Political Circus Serves a Purpose

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Nov 13, 2000 | by Ralph De Toledano

Few remember the excitement in 1948 when Henry Wallace, who had been both vice president and secretary of agriculture under Franklin D. Roosevelt, announced that he was running for the presidency under the banner of a great new political grouping. The Progressive Party, as it was to be known, was to be the answer to the populist dream, challenging what the radical left then liked to call the Tweedledee and Tweedledum of American politics. Though Wallace -- already called "Bubblehead" by such discerning columnists as Westbrook Pegler -- claimed that he was restoring democracy to the U.S. political process, it was apparent almost immediately that the new party had less to do with grassroots America than it did with Red Square.

New York's Park Avenue pinks, Hollywood's red-flaggers and the Stalinoid squadrons between them poured in money and mobilized efforts, but the Wallace campaign was one big dud for the Kremlin and a bigger yawn for the American electorate. Bubblehead's crusade pulled only about 1 million votes and helped, rather than hurt, Harry Truman, its major target.

That was little more than five decades ago but, given the short attention span of the American voter, it might as well have occurred during the second Punic War. Alas, history has a way of approximating itself, and this year we have seen Ralph Nader and his Green Party hard at it again.

At this point, some distinctions and clarifications are in order. To begin with, Wallace was never a Communist, though his rhetoric sometimes made him seem like one. When we think of "political innocents" Bubblehead (like Abou Ben Adhem) led all the rest. So innocent was he that in a trip across the Soviet Union he compared it in an address to quivering prisoners rounded up by Stalin's goons as the equivalent of the American West.

The Soviet Union, moreover, was in 1948 a major force in the world, and fighting the Cold War with might and main. The Communist Party USA, then had its secret battalions -- the phrase comes from old Harold Laski -- ensconced in vital areas of influence even in our own country, and still represented world revolution and the class struggle. Where it was not itself visible, it had that new school of termites (preaching neo-Marxism and neo-Freudianism) hard at work undermining education, the family, communications, religious faith, sexual morality and all of Western culture -- a campaign whose political successes have brought us to our present degradation.

That was 52 years ago. Wallace, after a convention in Philadelphia, ran a campaign that was to revolutionize American politics by the training it provided to such worthies as George McGovern, but he had no effect on the contest between Truman and New York Gov. Tom Dewey and the Progressive Party was pushed into the dumpster of history. In time, the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union left the "official" communist movement with its britches torn from Genesis to Revelation, so that when longtime Communist Party USA, commissar Gus Hall went off in late October to join Lenin and Stalin, his obituaries seemed so irrelevant as to read like that of a former potentate of the Great Bend Shriners.

But you can't keep a bad ideology down, and the neo-Marxist-neo-Freudian-environmentalist-feminist coalition sputters on. It had its guru in Herbert Marcuse, who from his post at Harvard University and the University of California-San Diego, inspired the Black Panthers, Students for a Democratic Society and all the movements attacking Western culture even before the trauma of political correctness.

Returning to his native West Germany, Marcuse organized the Green Party, which brought together the remnants of the disorganized communist movement and the disenfranchised former Hitler Jugend in what was hardly a secret neo-Communist movement. And, of course, the Green Party reached out across the ocean where it rooted in California and spread east. In 1996, the Greens made a halfhearted play for political importance. In this year's presidential campaign, with a rejuvenated Ralph Nader as its candidate, it found itself playing an important role, little understood by the pundits and media, but familiar enough to those of us who watched Wallace's effort to stun Truman into a leftward move in 1948.

Of Nader, much can be said, although this writer has been advised not to say it. Conservatives and Republicans are not saying it either, hoping that this silence about Bubblehead II will help him take votes from Al Gore and the Democrats. They need not assail him, merely quote him. For example, back in 1977, Nader told Village Voice's Anne Mayo, in defense of the destruction of property by assorted schoolboy Lenins:

"What activists are trying to do is make new law based on the settled Anglo-Saxon tradition of self-defense.... That is, if someone tries to break into your house you can retaliate lawfully. In the case of a nuclear reactor, the self-defense is projective. But what are you going to do, wait until radioactivity is all over the place? Shouldn't you destroy property before it destroys you? ... If they don't close those reactors down, we'll have civil war in five years."