``The basic assumption of modern liberalism is that freedom is involved in an ongoing, all encompassing struggle against a dangerous enemy, totalitarianism...'' Reuven Kaminer
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(I can't decide whether is a good idea or bad idea to post this...what the hell.)
No. The source of this the basic assumption is the US neoconservatives and the current criminal government of the United States---and neither are on particularly friendly terms with liberals. Both the neocons and their reactionary government are attempting to resurrect the old Cold War mentality and have managed to scare liberals to support rightwing policies. It worked during the cold war and it is effectively working again. Too bad. And too bad most liberals were born on boneless chicken ranches.
Technically, in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Arendt attempted to link Nazism with Stalinism, and not fascism with communism. Her argument was that both Germany and Russia were run by power crazed mad men who installed secret police apparatus that in turn managed a vast prision industrial complex devoted mostly to destorying any semblence of individual agency, and where the model citizen was Palov's dog.
On the other hand, I admit, that Arendt made the equivalence between Stalinism and Communism very easy and rhetorically lapsed into it herself in the last chapters of the book.
If you actually read Origins you will find that Arendt was making a Marxist argument against Nazism and Stalinism. This is not exactly what most neocons want to read, since much of the early development and initial characteristics of totalitarianism in Origins can be easily turned around to critique the great US neoliberal project to conquer the earth through economic domination, i.e. imperialism which is the middle section of the book.
It is primarily a neoconservative spin on Origins that links fascism with communism and paints both as ideological evil. Conservatives and reactionaries through-out the 30s-60s played the same game in order to pull the US public to the right and set-up the rationale for the various red scars throught out the period and certainly the Cold War. It worked on liberals notably Truman, Kennedy and Johnson.
But it didn't work on the student movements, the civil rights movements and anti-war movements. Since Stalin was dead and most of the politically active were too young to remember anything about the 1930s or WWII, these groups used the communist scare routine of the McCarthy era to great critical effect against Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon.
Arendt didn't disavow this work. But for the most part she dropped the references to the Russians in later works and continued her Marxist view in other writings: The Human Condition (1958), On Revolution (1963), Eichmann in Jerusalm (1963) and Crises in the Republic (1969).
I guess it needs to be said, Arendt was a marxist and socialist who thought Stalin was a totalitarian dictator. I think I can say accurately that once Stalin was gone, Arendt thought that Russia reverted to a plain despotism under Kruschev.
Whether that is an accurate representation of Arendt or not, remeber these are not exactly liberal credentials in the US, they are radical credentials.
In any event this is from a letter Arendt wrote to Jaspers, June 3, 1949:
...At the moment, the general political atmosphere is dismal here, paricularly at universities and colleges (with the exception of the very eminent ones). The Red Hunt is going full steam, and American intellectuals, particularly those who have a radical past and who have become anti-Stalinists over the years, are to some degree falling into line with the State Department, partly because they are genuinely disappoined with Stalinist Russia and partly because they have grown older. That doesn't mean, of course, that American foriegn policy isn't very often truly excellent. It means that these people are ready to put up with anything and are beginning to see in the FBI an instrument with which they can and may, for example, settle disagreements among the faculty. The consequence is that faculty colleagues don't speak openly with each other anymore, particularly at the small, state-supported colleges; and the general fear that at first held sway only in Washington among civil servants now lies like a poisonous cloud over the intellectual life of the whole country. Not only are people afraid to utter the name Marx, but every little idiot thinks he has the right and duty to look down on Marx now. And this all in a milieu in which a few years ago you had to be brave to say that Marx had not solved all the world's problems. At the universities themselves there is a battle between faculty and students going on under the surface, because the students naturally become all the more prone to Communism the more intolerantly and `properly' their teachers behave. There are of course, other things going on, and what I've just said here should be taken very much cum grano salis. The repulsive aspect of it is that someone like Hook, for example, if he's at odds with Sartre, whom he can't fit into the formula Stalinist versus anti-Stalinist, will then declare that Sartre is `a reluctant Stalinist.'(I don't have much use for Sartre, but that's beside the point.)....'' (Correspondence, 137p)
Other notes. From the above you can see she didn't have much use for Hook. Irving Kristol loathed and dreaded Arendt, but Arendt was friends with his wife. I think it was also Trilling's wife who was friends with Arendt and not Lionel. I am not sure what Clement Greenberg was doing there since none of these people knew much about the visual arts. It was probably his crapolla about formalism that appealed to Trilling and Howe probably. Most of this information comes from Podhoretz, Ex-Friends.
Also I didn't think much of Elizabeth Young-Bruehl's biography. Well, it was bad, but I had to read it. I got the distinct impression Bruehl didn't understand much of Arendt's work, particularly some of the more lyrical phases of thought that refer back to Arendt's youth and her love of the German Romantics. Y-B's biography is a lesson to other biographers, don't bother if you can't fully understand the ideas and the history.
Bruehl's essay that spawned this thread was terrible. Bad writing, bad analysis or lousey reflections--whatever. If The Nation editors can't see a perhaps naive stooge for the neocons, what's the point?
Although I don't like Brunel's writing, I feel a little sorry for her. She should have been more astute. No American is invited to Venezula without a propaganda purpose from one side or the other. We're in the middle of an on-going CIA operation there, Duh.
CG