Obama's There Is No Alternative bipartsan illusion

James Santel, a speechwriter in the Obama White House, has some important observations in his review of a collection of Barack Obnama's speeches, Orator-in-Chief The American Scholar 04/28/2017.

He does a good job of relating Obama's chronic appeals for bipartisanship, which he often presented as an end in itself, with the larger ideology of neoliberalism, one of whose key concepts is TINA (There Is No Alternative), the idea that all the major ideological questions prior to the fall of the Soviet Union have been solved. The basics of liberal democracy and economic liberalism, i.e., the "free market" economics of deregulation, privatization, low wages, labor "flexibility" (loss of job protections and unions), and the continuing reduction of the welfare state, have triumphed in the world. The only real questions now remaining, or legitimately remaining, are technical issues of how to implement the policies to make life and business more agreeable for corporations and the super-rich.

The most famous ideological formation of these ideas are those associated with the "end of history":

Even more exciting was what Obama’s candidacy seemed to promise about the future of politics in the United States: that it would disappear, a kind of domestic unfolding of what Francis Fukuyama predicted in The End of History and the Last Man. Again, this interpretation was encouraged by Obama’s version of American history. As he told it, the moments emblematic of the American character – the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments; the women’s rights and civil rights movements; the New Deal and the Great Society – were instances in which Americans came together to expand the meaning of liberty and justice. His speeches cast these actions not as the triumph of liberal politics, as the victory of one viewpoint over the other, but as the result of our shared values, never mind how deeply or even violently we have disagreed over the meaning of those values throughout history. Obama’s rhetoric suggested that if we simply followed our instincts and stayed true to our principles, liberalism would reign triumphant, and all Americans would recognize this development as a blessing. [my emphasis]

Politics is about conflict. So the idea of the "end of history," and its direct predecessor of an earlier decade, the "end of ideology," didn't actually assume that all conflict in politics and government would end. Only that any fundamental question that called into question the legitimacy of capitalism, or even opposed a welfare-state concept to the neoliberal one, was unacceptable and had to fade away.

But the corporate interests and the radical right were not willing to pretend that history had completely ended. What the End of History meant substantively was the collapse of the center-left parties as defenders of the welfare state. We saw that with the Democratic Party in the US, with the social-democratic parties in most of Europe. The process occurred as well, at a more accelerated pace, in much of Latin America. When it came to fundamental economic issues, and to political measures associated with the welfare state, in practice it was a one-sided surrender.

Santel describes how Obama's conception of bipartsanship played directly into the Republicans' plans to further rig the system to the benefit of the One Percent:

Even Obama in his more combative moods – during his 2011 speech on economic inequality at Osawatomie, Kansas, for instance – hardly drew lines in the sand, lest he disprove his own argument that we can move beyond partisanship. The first task of his speeches was always to convince Americans that they were in basic agreement on the ends of government, long after the GOP’s actions had made clear that this simply was not true. Obama often talked of politics as requiring compromise. “The point is, you need allies in a democracy,” he told graduates at Howard University’s commencement last year.

But what happens when those you would court as your allies cast themselves as your enemies? What happens when your opponents not only disagree with you, but harbor a completely different understanding of America’s founding principles? What happens when they not only challenge you, but question your legitimacy? What happens when they flock to a leader who calls into question the very pillars of democracy itself: a free press, the rule of law, and an educated citizenry?

Late in his Presidency, Santel observes, Obama made at least rhetorical admissions about the failure of his bipartisan vision:

His final speeches sounded notes of uncharacteristic somberness. In his final State of the Union (not included in this collection), Obama called increasing partisan rancor “one of the few regrets of my presidency.” At the memorial service for five Dallas police officers killed last summer, he said, “I’ve seen how inadequate words can be in bringing about lasting change. I’ve seen how inadequate my own words have been.”

And Santel calls the following passage from Obama's last address to the United Nations "a meditation on history as a tragic cycle, rather than an arc, steadily bending toward justice," the latter being a phrase of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s that Obama often evoked, in Obama's case as a soothing reassurance that history always progressed in a favorable way:

Let me conclude by saying that I recognize history tells a different story than the one that I’ve talked about here today. There’s a much darker and more cynical view of history that we can adopt. Human beings are too often motivated by greed and by power. Big countries for most of history have pushed smaller ones around. Tribes and ethnic groups and nation states have very often found it most convenient to define themselves by what they hate and not just those ideas that bind them together. ... Perhaps that’s our fate.

