July 29, 2018
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
Another Prophet of
Cultural Marxism—Who Has Had Tremendous Influence in America: Howard Zinn
Friends,
Back
on July 25, I remitted on to you two significant but concise essays which in
some way attempted to define and describe “Cultural Marxism”: one by longtime
conservative writer William Lind, and the other by scholar Dr. Paul Gottfried. [http://boydcatheyreviewofbooks.blogspot.com/2018/07/july-25-2018-my-corner-by-boydcathey.html]
The
term “cultural Marxism” is used so frequently these days to mean so much of
what traditional conservatives, those of us on the Right, oppose. And, indeed, I have used it repeatedly; I
believe it incumbent on us to actually understand its origin, its history, its major
formulators and exponents, and its objectives—and, certainly, its language and
how its utlized “devil terms” now affect our culture and politics.
In
past columns I have mentioned early figures like Frantz Fanon, whose volume The Wretched of the Earth (1961) was an
early clarion call against “European [white] colonialism” and a call for “liberation”
against the “oppressive [Western] power structures” imposed on “third world
peoples.” When I was in grad school, Fanon’s book formed an integral part of my
Modern Social Movements seminar.
About
the same time I was completing my MA at the University of Virginia, Saul
Alinsky was publishing his now-famous Rules
for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals (1971). Alinsky’s
objective was to produce a practical handbook for those whom he called “community
organizers,” basically an alliance of students, certain “oppressed groups” in
our population, and professional “social justice warriors,” who could utilize
it in efforts to organize disaffected racial minorities (e.g., blacks, Latinos),
lower-income communities, and, eventually, illegal immigrants and sexual
minorities (e.g., feminists, LGBTQ groups). These segments of the population,
working in tandem, would engage in revolutionary, albeit generally non-violent,
activity to gain social, economic, and political influence, while at the same
time forcing the dominant liberal American culture, with its touted “values” of
tolerance and generalized “freedom,” to give way. Implicit in Alinsky’s message
is the imperative to take advantage of the so-called “open society” created by
American liberalism over many decades, to shame it, so to speak, by calling to
mind its “failures” and demanding it make good on its promises of “full
equality and equal rights” and “insuring social and political justice.”
Indeed,
it has been the transformation of such liberal watch words as “[sexual] equality,”
“equal rights,” and “[racial] justice” and their employment in a revolutionary
context—in politics, academia, the media, and in entertainment—that has facilitated
the empowerment of Alinsky’s social justice warriors. For they argue, with some
justice, that the older liberal narrative never fulfilled its original promises
and that only a radical response could hope to achieve the logical conclusions
of liberal premises.
And
in so presenting their narrative they have managed to either silence, dismiss,
or absorb much of traditional American liberalism. Thus, in the face of
cowering political leaders of the older, “liberal” Democratic Party, newer
generations, affected by Alinsky’s radical methodology—New Yorker Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,
California Senator Kamala Harris, and New Jersey’s Cory Booker, not to mention
older faces like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren—now seem bent on converting
the party into their vehicle. And so-called “moderate liberals,” like Governor
Roy Cooper in North Carolina, fearful of the growing power of his leftist base
centered in university cities like Durham, Chapel Hill, and Asheville, and
responding to the organized Leftist demands of black and LGBTQ pressure groups,
pushes the removal of Confederate memorials and monuments, despite polling that
indicates that a majority of white North Carolinians oppose
removal. Yet, Cooper, like other
formerly “center left” Democrats is responding to his evolving radical Leftist power
base and the need to remove “symbols of white supremacy.”
There
is another author whose work has had a tremendous influence on community
organizer social justice warriors and who has exercised a significant role in
shaping the national—and local—conversations we now are impelled to have about
race, gender, equality, justice, and rights. He is Howard Zinn, and his major
opus is the volume, A People’s History of
the United States (1980). For Zinn, the heroes of American history are all
members of the “under class,” oppressed blacks, women, native Americans,
excluded sexual minorities, immigrants; the villains are “puritans and planters, settlers and pioneers, merchants
and shippers, bankers and industrialists, all of them promoting a nation
infected by greed, racism, and nativism.”
