Adversary

ADVERSARY CULTURE

Ask yourself, “Why do people continue to come to America if America is so bad?” The question begs an answer. Katherine Kersten addresses it, and more. A five-minute reading.

Sociologist Paul Hollander came to the United States after escaping from communist ­Hungary in 1956. Having first-hand ­experience with a totalitarian regime, he was baffled to encounter American intellectuals who were sympathetic to communism and endorsed its revolutionary aims. Some even championed ­Stalin, Castro, and Mao. Hollander saw that they were captive to an oppositional habit of mind, which led them toward a hypercritical repudiation of our nation’s institutions. Worse, this habit of mind led them to misperceive and idealize systems like the one he had fled, while overlooking or denying the virtues of their own society.

In Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China and Cuba 1928–1978 (1981) and other writings, Hollander explains why so many of the best-off people in the wealthiest, freest nation in the world have contempt for their own society. Though he died in 2019, before woke crusaders’ latest forays, his analysis sheds light on our cultural moment.

Hollander recognized the importance of the adversary culture in postwar America. It is characterized, he wrote, by the “socially critical temper” produced by alienation and estrangement from the larger ­society. Though a vibrant democracy requires vigorous debate, the fierce criticism nurtured by the adversary culture encourages “an intense, radical and indignant” disposition, which generates social-­critical passions powerful enough to overwhelm reason. Thus arises the impairment—willed or ­genuine—of one’s capacity to make important distinctions among degrees of social evil. The tens of millions killed during Mao’s Cultural Revolution disappear from view. The result is “an outlook or state of mind which leads to (or entails) viewing one’s own society with deep misgivings and suspicion,” condemning it as “deeply flawed, unjust,” and “calculated to constrain or reduce human satisfactions.”

In Political Pilgrims and elsewhere, Hollander recounts how this mindset prompted a parade of prominent intellectuals—among them George Bernard Shaw, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Noam Chomsky—to embrace beliefs at odds with reality, shaped by wishful thinking, and distorted by a suspension of logic. Though hyper-sensitive to their own societies’ flaws, these commentators gave the benefit of every doubt to systems and ideologies that advanced a utopian egalitarian and humanitarian vision.

Reality was of no consequence; they thrilled to ideals.

[…] Hollander recognized that political commitments often spring from deeper, unarticulated, non-political sources. In his words, “predisposition influences perception.” The moralistic crusades undertaken by people whose positions in life put them at a great distance from the issues they claim to care about are often not so much about a search for justice as a working out of their personal needs and dissatisfactions.

[…] Marxist-influenced thought has an important appeal in this context. As Hollander observes, Marxism’s ideological framework offers a “seemingly scientific foundation” for organizing moral passion and guides intellectuals in identifying “just” causes. Marxist ideology’s depiction of life as a power struggle between oppressors and victims—a core tenet of today’s “woke” movement—can serve to justify an unrelenting, self-righteous denunciation of the inevitable gap between aspirational American principles and real-world outcomes.

The upshot is a paradox very much evident today. The adversary culture alternates between moral absolutism and moral relativism—swinging from virulent criticism of “oppressor” groups to passionate enthusiasm for putative victims and their self-described champions, at home or abroad. “Systemic racism” is an ever-present and all-powerful threat that must be “eradicated,” while the destruction of stores, public buildings, and monuments presents no real moral problem . . .

– Katherine Kersten, “Adversary Culture in 2020,” First Things, February 2021, 41-46. https://www.firstthings.com/…/02/adversary-culture-in-2020