But even in that passage, it's notable that Obama called that alternative to his bipartisan notion of politics without ideological conflict "a much darker and more cynical view of history that we can adopt." Even in that moment of seeming insight in the flaw of making Bipartisanship itself a goal of one party when the other party had a more traditional idea of politics as conflict, Obama treats it with a postmodern flourish as an optional narrative. Not a recognition that the end of history and the end of ideology is a long way from having arrived.

Meanwhile, Obama has gone from the Presidency to offering end-of-ideology speech to Wall Street audiences at $400,000 a pop. For the few leaders that can steer left-of-center parties into corporate-friendly positions, there can be big paydays. Even when they leave their own party is a drastically damaged condition, as we have with the Democratic Party in the wake of the 2016 elections. Or maybe we should say, especially when they leave the left-of-center party in such a state.

Postpartisanship, classic Daniel Bell version (2): All the big problems are solved ("in the West")

Part 1 of this post looked at the political environment in which Daniel Bell was writing the essays collected as The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (1960; I'm using the 1965 revised edition here). He was very much a part of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) and others associated with their outlook. As discussed in Part 1, the CCF was covertly funded by the CIA to provide a highbrow counter to anti-Cold War advocacy by prominent intellectuals.

Daniel Bell (1919-2011)

Simply dismissing Communism and Marxism as we see today in the popular press was not an option for such a grouping of intellectuals in the 1950s. With the Communist world  - or the "socialist camp" as they themselves preferred to call it - then including the USSR, China and the Warsaw Pact nations, an effective Cold War approach for such a group would have to address their doctrines more directly. The End of Ideology represents Bell's attempt to perform just that task.

On one level, it seems odd to think of the 1950s as an "end of ideology" period. There were intense political controversies in the US at the time over issues like civil rights, the Korean War, and alleged Communist infiltration of the federal government (McCarthyism). Under their high risk nuclear doctrine known as Tripwire/Massive Retaliation, the Eisenhower Administration kept a lid on military expenditures, while the Democrats heartily criticized them for doing so. When the Russians put Sputnik into orbit in 1958, there was no shortage of bitter recriminations against each other among American politicians.

But the kind of Cold War end-of-ideology consensus represented by a group like the CCF didn't deny those differences. It included conservatives and left-liberals. And the focus of the CCF on combating Communism and promoting the Cold War in western Europe and the US meant that it couldn't be restricted to narrow conservatism. Ex-Trotskyists like Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol who later became famous as neoconservatives fit well into that niche, because they could address Marxist ideology on its own terms and also make arguments that liberals couldn't simply dismiss as die-hard anti-New Deal grumping. The more conservative among the CCF-type intellectuals might be more attentive to arguments from business for lighter regulation, the more left-leaning to efforts at establishing American-style democracy in the segregated Deep South states. But they were united in a triumphal narrative that considered any fundamental challenge to the American brand of democratic government and capitalist economy to be fully settled.

In the US, there was also the particulars of the two-party arrangement. Defenders of Southern segregation and champions of Keynesian economic policy were united in the Democratic Party, while the Republicans also had their conservative hardliners like Robert Taft but a President generally considered a moderate, and there were actual liberals within the Party. Ideological differences didn't break down obviously along party lines in many instances, and the need to fudge them within both parties was an incentive to fuzzy, non-ideological rhetoric around them.

Bell's The End of Ideology is not an argument that such controversies as civil rights or labor disputes were unimportant. It is an argument against any kind of fundamental criticism of the Cold War or the American political and economic system. Criticisms that fell outside that consensus were not respectable, not ones that would be recognized as valid by what Paul Krugman today calls the Very Serious People.

