In an article on the lamentable Oliver Stone and his new propaganda-masquerading-as-a- thoughtful-book-on-history, Sean Wilentz, an historian, close friend and defender of the Clintons and enemy of George Bush, makes a interesting observation on the evolution of the Left at the time of the Cold War, which divided liberals and leftists:
"On one side stood those such as Reinhold Niebuhr, J.K. Galbraith, Walter Reuther, Chester Bowles, and Eleanor Roosevelt, who believed that liberalism and communism were fundamentally opposed, with respect both to social ends and political means. On the other side stood those who believed that liberalism and communism existed on a continuum, with political freedom at one end and economic freedom on the other, and who believed further that, through peaceful coexistence and competition, each side could learn from the other. And there was a third group, of Communists who believed that liberalism was an underdeveloped politics, useful as a cover for their own higher ends.
The first group, the liberal anti-Communists, included the great majority of New Deal liberals, and gravitated to groups such as Americans for Democratic Action, which sought to expand the reforms of the New Deal while isolating Communists at home and supporting the containment of Soviet influence abroad. The second group, the anti-anti-Communists, included liberals who found their voice in the Progressive Party, who saw the West and especially the United States as the aggressor in the cold war, and who regarded liberal anticommunism as virtually indistinguishable from—indeed, as complicit with—the anticommunism of the right."
"On one side stood those such as Reinhold Niebuhr, J.K. Galbraith, Walter Reuther, Chester Bowles, and Eleanor Roosevelt, who believed that liberalism and communism were fundamentally opposed, with respect both to social ends and political means. On the other side stood those who believed that liberalism and communism existed on a continuum, with political freedom at one end and economic freedom on the other, and who believed further that, through peaceful coexistence and competition, each side could learn from the other. And there was a third group, of Communists who believed that liberalism was an underdeveloped politics, useful as a cover for their own higher ends.
The first group, the liberal anti-Communists, included the great majority of New Deal liberals, and gravitated to groups such as Americans for Democratic Action, which sought to expand the reforms of the New Deal while isolating Communists at home and supporting the containment of Soviet influence abroad. The second group, the anti-anti-Communists, included liberals who found their voice in the Progressive Party, who saw the West and especially the United States as the aggressor in the cold war, and who regarded liberal anticommunism as virtually indistinguishable from—indeed, as complicit with—the anticommunism of the right."
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