It is Zinn’s history, which has sold around three million copies
since its publication, that has become the popular standard “history” for students,
and has increasingly influenced academia (despite the volume’s departure from the
standards of legitimate historical research), Hollywood, and the Mainstream
Media…and now, also politics and the newly-dominant narrative of the Democratic
Party (and even with repercussions among the GOP who, given their intellectual
bondage to many of the same liberal principles that once prevailed in the
Democratic Party, are unable to mount successful opposition to its
encroachments).
Given the history—given the progression from Antonio Gramsci and
Georg Lukacs, through the flourishing of the Frankfurt School at Columbia
University and its broad and incredible influence in nearly every sphere of
American life—given such significant voices as Frantz Fanon, Saul Alinsky, and Howard
Zinn, whose additions and adjustments to, and modifications of the older Marxist
message and narrative have been so critical in shaping our current
circumstances—given all this, it is no longer enough to decry “cultural Marxism”
as simply a variant of Communism intent on subverting American institutions,
transforming and reshaping them. A fuller and more nuanced understanding is
required if the defenders of what is left of our culture and its institutions
shall succeed in their beleaguered opposition.
I pass on an essay which in some detail discusses Zinn and his
influence.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The America That Howard Zinn Made
The radical historian had an unequaled impact on our country's post-patriotic narrative.
Some are still in college.
Others are older, at the zeniths of their careers. Two generations have come of
age saturated by Howard Zinn’s A
People’s History of the United States and its disdain for
legacy America. Having sold an estimated three million copies since 1980,
Zinn’s book is the nation’s best known American history. The fifth and final
edition (2003) ends with the World Trade Center attacks and the war on
terrorism.
A volume that began as a New
Left hatchet job has become canonical. First popular with the general public,
not historians, it has gradually turned into a cardinal source for academics,
book editors, and film producers. Zinn’s view of U.S. history permeates what
students learn about the country’s past from grade school to grad school.
His history has two sharp
dimensions. The heroes are Arawaks, Cherokees, and Creeks, the Grimké sisters,
Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, John Brown, figures who had previously been
peripheral in U.S. history. Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, the Wobblies,
Emma Goldman, Eugene Debs, Sacco and Vanzetti, Rosa Parks, the Rosenbergs,
Betty Friedan, and Attica prisoners are at the center of the narrative.
America’s great 19th-century cities are “death traps of typhus, tuberculosis,
hunger, and fire.” The people who built America were cotton pickers, factory
girls, and breaker boys.
The villains are puritans and
planters, settlers and pioneers, merchants and shippers, bankers and
industrialists, all of them promoting a nation infected by greed, racism, and
nativism. Zinn thus reverses accepted narratives of American progress and
growth, deflating revered national figures and ignoring past accomplishments.
For Zinn and his admirers,
previous accounts of American history are smokescreens and calculated lies. He
uncovers the cover-up, which is part of his volume’s appeal and thrill. This
outlook grandly invalidates a mountain of distinguished historical scholarship
that preceded his book. As Harvard historian Jill Lepore once observed, Zinn’s
morality play has special appeal for the Holden Caulfields fighting the eternal
contest against phonies and fat cats instead of examining tangled social
contradictions. Under one cover, A
People’s History offers an uncomplicated, emotional, and
persuasive version of how the U.S. came to be what it is now.
Zinn’s impact can scarcely be
overestimated. Here’s Jon Meacham, 49, formerly of Newsweek and Random House,
talking to Boston public radio and trying to sell his new book, The Soul of America. Howard
Zinn “pulls the camera back in a hugely effective and illuminating way,”
Meacham professes. “I think all of us work in the reframing that he undertook.”
Meacham considers himself a
liberal bellwether. In his ambitious new history, injustice, racism, and
right-wing extremism repeatedly tempt the American soul. The U.S. remains
tasked with redemption. It must duly prevail over political darkness and fear,
redressing the nation’s original sins. Trying to reconcile Zinn’s paradigm and
heroes with a benevolent American soul proves difficult, however. Meacham trots
out victories over familiar demons from the Ku Klux Klan to Joe McCarthy. But
ambivalent about the nation’s record beyond protest and making amends, he can
only conclude with smooth platitudes about the “dangers of reaction.”
There’s Spenser Rapone, 26,
the West Point “commie cadet” whom the Army ejected after anti-American media
stunts, insults, and pronouncements on the “long march through the
institutions.” Rapone openly declares Zinn to be an inspiration. At West Point,
he was a protégé of history instructor and Muslim activist Rasheed
Hosein, now on administrative leave.