The End of Ideology is reminiscent of a Tom Friedman column. But without the taxi drivers. There are strains in society, he argues, but the comfortable assumptions of the society have moved beyond serious question. "The intellectual rehabilitation of American capitalism is being completed while the reality itself is rapidly changing," he writes. (p. 94)

The first essay in the book is called "America as a Mass Society: A Critique," based on a 1955 paper for the CCF. The 1950s saw a great deal of what became known as "mass society" analysis focused on the homogenizing tendencies of modern societies, a matter that was given new urgency by the rise of powerful mass communication instruments like radio and television and the mass mobilizations seen in Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union. One might think an argument that modern society had such homogenizing effects would be attractive to someone wanted to demonstrate an "end of ideology." But Bell rejects the notion:

The moralist may have his reservations or give approval - as some see in the breakup of the family the loss of a source of essential values, while others see in the new, freer marriages a healthier form of companionship - but the singular fact is that these changes emerge in a society that is now providing one answer to the great challenge posed to Western - and now world - society over the last two hundred years: how, within the framework of freedom, to increase the living standards of the majority of people and at the same time maintain or raise cultural levels. For these reasons, the theory of the mass society no longer serves as a description or Western society but as an ideology of romantic protest against contemporary life. [my emphasis] (p. 38)

Postwar US society, we might say, was the best of all possible worlds. It was certainly solving the problems of capitalism that had given rise to the classic Marxist challenge to that system. To admit that some fundamental problem exist in capitalist civilization, or in "modernity", would open the way to fundamental criticism that could not be allowed within the Cold War dichotomy.

But this wasn't a killer-capitalism or Gilded Age perspective in which the losers were losers because of their moral failures and the rich wealthy because of God's favor or their superior personal qualities. What looked to other like a threat to the integrity of individual people or even a menace to self-government was for Bell a virtuous solving of the problems of the last 200 years: "The mass society is the product of change - and is itself change. It is the bringing of the 'masses' into a society, from which they were once excluded." (p. 38)

And the problems of that society are reassuringly manageable:

The key question remains one of political economy. On a technical level, economic answers to the organization of production, control of inflation, maintenance of full employment, etc. are available. Political answers, in an interest-group society like ours, are not so easy. But in the long run the problems of the distribution of burdens and the nature of controls cannot be deflected. The "statist" needs of a semi-war economy with its technical imperatives must clash with the restless anti-statist attitudes of the corporate managers. The first Republican administration in twenty years, even though it represents these anti-statist corporate managers, is not able to change drastically the course of government spending. The international situation imposes the same imperatives on Republicans as on Democrats, and the semi-war that is made necessary by it inevitably casts government in the role of controller and dominator of the economy. The real political question in domestic affairs will then become which of the groups will bear the costs of the added burdens. [my emphasis in bold] pp. 93-4)

The Cold War is beyond respectable challenge in that view. Democrats and Republicans are agreed on the basic size and function of government. And the Cold War - forced entirely by the "international situation" and certainly not by some class interest, military-industrial complex or cynical political calculation - has the happy effect of keeping Republicans and Democrats in line with respectable opinion, the "conventional wisdom," as John Kenneth Galbraith dubbed it in The Affluent Society (1958).

He devotes a chapter to attacking C. Wright Mills' widely-known book The Power Elite (1956), pronouncing Wright to be "a 'vulgar' Marixst" (p. 62) for suggesting that there might be a dominant economic class in the US that also seeks to exercise political power. Mills, Bell argues, "is motivated by his enormous anger" because, after all, "Many people do feel helpless and ignorant and react in anger." He specifically objects to Mills' suggestion that there might be any internal business or other interest that might have some less-than-completely-patriotic interest in the Cold War. He writes (emphasis his), "United States foreign policy since 1946 ... was not a reflex of any internal social divisions or class issues in the United States but was based on an estimate of Russia's intentions." (p. 72) The Vietnam War would eventually make such criticisms much more prominent, however much Daniel Bell and the Very Serious People of 1960 might have wished to ban them from respectable discussion, as uncouth "anger" on the part of the "helpless and ignorant."

