that is absolutely tops, and if you are the sort of person who might be remotely interested in anything of the sort, you should get it. It is To Laugh That We May Not Weep: The Life and Art of Art Young [publisher]. The Kindle version is cheap on Amazon [amazon associates link]. I don’t know how long that happy condition will last. If you don’t wanna pay, this site is pretty ok, too. The thing is: the new book contains lots of high quality reproductions of the original art, rather than just scans of the poorly printed originally published versions. The original art, properly reproduced, just pops to an incredible degree. The crosshatching. I’m in awe. Tomorrow or the next day I’m going to try to work up an appreciation of Young’s art. He was a pen and ink master. Just look at this nice stuff!



But politics. First, politics.

Max Eastman and Art Young worked together on a radical socialist monthly, The Masses. Eastman was editor (while still working on his dissertation under John Dewey); Art Young was house cartoonist. The two of them ended up co-defendants in major trials, not once, not twice but two-and-a-half times. (The third was a re-trial.)

First, in 1913, they were sued for libel by the Associated Press for alleging – truthfully! – that the AP had effectively suppressed news of the Paint-Creek Cabin-Creek Strike. Young drew a cartoon. Wikimedia has it. Wikipedia:

The strike came to national attention in July 1913, cartoonist Art Young published a cartoon in The Masses called “Poisoned at the Source” depicting the president of The Associated Press, Frank B. Noyes, poisoning a well labeled ‘The News’ with lies, suppressed facts, slander, and prejudice. It was accompanied by an editorial by Max Eastman claiming that the AP had not only suppressed the facts of the strike, but that the AP had a profound conflict of interest. Despite the AP’s denials, its local AP representative, Cal Young, was also a member of the military tribunal passing judgment on the strikers. The AP responded with two suits of criminal libel against Eastman and Young on November 1913 and January 1914. Both suits eventually were dropped. The AP’s specific reasons for dropping the suits, and its general relationship to labor, are explored in Upton Sinclair’s 1919 exposé The Brass Check.

Then Eastman and Young both got prosecuted for violation of the Espionage Act in 1918. Basically, they were accused of interfering with recruitment. Again Wikimedia has the offending cartoon. Funnier is the account of the second trial for espionage (after the first ended in mistrial.) Wikipedia:

The second trial began in September 1918, and it was as full of humor and irreverence as the first, perhaps more humorous for the historian than for Young. Throughout the trial, Young had the tendency to nap, an act that brought him dangerously close to being charged with contempt of court. Afraid Young would get into more trouble than he already was, his attorneys insisted he be awakened and given a pencil and pad. Young took the pencil and pad and quickly completed a self-portrait. The drawing, “Art Young on Trial for His Life”, appeared in the Liberator in June 1918. The cartoon depicted Young slumped in a chair, dozing the trial away. Young’s propensity for napping worked to the defendant’s advantage during the closing arguments. Prosecutor Barnes, wrapped in an American flag and giving a moving speech, told a story of a dead soldier in France. This soldier, Barnes claimed, “is but one of a thousand whose voices are not silent. He died for you and he died for me. He died for Max Eastman. He died for John Reed. He died for Merrill Rogers. He demands that these men be punished.” Roused from his slumber by the impassioned speech, Young exclaimed, “What! Didn’t he die for me too?” The beautiful oration successfully ruined, the second jury was unable to convict or acquit. Eight jurors voted for acquittal and four for conviction. It would be the last time Young appeared in court for the charges, as they were dropped after failing twice to garner any convictions.

Good story!

Back to Corey’s New Yorker piece. (But we’ll get back to Young before we’re done!) The occasion for Corey’s question about the asymmetry – why are left-right converts influential, right-left converts not so much – is a pair of recent right-to-left shifts: Derek Black and Max Boot. (CT readers know Boot, and Corey just posted about him. Black is the subject of a recent book by Eli Saslow. [amazon])

Let’s first ask: is he right? (We don’t want to haul off and try to explain a non-fact.) Former leftist radicals have not merely joined but, to a very considerable degree, defined the modern American right. Made the modern conservative movement. Yep. True and undeniable.

