>If you have a theory on how to undergo the kind of transformation I
>was satirizing, let's hear it.
>
>Anyway, it is possible to start off as goldilocks and end up as the
>minotaur. As I see it, the key ingredients in the process are a kind
>of absolute conviction of moral rectitude coupled with a strong
>authoritarian streak, and a tenacious adherence to some form of
>dogma--that's what I mean by stalinist.
Transformation (sudden or gradual) from the Left (anarchism, socialism, communism [be it of the CP, Trotskyism, Maoism, libertarian-communism, etc.], revolutionary nationalism, feminism, environmentalism, etc.) to the Right (fascism, fundamentalism, cold-war liberalism, neo-liberalism, etc.) has been a constant feature of modern politics, and I don't believe it is easy to develop an overarching theory to explain the phenomenon in question comprehensibly. I'd chalk it up to the fact that the Right has always had more power (social, economic, political, & cultural), and high-profile defectors from the Left could often count on the Right to bankroll their post-Left careers (e.g., selling conversion stories).
What happens much more often than radical conversions from the Left to the Right, however, is simple demobilization (withdrawal from active political participation). To take an example from the CP, even at the height of their popularity in the USA, many individuals often remained the CP members for no more than several years. Breaks with the Party didn't usually come as spectacular ruptures motivated by radical ideological conversions. Most of the times, folks just drifted away, when they felt that the Party ceased to be an effective political organization and/or that the Party work came to conflict with their personal & professional lives:
***** They were growing older, beginning families, becoming settled in their careers. Many simply no longer had the time they once had for Party activities. And many no longer felt it was worth the effort....Leaving the Party [however] did not [necessarily] mean leaving the left....
Once the Cold War had ended the Party's effectiveness and legitimacy, many academics faced the same dilemma [William] Parry did ["I felt I had to decide between being an active Communist and being a teacher in an American University and I had chosen the latter and I had to live with it"]. Had the Party's mission seemed as important as it had been during the late 1930s, many of its academic members would not have resigned. As they later showed, when they refused to cooperate with the anti-Communist investigations of the 1950s, they were ready to make considerable sacrifices for something they believed in. But the Party was no longer that kind of a cause. "Most of us were more sophisticated, not so anxious," Philip Morrison explained....
A few of the Berkeley physicists who had remained in the Party during the war describe it as "rather ineffective." By 1945 their unit had disbanded. "There was no point to it and nothing we could do." Similarly, Stanley Moore recalls that "most of" what his tiny Party group at Reed College did in the late forties "was a waste of time." Robert Rutman was similarly disillusioned:
"I was primarily concerned with the solution of problems in this country first and foremost, and...one of the reasons I came to leave the Communist Party was because I felt that too much attention was directed to analysis of what goes on in the Soviet Union or in Czechoslovakia, and too little attention was directed to what I thought were the real problems here."
Rutman's disappointment was typical. For him, as for so many other academic Communists, the Party no longer seemed to be, if it had ever been, a useful vehicle for political action. Once they sensed the futility of the enterprise, these men and women began to disengage themselves from the CP.
Few of these former Communists cite a specific incident that disillusioned them. Their disaffection was a cumulative process and one that depended on a combination of factors -- development in their own lives as well as in the international situation and in the Party itself....
They [most academic Communists] no longer had time for Party work. Mark Nickerson had been an active Communist as a graduate student at Johns Hopkins in the early forties, but after he moved to the University of Utah in 1944 he began teaching full-time, directing a large research program, and going to medical school. "I didn't have much time left for political activity." As a result Nicherson began to drift away from the Party. "I went to fewer meetings," he recalled. "I think in one case I didn't go around at all for four or five months, and then I went again for a month, for one or two meetings." The Party's displeasure with Nickerson's spotty attendance hastened his final departure....Other people's priorities changed. As their careers became more important to them, they were no longer willing to meet the demands of what had become an increasingly irrelevant political movement. "I was tired of it," one man explained, "fed up with it, and I had to devote more time to my serious scholarly work." The biologist Marcus Singer gradually lost interest in left-wing politics altogether. "As I went along in my career," he recollected,
"I realized that my personal talents do not lie either in the direction of politics or in the direction of economics, that my talents lie particularly within my field, and so I devoted myself more and more to research and to my family which had started then and had grown."
For Singer, as for most academics, leaving the Party was painless. Though some people outside the academy found the break traumatic, academics had no such problems. Since they had never lived in the self-enclosed left-wing world that so many other American Communists inhabited, their lives did not change when their politics did. They had another community to rely on, the academic one, into which they were already fairly well integrated by the time they left the CP. In addition, their separation from the Party was so gradual that few of them could give a specific date on which they stopped being Communists.... (Ellen W. Schrecker, _No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism & the Universities_, NY: Oxford UP, 1986) *****
To repeat, radical conversions from the Left to the Right (a la David Horowitz) have been few, though the few have commanded our disproportionate attention. Most individuals have either moved from one strand of the Left to another or (perhaps more commonly) ceased to be politically active, and the main reasons for withdrawal have been changes in overall political environments (domestic & international), pressures on time placed by families & paid employment, feelings of futility that built up when the size of a movement shrank, etc.
Yoshie