The chapter on "The Failure of American Socialism" makes an argument that is a staple of what American Republicans today proudly call American Exceptionalism, a phrase apparently invented by Joseph Stalin. The core of Bell's version of the argument is that socialists and anyone of similar inspiration are essentially religious fanatics, like the leader in the German Peasant War of 1524–25, Thomas Münzer, or the "radical Anabaptists," known for their theocratic city-state in Munster of 1533-5. Bell argues that "not only the anarchist, but every socialist, every convert to political messianism, is in the beginning something of a chiliast," which in Bell's understanding is someone engaged in "the ecstatic effort to realize the Millennium at once." (pp. 280-1)

Anabaptists, Commies: Daniel Bell thought they were all the same
Here Jan van Leiden (1509-1536) prepares for the beheading of one of his 16 wives, Elisabeth Wantscherer for criticizing him

His argument comes down to the fact that Communists and socialists are inherently fanatics and can't operate in democratic politics because they are determined to be Anabaptists hacking off heads. The "twentieth-century Communist" is completely stuck with Anabaptist fanaticism. "He is the perpetual alien living in the hostile enemy land. ... His is the ethic of 'ultimate end'; only the goal counts, the means are inconsequential. Bolshevism thus is neither int he world nor of it it, but stands outside." A socialist may step out of that rigid fanaticism, but then he cease to be serious about his inherently Utopian goal. He praises US Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas for being what he seems to regard as an amiable loser. "If [Eugene] Debs was, at bottom, the sentimentalist of American socialism, Norman Thomas has been its moral figure." Thomas, he says, was "a man whose instincts are primarily ethical" and that has made him "the genuine moral man in the immoral society." But as such, he found himself "caught inextricably in the dilemmas of expediency, the relevant alternatives, and the lesser evil." (pp. 289, 290)

Somehow in Bell's presentation, Thomas both retained his moral purity, making him like unto a religious prophet, but nevertheless avoided doctrinaire purity and engaged in ethical behavior by entering into the practical compromises of real-world democratic politics, and apparently both things made him an ineffectual figure. Because this whole socialism business is just un-American. Or something. He concludes, "For the socialist movement, living in but not of the world, [compromise] was a wisdom which it could not accept. Doctrine remained; but the movement failed." This being a highbrow presentation, it wouldn't have been prudent for him to add the implied, "And thank God for that! Dang Commies!!" But the tone fits.

A chapter taken from a paper presented to a 1958 CCF conference, "Two Roads From Marx: The Themes of Alienation and Exploitation and Workers' Control in Socialist Thought," indicates how central Cold War concerns were to Bell's end-of-ideology position. The paper has some nice things to say about social-democratic attempts to improve workers' control of the workplace, and even gives a nod to the unorthodox experiment in that regard then taking place in Yugoslavia, which had broken away the Soviet Union in 1948 in its foreign policy. He also praises in a limited way Georg (György) Lukács and his work on Hegelian influences on Marx' thought. Lukács had fallen out of official favor in the Soviet bloc, serving as he did as Hungarian Minister of Culture during the revolt of 1956. The postwar Soviet philosophical line strongly de-emphasized Hegel's influence on Marxist thought, which caused some amount of upheaval in East Germany philosophy and, in a perhaps surprising twist, retarded the study of physics in the Soviet bloc. Lukács and Ernst Bloch were particular targets of criticism for their Hegelian emphasis in Marxist philosophy.

But Bell wasn't going very far down the road of praising dissident East European thinkers:

What is remarkable, in fact, is that in the last few years in Europe, a whole school of neo-Marxists, taking inspiration from Lukacs, have gone back to the early doctrines of alienation in order to find the basis for anew, humanistic interpretation of Marx. To the extent that this is an effort to find a new, radical critique of society, the effort is an encouraging one. But to the extent-and this seems as much to be the case-that it is a form of new myth-making, in order to cling to the symbol of Marx, it is wrong. For while it is the early Marx, it is not the historical Marx. The historical Marx had, in effect, repudiated the idea of alienation. [my emphasis in bold] (p. 365)

That last idea is highly questionable, as his insertion of "in effect" indicates. It's notable that in this essay he undertook to show some grasp of the German philosophical background of Marxism, though he makes sure to tell us that even on his philosophical insight on alienation, "Marx's followers drew the 'vulgar' implications from these conclusions." And Marx "in effect" repudiated them anyway, in Bell's view. He concludes the essay by arguing that enlightened management techniques can address whatever problems might be bound up with the nature of work. "The fullness of life must be found in the nature of work itself," he argues, and "the work place itself ... must be the center of determination of pace and tempo of work." (p. 392) Whatever psychological-social problems of "alienation" might exist, they could be addressed as a technical management issue. Neither the class structure of society nor the organization of economic enterprises were especially relevant.

