Will success spoil anti-communists? As freedom triumphs, liberals feel sorry for conservatives. What will they do without communism to attack?

National Review, March 5, 1990 by Tom Bethell

As freedom triumphs, liberals feel sorry for conservatives.

What will they do without Communism to attack?

Well, there's always liberalism-and plenty of it.

TWENTY-FIVE years after Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary, saw the lights going out all over Europe, they were unexpectedly turned on again in the fall of 1989. A friend of mine, a well-known conservative, suggested that I keep an eye on the news media's coverage of these stirring events. For the liberals, he believed, a little "spin control" would be necessary. They couldn't really enjoy what was going on, but they wouldn't be able to admit as much, either. A column by George Will partly confirmed this guess. "Some liberals," he wrote, "seem disoriented. They are even made morose by recent events." The New Yorker, however, contrived to detect a silver lining in the cloud of an anti-communist revolution-the imminent demise of anti-communism: "That the cold war may be ending, and that forty years of nuclear dread might diminish, and that anti-communism, an engine that has propelled so many American political careers, could fall into disuse-a newspaper reader hardly dares to be so hopeful."

This theme was repeated with minor variations by Russell Baker in the New York Times and by Richard Cohen in the Washington Post. "Anti-communism has been the glue that held together the volatile elements of the Republican Party for longer than most of them remember," Baker wrote. "It's all very sweet to see the old order changing from Germany to Moscow, but where's the political mileage in anti-communism if Communism is all washed up?"

"With Communism threatening to vaporize," Richard Cohen wrote, conservatives "may soon have little to react against." He added that "conservatism is reactive in nature. Its idea of a program is to oppose one offered by someone else." (Not quite. Conservatives believe that individuals, being possessed of free will, should have their own separate "programs.")

Unavoidably, however, the news media, especially television, did convey much of the tremendous joy that has been experienced by tens of millions of Europeans in recent months. Anti-communism turned out to have been a well-nigh universal philosophy. The television anchormen could do little more than position themselves before the celebrating crowds in Berlin and Prague and Bucharest, but that was all they had to do. Nothing they might have said could possibly have detracted from these images of freedom experienced for the first time, many of them unexpectedly moving-pale East Berliners gazing with silent awe into West Berlin shop windows, and so on. (To be fair, no TV reports that I saw even hinted that the unfolding events were anything other than joyous.)

IF THERE WERE spin-control teams at work at the New York Times and Washington Post, one sensed nonetheless that events were unfolding too rapidly for them to have much effect. Inevitably, there were items one could quibble with. One example was a New York Times headline over a page-one story by Craig Whitney: "East Germans Fear New Freedom Could Outstrip Ways to Control It." This headline erroneously imputed to "East Germans" in general what is surely the Weltanschauung of New York Times editors in general. The sentiment should have been attributed to "a small handful of East Germans"-those who still think that Communism is a nice idea in theory.

Something else that kept popping up was the New York Times's uncritical use of the CIA!S GNP-per-capita statistics. The media regaled us with funny stories about East Germany's getaway car, the Trabant, with its lawnmower engine. But there, tucked inside the New York Times, would be the odd claim that East Germany's 1988 GNP per capita was $12,480, compared with $7,390 in Spain, $13,270 in Britain, and $14,260 in West Germany. Obviously these figures are nonsense. They merely discredit the CIA'S information-gathering and statistical procedures. One wonders if the Times and other news media organizations-with their professed resistance to "accepting handouts" from government agencies-will ever question them. Nick Eberstadt, author of The Poverty of Communism, points out that the 1989 edition of the Statistical Abstract of the United States absurdly credits East Germany with a GNP per capita that is higher than West Germany's.

ON THE WHOLE, however, the press has been favorably disposed toward the revolution of 1989. This is not because our leading media figures are particularly enthusiastic about an "anti-communist revolution" (as the Washington Post creditably called it on its front page on January 14), or because they are wild about liberty in the abstract- In fact, on December 8 the New York Times published a unusual column by A. M. Rosenthal, until recently the paper's executive editor, railing against "so many of our academics an journalists," who "cluck nervously at the passion for freedom of the people of Eastern and Central Europe, whose very captivity was unfashionable to mention for many years." Rosenthal has a good point here. For years the press used the phrase "captive nations" gingerly, if at all, and usually within prophylactic quotation marks. The Washington Post foresaw this argument while it was still over the horizon, noting in an August 1989 editorial that the captive nations' "political strivings were commonly received as disruptive, unrealistic' threats to international stability, perhaps of some musty literal or historical merit but essentially unhelpful to the greater good of world peace."