[ASDnet] Social Democrats USA]

Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema crdbronx at erols.com
Mon Jul 9 07:39:40 PDT 2001


In response to Chris Lowe's thoughts on Elliot A.

I have a few recollections that may be relevant. First, though, I recall from one of those write-ups in the NYTIMES, probably from when he was appointed to something years ago. It said he went to Elizabeth Irwin High School, which is a long-time "progressive" school in Greenwich Village. Friends have told me that during the McCarthy Era, their CP leadership (and intellectual cadre) parents sent them there so as to shield them from possible red-baiting in the public schools. I think, (not quite sure) that the Rosenberg orphans went there. I don't know exactly how this fits in with Abrams, but it's intriguing.

Chris Lowe wrote:


> But the poking has also made me think that seeing this all through the
> lens of Max Schactman & the SPUSA split is problematic, possibly as much
> so as if one were to interpret DSA that way.
>
> A biographical snippet in a paper on a website connected to _Vietnam
> Generation_ says that Abrams came from a liberal family and at Harvard
> in the late 1960s had anti-New Left politics that had him in loose
> association with social democrats and socialists; the author suggests
> that at bottom he was a Humphrey liberal. Anybody know anything about
> the SP at Harvard in that period, & its relationship to that split?

At the time, at Harvard, there was a guy named Steven Kelman who made a brief career out of being the left anti-New Left voice. He came from an SP family, as it appeared, and wrote a book about how he was the voice of reason opposing the SDS. I read the book back about 1971, and recall bits, including a fairly saccharine passage about how he was in charge of shepherding the, by then, quite ancient Norman Thomas around during a visit to Harvard. Haven't heard anything of Kelman in recent years, but his book probably is still to be found somewhere.

Now this:


> My understanding about AIFLD and related
> AFL-CIO Cold War operations was that they were headed by people with
> Lovestoneite backgrounds going back to ca. 1960 at least. Is that
> wrong? Were those people in the SP and then SDUSA? If so, were they
> Schactmanites?

I never read it, but Ronald Radosh, of all people, wrote a book about the general topic of unions and the cold war.

Here I think you're right --


>
> A possible new basis for alliance may lie in religion. Since his
> conviction and pardon, Abrams apparently has been President/Executive
> Director of something called the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which
> promotes "Judeo-Christian" values in specific areas, (particularly
> science & medical ethics [anti-abortion, birth-control & probably
> genetic engineering], marriage law [anti-gay & lesbian marriage], and
> foreign policy [esp. promotion of religious freedom, though implicitly
> perhaps esp. defense against persecution of Christians]) as a means to
> coordinate activism by conservative Catholics, Jews and Evangelical
> Protestants. The chair of EPPc's board is Jeanne Kirkpatrick, & it
> includes Fr. Richard John Neuhaus (who edits _First Things_ & apparently
> once was Lutheran before becoming a conservative Catholic).
>

It impresses me that the motivation for a lot of New Leftists who moved to the right had a good bit to do with sexual politics. They tend to express it publicly in calls for responsibility in family relations, particularly as this affects the poor, and to demand sexual restraint, enclosure of sexuality in marriage, etc. Christopher Jencks's differences with the Institute for Policy Studies, and his affirmation of the concept of the "illegitimacy" of children whose parents aren't married is an example. I suspect that for many of them, though they are too smart to admit it, the invasion of academia by women brought changes they find distasteful not only on the level of job openings but also because women academics have demanded new notions of what constitutes scholarship.

This kind of thing has several implications. For one thing, it amounts to an endorsement of limited government, and its corollary, restrictive and non-universal social welfare provision. This, perforce, moves its proponents rightward towards a pro-corporate agenda, as it leaves individual people more and more at the mercy of the market.

Since it is difficult to publicly advocate this kind of thing (and for the normally ethical) to advocate inwardly to itself, a turn towards traditional religiosity is a logical outcome. Hence the phenomena you describe. Interestingly, "Fr. Richard John Neuhaus (who edits _First Things_ & apparently once was Lutheran before becoming a conservative Catholic)" was, during the Vietnam War, a strongly anti-war Lutheran pastor. A few years ago, having become increasingly conservative, he converted, and they expedited his ordination. (He was single.).

I keep looking out for a cheap copy of his THE NAKED PUBLIC SQUARE, and haven't read it. However, there were extensive excerpts in the WALL STREET JOURNAL. He decried the mounting secularization of the society and the culture. Did this mean he disapproved of changing sexual mores and gender values? To be fair to him I'd have to look more closely.

I haven't seen this review. Glendon, of course, was the Pope's representative at one of those UN conferences on the status of women, and, as I recall, allied the Catholic Church with very right-wing Islamic régimes, in support of conservative family policies, opposition to abortion and gay rights.


> The other point of interest here is that Abrams wrote a review of a book
> by another EPPC board member, Mary Ann Glendon of Harvard Law School, on
> Eleanor Roosevelt and the International Declaration of Human Rights, for
> the journal _First Things_ (again, devoted to promoting conservative
> religious values in public life) that speaks respectfully, without
> obviously agreeing, of the Catholic Church's continued social teachings
> against unrestrained market forces.

This is an example of internal contradictions both for the right and the left. Someone like Abrams, who probably comes down, where it matters, as a market conservative on economic questions, finds himself in alliance with a proponent of Catholic social thought. This mirrors the contradiction for those leftists who are economically progressive, but also support progressive gender policies, abortion and gay rights, etc.

Catholic social teaching seems to have two major origins. One is that Catholicism's historical roots as a mass ideology are in a somewhat earlier stage in the European early modern period, where capitalism had to operate under conditions where a sense of feudal obligation still commanded some legitimacy. The other is that the Catholic Church is large enough and has a longer enough historical perspective to transcend some of the narrower considerations of immediate profit and national advantage that motivate people who make political and managerial decisions in capitalist states.

This has made elements in the Church defenders of the poor in some places, most particularly in the Third World, where Catholic social teaching, in practice, sounds like a version of what the New Deal was in the United States. It doesn't challenge the basic legitimacy of Capitalism much but wants to insist on less poverty, more responsibility from ruling élites, etc. I'm sure if I was an inhabitant of the Third World I would dream of something like this.

At the same time, the principle of subsidiarity in Catholic social teaching does pretty much parallel some very conservative themes of the right in the United States. Subsidiarity, as I read about it in one of Father Andrew Greeley's books, and in Michael Novak, is the notion that services for poor people must always be carried out by the lowest bureaucratic level possible. There is a preference here for the small, the communitarian, the familial and familiar, the intimate. There is a distrust of government here that is not unlike the one the Republicans put forward, except that it doesn't celebrate the market. It does, of course, legitimize one large institution, the Church itself.

As you say,


> It also seems to me to signify
> another evidence that Bush, Jr. was a stealth hard-religious-right
> candidate, whose "compassion" is not at all a code-word for moderation
> as it was portrayed, but for evangelical zeal. Just as SDUSA and the
> AFL-CIO gave "liberal" cover to Reaganite foreign policy, it looks like
> Abrams role will be to bring coordinated, "ecumenical" religious cover
> to Bush foreign policy.

All these contradictions, like any contradictions, offer opportunities to the right and to the left.

Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema



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