His epilogue is called "The End of Ideology in the West," and is several pages of polemics against Anabaptist Marxism. Here he's explicit about what he means by the famous phrase of the book's title: "The end of ideology closes the book, intellectually speaking, on an era, the one of easy 'left' formulae for social change." (my emphasis) American Exceptionalism has obviously triumphed, the great economic problems of depressions have been solved, American and European capitalism justified as the Hegelian end of history, and we can finally be done with those abominable "'left' formulae for social change."  Also all the troubling griping about modernity and class conflict and alienation and the truncating of democracy by the power of wealth and so on. From now own, we can follow the Very Serious People in contemplating "individual issues on their individual merits." (pp. 405-6)

Bell's concept of the end of ideology indeed envisioned an end of ideology "in the West," a West united in an open-ended Cold War and nuclear arms race, a West in which questions about serious dysfunctions in society, even calamitous ones, are just not raised. A West in which the bases of even screaming economic disparities, overt militarism and blatant social injustice are not seriously questioned in respectable thought.

Bell's "end of ideology" is framed in Cold War terms primarily as a criticism of the Other Side and its official Marxist ideology. But it's also very much a quietism perspective that rejects the possibility that there may be any kind of deep-rooted or fundamental problems in the societies of the United States and Europe. This at a time when African-Americans were largely denied the vote and other basic civil rights in the Deep South, when Spain and Portugal were ruled by dictatorships, and even France and gone through a six-month period in 1958 when the National Assembly handed full power to Charles De Gaulle to avert a civil war over Algeria, which at the time The End of Ideology was published was still colonized by France. Bell framed his perspective as anti-Communism. But it was "anti" more than that.

The hope for such a convenient state of affairs for the One Percent is alive and well today. The advocates of neoliberalism internationally seek to achieve that end but taking the most decisive economic questions off the table of public discussion, leaving only technocratic questions as to how much public money to spend on education. Or the exact terms of international trade treaties, so long as the their basic antilabor provisions and their protections for the uninhibited movement of capital are beyond question.

Andrew Bacevich has suggested that the Cold War is usefully seen as a phase of a Long War that is still continuing. Daniel Bell insisted that US actions in the Cold War in the 1950s were driven by the actions of the nuclear-armed Soviet Union. Now that the Soviet Union no longer exists, the Long War clicks right along with wide bipartisan support and an amorphous enemy known as The Terrorists. And our Very Serious People today also consider it beyond the pale of respectable opinion to suggest that the Long War might be driven even in part by anything so worldly as war profiteering.

Like Bell's End of Ideology theory, neoliberalism and the Long War are also end-of-ideology ideologies. Just before the 2012 election, President Obama laid out his own end-of-ideology ideology of postpartisanship and the Grand Bargain to cut benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Sabrina Siddiqui reported in Obama, In Morning Joe Interview, Predicts War Inside Republican Party If He Is Reelected Huffington Post 10/29/2012:

"There are a whole range of issues I think where we can actually bring the country together with a non-ideological agenda," Obama said in a pre-taped interview on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." ...

"I truly believe that if we can get the deficit and debt issues solved, which I believe we can get done in the lame-duck or in the immediate aftermath of the lame-duck, then that clears away a lot of the ideological underbrush," he said. "And then now we can start looking at a whole bunch of other issues that, as I said, historically have not been that ideological." [my emphasis]

And yet those "vulgar" ideological problems keeping coming up, no matter how badly the Very Serious People want them to go away.

Tags: daniel bell, cold war, end of ideology, grand bargain, long war, neoliberalism

Postpartisanship, classic Daniel Bell version (1): Bell and the Cold War ideology of the Congress for Cultural Freedom

I've referred a number of times to the similarity of President Obama's no-red-America-no-blue-America postpartisan vision with the "end of history" imagined by neoconservatives after the fall of the Soviet Union and with an earlier incarnation by a pioneering neocon writer Daniel Bell, the "end of ideology."

