The Red Scare Revisited, Part II

The almost amusing echos notwithstanding, there are some important ways in which our current cultural moment is different than that described by Hook. To bring these out we can make use of the useful set of ideas introduced by Hook in his title.

Heretics and Conspirators 

A ‘heresy’ for Hook is a view falling outside of an orthodoxy of any sort, and he is quite willing to defend the rights of heretics so defined. Minority opinions, unpopular ideas, scandalous judgments, religious apostasy, mutterings unwelcome in polite society—pretty much any speech or thought someone somewhere puts beyond the pale is welcomed by Hook with open arms, and he makes no exceptions of the ideas animating Communism. Reading and writing about and teaching the ideas of Marx, Lenin, Stalin or Mao should not land anyone in any kind of hot water. Nor should trenchant criticisms of capitalism, democracy, the Bill of Rights, Christianity, or anything else held sacred in the US. To the contrary, Hook argues college students should be exposed to such ideas, and—importantly—the ‘democratic responses’ to them. In classic liberal fashion Hook celebrates a cacophony of ideological voices as a vital contribution to the common good.

What does not deserve protection are the actions of those engaged in conspiracies to overthrow the state. Conspiracies also promote unorthodox views and question our political institutions. But unlike heresy, a conspiracy, according to Hook, “seeks to attain its ends not by normal political or educational processes but by playing outside the rules of the game.” (22) Rather than competing openly in liberalism’s ‘market place of ideas’ and working to gain converts through the force of the better argument, conspirators “ruthlessly destroy… all heretics and dissenters…” on their way to revolution. (22) Conspiracy is about power and the use of political institutions as a means of wielding it in service of a nakedly political—and anti-democratic—aim.

A conspiracy is a threat to liberalism because of its shameless willingness to pretend to honor liberal values for its own authoritarian purposes—it is the method of anti-liberal politics of both the left and right. Conspirators will clamor for their own civil rights while working tireless on behalf of regimes that would deny them across the board. For Hook, it is too much to ask that such treachery be protected by the First Amendment, and foolishness to turn over the levers of political, economic, scientific, and educational power to those who actions originate in authoritarian ideologies. 

Hook argued, then, that while liberalism can tolerate illiberal ideas, it is madness for it to turn a blind eye to illiberal political parties actively working to undermine democracy.  To be a Communist in the 1950s was to be part of such a conspiracy, Hook believed with some justification. By “Communist” Hook meant “member of the Communist Party of the USA”, a group populated by men and women who were unfailingly loyal to the USSR and hostile to the US. Party members went beyond having sympathies for Marxist thought or Communist politics, or believing the US to be fundamentally unjust, or capitalism inherently oppressive. This is because, Hook tells us, Party membership was conditioned on a willingness to obey without question any orders coming from the Kremlin, including those to infiltrate and undermine American institutions. Excluding Communists, who were effectively foreign agents, from positions where they could more readily inflict their damage was not a violation of anyone’s civil rights—it was common sense. 

Hook accused the cultural vigilantes and tribal liberals of the same confusion—they both mixed up heresy and conspiracy. The vigilantes did so when they acted as though anyone who talked about or showed the slightest sympathy for Marxist ideas—or even more mundane socialist, democratic socialist, or capital ‘D’ Democratic ideas—was a Communist conspirator working against America. For their part, the tribal liberalists insisted, in the face of compelling evidence to the contrary, Communist conspirators were entirely a figment of McCarthy’s fevered imagination. Turning a blind eye to the likes of Judith Coplan and Alger Hiss, Hook’s tribal liberals assumed with religious certainty the innocence of anyone tracked by the FBI or hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee or put on a Hollywood blacklist, so confident were they that only heretics were to be found in the US. The only conspiracies they recognized were to be found on the right.

This too finds some contemporary purchase. The extreme vitriol directed towards The New York Times’ 1619 project consistently moves from challenging its claims to vilifying the work an attempt to infiltrate schools with anti-American ideas as part of a revolutionary agenda. Nor does the rush to pass legislation against the teaching of Critical Race Theory or ‘wokeness’ reflect a considered judgement about their scholarly rigor. These too are blasted as a covert ways of smuggling anti-American ideas into schools and workplaces and even the military. Increasingly, conservatives act as if any deviation from a bowdlerized account of the slavery, the civil rights movement, contemporary race relations, gender or the standing of sexual minorities amounts to a sneaky attack on all things American—it’s all conspiracy. 

On the other side, there are those on the left who struggle to even acknowledge the glaring ease with which those on the right produce example after example of ideologically motivated material showing up in elementary schools, college and university DEI programs, and corporate training seminars to everyone’s surprise. The standard responses of ignoring this parade of embarrassments, or pointing out that that strictly speaking they’re not really examples of Critical Race Theory exactly, miss the point, which is that a lot of it is just really bad and certainly looks like the quiet imposition of highly tendentious political ideas where they don’t belong. Liberals have been similarly inept in responding to the longer running parade of embarrassments occasioned by so called ‘cancel culture’ as they cycle through a set of replies that begins with denying there’s any such thing, moves through recognizing but minimizing its badness, and then ends with the consolation of it’s being less bad than fascism anyway. No conspiracy here—just healthy heresy. 

Heresy No, Conspiracy Yes?

For all the ways the current political landscape resembles that of Hook’s time, some critical differences are evident, the biggest being that the 1950s culture wars were fought by two sides still deeply committed to American liberalism. To be sure, both had illiberal tendencies that were often over-indulged in the heat of cold war battle, but by and large cooler heads reliably prevailed. Most on the left pictured the likes of Pete Seeger, Zero Mostel, and Edger G. Robinson when they thought of victims of the Red Scare, not actual spies or traitors. They might have been wrong about the Rosenbergs, but American liberals generally had any little sympathy for Stalinism and a great deal for the Bill of Rights. Most of those on the other side were similarly sincere in their belief that there was something fundamentally good about the US and nothing good about totalitarian states, and they were glad for the sacrifices made to defeat real fascism. At their best conservatives and anti-Communist liberals like Hook struggled to find a way to balance combating what they took to be a real threat and a continued commitment to freedom and tolerance. Hooks despair notwithstanding, history bore out his belief that “it is under liberal leadership that democratic institutions and the rights of heresy have the best chances of being preserved.” (83)

The illiberal tendencies are still there on both sides, but it seems now they are being deliberately and openly stoked by people who really ought to know better. A full analysis of the growing influence of the stridently intolerant left on the Democrats is for another time, as is an account of the even more ominous rise of an organized ‘post-liberal’ right and its cynical eagerness to use Trump’s GOP as muscle. But an irony is the growing willingness on both sides to resort to the ways of conspiracy. The methods sometimes differ—the right prefers the strong arm of the law to control what can and cannot be taught, while the left opts for no-platforming and declarations that some things are just not up for debate. Both sides excuse their raids on the conspiracy toolbox in the name of necessities in a political culture reduced to raw struggles for power.

As faith in liberal democracy wanes, political speech is increasingly seen as nothing more than a weapon, good when used for our side but a baneful threat when used by the other. Within a narrow ban of orthodoxy there is room for disagreement, but no further. Heresy is no longer welcome, never mind celebrated. For both sides today, Hook’s slogan has been reversed—it’s conspiracy yes, but only our own.