Has no former right-winger-turned-left defined the shape of liberalism, or the left, to a comparable degree? Corey lists candidates: “Arianna Huffington, Michael Lind, Bruce Bartlett, Glenn Loury, and, in Britain, John Gray.” I might add: Gary Wills, David Brock. As Corey says: clearly none of these is it. I’m a fan of Michael Lind. He’s great. Brock’s Media Matters has been a significant, steady force. But I couldn’t honestly say that any of them have significantly shaped what liberalism or the left is. There are no former right-wing, now-left-wing ‘thought leaders’. Not the way ex-leftists on the right have literally made the modern conservative movement.

Is there a reason? Corey’s answer is seemingly rather simple (and I’ll simplify it further by quoting a single line from the end.)

Revolutions don’t react to or borrow; for better or worse, they create an untried form. They have no need for defectors, no need to turn the other side. As Hannah Arendt taught us, they always begin something new.

I think this is not quite it. First, while this is no doubt the rhetoric of revolution, the reality is always a bit more mixed. Second, not all leftism is revolutionism. Let alone all liberalism. But there’s something to this simple answer, all the same.

Let’s start here. Corey’s piece makes me think that ‘reactionary’ is kinda ambiguous. Type-1: a fantatical, dogmatic, uncompromising, iron adherent to some (former) order. Joseph de Maistre, say. But there is a second sort – the recovering former communist, say. Type-2. Sometimes those turn out plain type-1. The fanaticism of the convert. I don’t suppose there is daylight between David Horowitz and Joseph de Maistre, temperamentally. But often the recovering leftist turns out weirdly broad-minded, or pseudo-broad-minded, in an interesting way. The type-2 reactionary can think outside the box … but only in another box. (This needs another post.) It’s more like extreme-minded than truly broad-minded. It’s funny the degree to which conservatism – allegedly a softer, moderate temperament – has been a movement built on the backs of type-2 reactionaries without a moderate bone in their bodies. Just an unusually wide spread of extreme bones.

What about this? Political conservatism is hell-based theology. There is a leftist Bad Place – way worse than most ordinary folk have ever witnessed – and the main thing we must do is keep out of it. So you need a steady stream of witnesses who have been there. (Even if it’s just Bill Buckley having been to Yale and having witnessed the fresh hell of God’s exclusion from those ivy-clad environs.) This first-hand testimony founds the political theology.

So the left isn’t distinguished from the right by some dream of an as-yet-unseen heaven. It’s distinguished by being not based on a nightmare of as-yet-unseen hell.

Now, as to the value of such visions? There was a time when the left, outside Russia, was wishfully deluded about conditions in Stalinist Russia. In those circumstances, apostate former worshippers of the God that Failed were powerful witnesses. But there is a stopped-clock weakness if that is all you’ve got. For the right, the problem with everything the left does is not that there is something obviously wrong with it. Yet, somehow, it’s necessarily the road to hell. So the conservative movement will be effectively lead by those who have, allegedly, walked that road back from hell. They have trod that sad path of good intentions gone bad.

Then again, demonization of the opposition isn’t a right-wing monopoly. Is the paranoid style so different, left-right-wise? Why shouldn’t the left be just as eager as the right to have converts from the other side testifying ‘it’s hell there!’

Back to Art Young. He started as a good, solidly midwestern Republican, drawing cartoons of a heroic Benjamin Harrison (of all things!) But he drifted left, then left some more. Corey quotes Daniel Bell (one of the more thoughtful left-right shifters): “Every radical generation has its Kronstadt.” Kronstadt: site of an egregious Stalinist atrocity – and hypocrisy. Slaughtered workers, then celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Paris Commune over their dead bodies. Young had a couple of Kronstadts, even before he found himself on trial. He was a sketch artist, covering the Haymarket Riots. He lampooned a different Harrison – Carter Harrison, mayor of Chicago – for being soft on anarchist elements, too lenient concerning labor protests, and bending over backwards to appeal to all nationalities. From the book:

Young himself would later say of the trial and execution of four men arrested for the Haymarket bombing that “not until several years later did I discover that there was another side to the story” and of a cartoon he drew for an anti-Anarchist book, “if the dead can hear, I ask forgiveness now for that act. I was young and I had been misled by the clamor of many voices raised to justify a dark and shameful deed.”