Bell's collection of essays The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties was originally published in 1960; I'm working here from the revised edition of 1965. The phrase "end of ideology" became famous and was often mocked in the 1960s, which turned out to be a decade in which ideological divisions became dramatic in the US and much of the Western world.

The essays in the book were all from the 1950s. Bell's account in the Acknowledgment section are more revealing today than there would have been to the general reader in 1965:

These essays were written during the years I was labor editor of Fortune magazine. ...

A number of these essays appeared first in the pages of Commentary and Encounter, and my most enduring obligation is to Irving Kristol, who, as an editor for the two magazines, prompted these articles, and, as friend, wrestled to bring order out of them. ...

Three of the longer essays were first presented as papers from conferences sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an international organization of intellectuals opposed to totalitarianism. I was fortunate in being able to work for a year in Paris, in 1956-57 (while on leaves from Fortune), as director of international seminars for the Congress.

He also cites his intellectual and professional debts to Raymond Aron, Nathna Glazer and Seymour Martin Lipset, all of whom figured as intellectuals in the neoconservative mode of thinking.

Irving Kristol was one of the leading lights of neoconservatism and his son Bill is a former staffer to Republican Vice President Dan Quayle and a major advocate of the Iraq War. The neocons are much better known today because of their prominent and highly influential role in the foreign policies of the Cheney-Bush Administration, and especially the invasion and destruction of Iraq. In light of recent events in Boston, it's worth noting that the neocons also happily promoted anti-Russian terrorism by Chechens against Russia in the not-too-distant past, as Coleen Rowley explains in Chechen Terrorists and the Neocons Consortium News 04/19/2013.

The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), later renamed International Association for Cultural Freedom (IACF), was secretly sponsored by the CIA as a Cold War propaganda instrument against the Soviet Union. This was unknown to many of the participants, many of whom like Bell were established scholars. And they were publishing CIA press releases under their own names, so their association with the CCF doesn't invalidate their work. But it can help situate it in the politics of the Cold War. Laurence Zuckerman in How the Central Intelligence Agency Played Dirty Tricks With Our Culture New York Times 03/18/2000, also via Common Dreams, writes that the CIA during in the 1950s was obsessed "with snuffing out a notion then popular among many European intellectuals: that East and West were morally equivalent. But instead of illustrating the differences between the two competing systems by taking the high road, the agency justified its covert activities by referring to the unethical tactics of the Soviets."

The CIA website has a redacted version of an internal memo on the history of the CCF, Origins of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, 1949-50, which it says was posted in 2007 but does not specify the actual date of the document. It gives a version of the CIA's perspective on this "soft power" Cold War field of conflict.

Willi Münzenberg: model for the CIA organizing a front group?

The paper contains assertions about supposedly pro-Communist groups and individuals that should not be taken as fact on the basis of the CIA document. This is the first I'd seen it suggested, for instance, that the famous Comintern propagandist, Willi Münzenberg (1889-1940) was the mastermind of the "popular front" technique of building "front groups"; the claim in the CIA paper is at best a careless generalization. Münzenberg is probably best known today for popularizing the story, built from circumstantial evidence but generally regarded by historians of the event today as false, that the Nazis themselves planned and instigated the Reichstag Fire in 1933. Markus Schulz in Linke Grabenkämpfe. Der Konsensmacher in the Spiegel history publication Einestages 01.12.2009 describes how the Comintern in 1935 finally decided to give up its general direction against Communist Parties in Western countries forming coalitions with Social Democratic and "bourgeois" parties and adopted the United Front/Popular Front strategy of cooperating with other democratic parties, the Communists formally understanding themselves as the radical left of democracy.