Before A People’s History caught
fire, Zinn was a recognized Nation magazine
writer and civil rights activist. Like Senator George McGovern, he had been a
bombardier in World War II and was a force in the Vietnam antiwar movement. At
Boston University he was becoming president John Silber’s bête noir. His Postwar America (1973) was
a short, derivative, readable, “revisionist” survey of U.S. foreign policy and
the civil rights movement. Seven years later came A People’s History, a prequel
and reprise of the earlier book, applying the New Left critique to the entire
U.S. past. Actor Matt Damon’s 2003 audiobook and subsequent narration of the
2004 television documentary You
Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train vastly broadened Zinn’s
audience and reach (albeit less than a decade before he died in 2010 at 87).
In A People’s History, Zinn boldly
borrowed from earlier archival work. He did not offer footnotes or even much of
a bibliography. Zinn was not a serious scholar. Critics and historians panned
it as a simplistic cut-and-paste job. Harvard University historian Oscar
Handlin condemned the “deranged quality of this fairy tale” and its
“anti-Americanism” in the American
Scholar. In the New
York Times, Columbia University’s Marxist Eric Foner—who would act
as Zinn’s lifelong champion—called the book “a deeply pessimistic vision of the
American experience.”
Zinn’s version of the
nation’s past featured the invasion of the New World, Indian removals, robber
barons, Jim Crow, The Jungle,
masters of war, and anti-communist hysteria, the stuff of Woody Guthrie, early
Bob Dylan, and Phil Ochs. Its later chapters are studies in New Left
triumphalism. Zinn professed that the “elite” and its “system” perpetuate
vicious social and economic inequality through the seductive language of
liberty and equality, and thus with a minimum of coercion. “The American system
is the most ingenious system of control in world history,” he declared, “the
system can afford to distribute just enough wealth to just enough people to
limit discontent to a troublesome minority.” His nebulous “people”—what
American historians once called the “have-nots”—are tricked or prevented from
realizing their own interests, just like those Republican voters in Kansas.
When accused of bias, Zinn
was arrogant. “I’m not troubled,” he retorted, since “the mountain of history
books under which we all stand leans so heavily in the other direction.” But he
knew perfectly well that race, class, and
gender—bottom-up history—had long been the culture’s holy trinity,
captivating academics, media, and style-makers.
The messianic Zinn brushed
off the complaints. “Objectivity is
neither possible nor desirable,” he said. “It’s not possible because all
history is subjective, all history represents a point of view. History is
always a selection from an infinite number of facts and everybody makes the
selection differently, based on their values and what they think is important.”
Well sort of—but not quite, and really not at all for learned scholars who
value impartiality, detachment, and neutrality.
A People’s
History is not without appeal, however, and rightists who have
never read it condemn the book too quickly. Zinn’s critics often ignore the
wide concerns Americans of all political backgrounds feel over past injustices
and the desire to rectify them in the present. Just because Zinn called
attention to America’s shortfalls does not mean they are invented or false.
Zinn’s
charisma was ultimately employed in the service of himself. He masked his
righteous anger and narcissism in pieties about saving America, while pocketing
millions of dollars in royalties. But what were his motives beyond celebrity?
In 2013, Ron Radosh confirmed Zinn’s early Communist
ties. His efforts to undermine confidence in the U.S. and its historical elites
were evidently intentional—and wildly successful.
Zinn hoped to stir a “quiet
revolution,” he once said, “not a revolution in the classical sense of a
seizure of power, but rather from people beginning to take power from within
the institutions.” That takeover is fait accompli. What he pushed with brio and
showmanship throughout his long career has altered establishment creed and
priorities, Antonio Gramsci-style.
Forty years after it was
written, A People’s History seems
more ideologically akin to Bernie Sanders than Ta-Nehisi Coates. Still, Zinn
did more than anyone else to turn the prevailing American narrative from one of
national pride and triumph to centuries of dishonor. His book’s impact on how
the nation’s post-patriotic establishment thinks is unique and possibly
accelerating.
Gilbert T. Sewall is co-author of After
Hiroshima: The United States Since 1945 and
editor of The Eighties: A Reader.
.
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