One of Young’s more popular cartoon creations was the Poor Fish. Hooked by the saddest stuff, wisdom-wise.

Like Ben Stein, criticizing Ocasio-Cortez: “There’s nothing wrong in a society that allows billionaires to exist as long as the billionaires don’t lock you up in prison and put you in a firing squad.” That’s a perfect, modern Poor Fishism.

It’s good to be a recovered Poor Fish – smarter than being Ben Stein – but not exactly heroic. Getting back to Corey: the trouble with Boot’s conversion is that his time in the conservative trenches doesn’t seem to have given him special local knowledge or insight, beyond what is more or less apparent to outsiders. Max Boot is a smart guy who was seriously confused, and some Poor Fish scales have fallen from his eyes. That’s it.

Corey has this good catch. On the one hand, Boot wanted to be part of a ‘party of ideas’, not just buy into cracker-barrel philosophy. Once upon a time we had Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative! Now it’s just Trump! But Corey catches him admitting later that, when he finally got around to reading Goldwater’s book – after Trump got elected – it seems kinda nuts in parts. As the Poor Fish preaches: “Wars are necessary.” And: “My country, right or wrong.” Also: “the meek shall inherit the earth,” “Life is what you make it,” “We’ll always have rich and poor,” and “there’s always room at the top.”

It’s like someone sells a Poor Fish a box of wisdom and … out pops a Poor Fish, selling a smaller box of wisdom!

Liberalism – progressivism, the left – isn’t going to remake itself as the philosophy with the special power to see further than a Poor Fish. If Art Young had tried to make a cartoon career out of narrating and re-narrating his harrowing escape from the ideological clutches of Benjamin Harrison, via the Haymarket Riots, that would have been … not without local interest, but self-limiting, as ideological achievements go. (If you want to read his biography, it’s on Archive.org.)

More needs to be said. It’s not that everything every recovering conservative has said about their leftward path is Poor Fish-bait. Why are, say, Michael Lind and Garry Wills smart apostates from the right but not therefore lefty leadership material? That’s an interesting question. But this post has gone on too long and I haven’t gotten to hell proper. Let’s briefly visit.

Art Young had a hell-and-back thing. Presumably it started with admiring Doré’s Dante illustrations as a lad. In 1893 he published Hell Up To Date, The Reckless Journey of R. Palasco Drant, Special Correspondent, Through the Infernal Regions, As Recorded By Himself (Archive.org has got that, too, and the graphics quality isn’t so bad). Then, in 1901 he followed up with Through Hell with Hiprah Hunt. (You can get a cheap Kindle version of that one. Or just try out Wikimedia.) Then, in 1934, Art Young’s Inferno: A Journey Through Hell Six Hundred Years After Dante. It isn’t really political. It’s one of those ‘annoying people get fitting punishments’ things, mostly. It gets somewhat more political as the author himself does. But, here again, the theme that capitalism is, secretly, Hell – or that some businessmen are bastards who deserve what’s coming to them – is not the stuff of which serious revelations are made. It’s unpretentious but graphically fun. It’s impossible to imagine Young offering up his vision of Hell, as a convert to the left, and speaking about it the way, say, Arthur Koestler spoke to the right. Corey quotes him: “all you comfortable, insular, Anglo-Saxon anti-Communists resent us as allies – but, when all is said, we ex-Communists are the only people on your side who know what it’s all about.”

You don’t know what the radical future requires unless you’ve once been too soft on Benjamin Harrison!

Eh. What else have you got?

That’s enough for Part 1. Part 2 will be my appreciation of Young’s style and artistic evolution, if I can work up to getting around to writing it.

Congrats again to Corey hitting the big time. The New Yorker, man.