Münzenberg was the head of propaganda for the Comintern, and he was known as an enthusiastic advocate of the United Front line, which wasn't always shared by his fellow members of the German Communist Party (KPD). In French exile after Hitler came to power in 1933, he did organize conferences against Nazism that featured prominent non-Communists. It's apparently this to which the CIA paper refers in garbled form. Obviously, the United States and Britain found it advisable to make a common front with the Communist Soviet Union eventually. In Münzenberg's case, he wasn't so terribly successful with his efforts to forge a coalition with the German Social Democrats (SPD), whose leaders still refused to make a formal alliance with their old enemy the KPD. Because of his criticism of the Moscow Trials and Party purges, he was expelled from the KPD and the Comintern in 1938. He was killed in France in 1940 by parties still unknown. The Deutsches Historisches Museum (DHM) timeline lined above notes that Münzenberg may have committed suicide, but either the German Gestapo or Soviet agents could also have been responsible.

The CIA document explains how Frank Wisner's Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) within the agency in 1949 looked for ways to counter protests by prominent writers and intellectuals against US Cold War policies which the OPC regarded as manipulated by the USSR. Wisner wrote at time in an appeal for funds from another agency:

Now the theme [of the Cold War critics] is that the United States and the Western democracies are the war-mongers and Fascists and the Kremlin and its stooges the peace-loving democracies. And there is a better than even chance that by constant repetition the Commies can persuade innocents to follow this line. Perhaps not immediately but in the course of the next few years because there is a tremendous residue of pacificism [sic], isolationism and big business [sic] to be exploited. For example, a recession in the United States might cause people to lose interest in bolstering Europe .... I think you will agree that this phony peace movement actually embraces far more than intellectuals and that any counter-congress should emphasize also that the threat to world peace comes from the Kremlin and its allies.

This paragraph from the report gives an idea of the general perspective of those looking to implement the kind of project the CIA would be interested in supporting:

In August 1949, a crucial meeting took place in Frankfurt. American journalist Melvin J. Lasky, together with a pair of ex-Communists, Franz Borkenau and Ruth Fischer, hatched a plan for an international conference of the non-Communist Left in Berlin the following year. Lasky, only 29, was already prominent in German intellectual circles as the founding editor of Der Monat, a journal sponsored by the American occupation government that brought Western writers once more into the ken of the German public. Borkenau too had been in Paris the previous April as a disappointed member of the German delegation. Fischer--whose given name was Elfriede Eisler--was the sister of Gerhart Eisler, a Soviet operative dubbed in 1946 ``the Number-One Communist in the US'' and convicted the following year for falsifying a visa application. She herself had been a leader of the German Communist Party before her faction was expelled on orders from Moscow, leading her to break with Stalin (and with her brother Gerhart).

A naturalized American named Michael Josselson with a flair for covert work played a major part in organizing the project:

In Josselson's capable hands the still-amorphous Fischer plan took specific shape. Where Fischer had proposed an essentially political gathering, the self-taught Josselson sensed that an explicitly cultural and intellectual conference, to be called "the Congress for cultural freedom," could seize the initiative from the Communists by reaffirming "the fundamental ideals governing cultural (and political) action in the Western world and the repudiation of all totalitarian challenges."

With the backing of several prominent Berlin academics, a committee of American and European thinkers would organize the event and invite participants, selecting them on the basis of their political outlook, their international reputation and their popularity in Germany. In addition, the congress could be used to bring about the creation of some sort of permanent committee, which, with a few interested people and a certain amount of funds, could maintain the degree of intellectual and rhetorical coordination expected to be achieved in Berlin. The Josselson proposal reached Washington in January 1950.

Michael Josselson's interest in the congress idea gave Lasky all the encouragement he needed. Lasky, unwitting of OPC's hand in the plan, forged ahead while official Washington made up its mind. He sent a similar proposal of his own to Sidney Hook, his old boss, who liked the idea. In February, Lasky enlisted Ernst Reuter, Lord Mayor of West Berlin, and several prominent German academics, who endorsed the plan and promised their support. Together these men formed a standing committee and began issuing invitations.

Lasky's freelancing, however, was not all for the good. As an employee of the American occupation government, his activities on behalf of the congress struck more than a few observers, both friendly and hostile, as proof that the US Government was behind the event. This would later cause trouble for Lasky.

