Enemies of the Status Quo
A familiar tune
“We have learned how vulnerable civilization is, how arduous the struggle to preserve it may be. And we have learned—many of us in its own sorry school—that Communism is not just another scheme, another idea. It is one of the real absolutes of our time, perhaps the only absolute, and by its nature, by virtue of what it has made of itself, it permits of no neutrality. The liquidation of neutrals is one of its specialties.” —Granville Hicks
The Illusion Still Lingers
By 1950, American liberals faced a crossroads. The Cold War’s chill had finally settled in: China was lost, the Soviets had the Bomb, and the trials of Alger Hiss and Klaus Fuchs exposed communist espionage at home, while North Korea’s invasion of the South confirmed its aggression abroad. The political consensus that had steered the nation through the Depression and World War II was unraveling, forcing liberals who had long defended the Soviet Union to question their loyalties. For liberal intellectuals, the crisis triggered a painful ideological reckoning that fractured the left and alienated its radicals.
Former communist Granville Hicks, however, was no stranger to such crises. An influential Marxist literary critic and card-carrying member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) in the 1930s, Hicks had served as literary editor for New Masses and had authored a definitive biography of John Reed. But in 1939, he broke with CPUSA over the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, joining prominent left-wing intellectuals like Max Eastman, Whittaker Chambers, and Sidney Hook in rejecting Soviet communism.
In 1951, as liberals grappled with a fierce conservative backlash, Granville Hicks published “The Liberals Who Haven’t Learned” in Commentary, exposing the codependent relationship between American Communists and pro-Soviet liberals. In the essay, Hicks critiques a persistent strain of liberalism that, despite undeniable evidence of Soviet totalitarianism, masks communist goals with the rhetoric of “social betterment.” Drawing on his own journey from Communist Party member to disillusioned outcast, Hicks warns of liberal self-deception in the Cold War’s upcoming ideological battles, tracing the roots of this dynamic to an earlier era.
History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes, and in Hicks’s essay, I hear a familiar tune.
To understand the uneasy alliance between liberals and Communists, Hicks traces its roots to the 1920s, when dissenting intellectuals—Communists, socialists, anarchists, progressives, and pacifists—united as a "fellowship of the enemies of the status quo" and went on to win a series of significant cultural victories.