OPC officers also liked Josselson's plan. Headquarters produced a formal project proposal envisioning a budget of $50,000. Time was of the essence, although OPC soon realized that the congress would have to postponed to May or even June. Wisner approved the project outline, which essentially reiterated Josselson's December proposal, on 7 April, adding that he wanted Lasky and Burnham kept out of sight in Berlin for fear their presence would only provide ammunition to Communist critics of the event.

Bell's Acknowledgment also cites Sidney Hook and Melvin Lasky, the former as the one "who taught me the appreciation of ideas", the latter as "an old comrade."

The founding conference took place in Berlin in 1950:

It was already too late to rein in Lasky. He had appointed himself the driving force behind the event, inviting participants and organizing programs. Josselson defended Lasky when informed of Wisner's comment. Josselson explained that Lasky's name on the event's masthead as General Secretary had been largely responsible for the enthusiasm that the congress had generated among European intellectuals. "No other person here, certainly no German, could have achieved such success," cabled Josselson.

The congress in Berlin rolled ahead that spring gathering sponsors and patrons. World-renowned philosophers John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, Benedetto Croce, Karl Jaspers, and Jacques Maritain agreed to lend gravitas to the event as its honorary chairmen. OPC bought tickets for the American delegation, using [several intermediary organizations] as its travel agents. Hook and another NYU philosophy professor named James Burnham took charge of the details for the American delegation. The Department of State proved an enthusiastic partner in the enterprise, arranging travel, expenses, and publicity for the delegates. Indeed, Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs Jesse MacKnight was so impressed with the American delegation that he urged CIA to sponsor the congress on a continuing basis even before the conclave in Berlin had taken place.

The Congress for Cultural Freedom convened in Berlin's Titania Palace on 26 June 1950. American delegates Hook, James Burnham, James T. Farrell, playwright Tennessee Williams, historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., actor Robert Montgomery, and chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission David Lilienthal had been greeted on their arrival the previous day with the news that troops of North Korea had launched a massive invasion of the South. This pointed reminder of the vulnerability of Berlin itself heightened the sense of apprehension in the hall. The Congress's opening caught and reflected this mood. Lord Mayor Reuter asked the almost 200 delegates and the 4,000 other attendees to stand for a moment of silence in memory of those who had died fighting for freedom or who still languished in concentration camps. [my emphasis]

Ironically, writer Arthur "Koestler had once worked for Soviet operative Willi Mnzenberg [sic] managing front groups for Moscow, and now he was unwittingly helping the CIA's efforts to establish a new organization designed to undo some of the damage done by Stalin's agents over the last generation," according to the CIA memo.

And it memo notes something very relevant to understand the end-of-ideology outlook: "Josselson's Congress for Cultural Freedom would later be criticized (by American anti-Communists, in particular) for tolerating too much criticism of America's own shortcomings by figures on the anti-Communist left."

Michael Josselson was the CCF's Administrative Secretary for 16 years, including the 1956-7 period when Daniel Bell was their "director of international seminars."

In a review of Peter Coleman's book The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress For Cultural Freedom And The Struggle For The Mind Of Postwar Europe (1989) in Foreign Affairs (Winter 1989/90), Andrew Pierre summarized the CCF's history briefly:

The activities of the Congress for Cultural Freedom constitute an important and controversial chapter in the intellectual and political history of Western Europe after World War II. Founded in 1950 in the aftermath of a series of Soviet-sponsored international "peace" conferences, the congress sought to combat the appeal of communist propaganda to intellectual and student circles. By the mid-1960s, with the Vietnam War, détente and the transformation of the liberal-conservative debate, it had lost some of its support; the final death knell was sounded with the revelations of CIA funding.

On the CCF, see also: Joel Whitney, Exclusive: The Paris Review, the Cold War and the CIA Salon 05/27/2012; Frances Stonor Saunders, Modern art was CIA 'weapon' The Independent 10/22/1995; and, Hilton Kramer, What was the Congress for Cultural Freedom? New Criterion (Jan 1990), the latter an enthusiastic defense of the CCF and its CIA backing.

This gives an idea of the political setting of Bell end-of-ideology arguments in the 1960 book of that title. We'll look at those directly in Part 2.

Tags: daniel bell, cold war, end of ideology