Philip Roth is a gifted Jewish-American writer whose novels have entertained and educated an American and international reading public for four decades. Paul Berman is a former New Lefty and anarchist-oriented intellectual (at least that is the way I remember him in the old days when I lived in New York and saw him hanging around the left) who eventually became a MacArthur Fellowship winner, a pundit, a talking head, an interpreter of a generation that wanted to be interpreted. Paul Berman was always an anti-Communist. He went from being a somewhat scrungy and likeable would-be Emma Goldman to becoming a well dressed, pontifical, would-be Hannah Arendt.

In the New York Times, which conservatives call a liberal newspaper but which Reds like myself consider a secular version of the Wall Street Journal. (In the 1930s, a Communist called the Times’ political position 'democracy without profit sharing.') Berman held center stage last in the book review section with what amounted to a term paper on Roth’s new novel, The Plot Against America.

Roth is writing about an American Fascism that fortunately never was. Berman, an Iraq war liberal (now that the term cold war liberal is defunct as an explanation for ideological commodities consumed by the anti-Communist left niche of the political couch potato market) is writing at cross purposes with Roth against the anti-Iraq war activists and anti-Bush people, looking upon them as extremists, Fascists, anti-Semites.

Berman, like those who pontificated before him, is now by for and of what Art Schlesinger called a Vital Center, meaning a center-right political consensus where the tolerated Left is a loyal opposition that always runs interference for the Right by calling the rest of the Left 'totalitarian' and the mirror image of the Right, but not the Right in power, not Nixon, Reagan, the Two Bushes, but the right of Hitler and Mussolini, which is like the left of Stalin, Mao, Tito, Castro, Ho, Thorez, Togliatti, Chávez and you can fill in the blanks because the blanks are in the present and represent the Left and the fascists are in the past, so you never have to organize against them, except of course to use them as a negative reference group to attack the left. After all, didn’t Dick Cheney say that if John Kerry couldn’t stand up to Howard Dean, how could he stand up to Al Qaida.

Most people like Frank Rich, a critic a lot smarter and well to the left of Paul Berman, who are writing about The Plot Against America see in it the face of the present administration, And that makes some sense, since the present administration treats much of the world the way Lindbergh’s fictional administration, as seen from the reviews, treats minorities and political opponents in the U.S.

Philip Roth, who wrote Our Gang at the beginning of the Nixon administration, a great satire that concluded with Nixon’s assassination, descent into Hell, and McCarthyite campaign for the office of Devil, has written a work of historical fiction based on the premise that the press and newsreel created 'hero' and tabloid celebrity of the 1920s and thirties, pro-fascist aviator Charles Lindbergh defeated Franklin Roosevelt in 1940 and briefly established Vichy style Nazi collaborator regime. The real Lindbergh was an opponent of U.S. support for Britain and the Soviet Union in the first two years of World War II, an admirer of the Hitler regime, and a sympathizer with its racist world-view and its curious combination of support for advanced technologies, particularly the technologies of warfare, and a Kinder (children-family) Kuche (Kitchen) Kirche (Church) small town ethnically pure Germany, what we might call today the family values Dick and Jane America where, to use Ronald Reagan’s 1984 campaign phrase, it is always morning.

Since I haven’t read the novel yet, I shouldn’t comment too much on it, except to say of course what many are saying – that it certainly is an expression of the mounting fears of some form of fascism in the U.S. that the Bush administration policies have created both here and abroad and the desire to resist Fascism. Previously in our issue, a number of PA contributors, myself included, comment on this question.

Actually, the 'neo-conservatives' in power with Bush and the right-wing 'isolationists' who fortunately were not in power in 1941 do have a lot in common. Lindbergh and his fellow America Firsters believed in an authoritarian Fortress America which dominated more directly than before the Western Hemisphere and warded off its enemies at home (meaning the left) and abroad, meaning anybody, with a much bigger military and police system.

As for the world outside North America, the Conservative Republican leader and the leading isolationist candidate for the Republican nomination in 1940, Senator Robert Taft (who to be fair was never anything like the open racist and pro-Fascist that Lindbergh was) summed up the isolationist world view best when he said after the war that what America needed was a 'Sky Cavalry' that would strike at international outlaws and the global equivalents of Native Americans throughout the world, and then go back to the United States.

The 'isolationists' were, like the present Bush administration, unilateralist. They were against involvement in World War II, which they saw as a war for the British Empire, their business rivals, 'Communist Russia' their real political enemies, and Jewish people everywhere, whom they saw as trouble makers and 'racial inferiors' whose persecution at the hands of Hitler and his fellow Fascists was none of America’s business.

Although the Bush administration is much more ecumenical than the old America Firsters in that it has Christians and Jews, Blacks and Whites, people of all ethnicities who are willing to work for its ultra-right creed, it shares the old isolationists deeply anti-democratic world view, which has morphed today into a continuation and an exaggeration of the worst of U.S. cold war policy, namely military intervention and occupation of any nation or territory on the government’s hit list. In effect, this goes behind Harry Truman’s Truman Doctrine and Robert Taft’s Sky Cavalry. It is a Sky, Sea, and Land Cavalry with limitless Fort Apaches to be established through the world, while more and more of the United States may come to resemble my old neighborhood in the South Bronx, which got the name Fort Apache in the 1960s when poor Puerto Ricans held angry demonstrations in front a barricaded 41st precinct police station in response to acts of police brutality.

I don’t think Charles Lindbergh and the America Firsters would have defeated Franklin Roosevelt in 1940 in any presidential election, given the strength of the labor movement and the balance of political forces in the country, (something like a military coup organized by big business and led by a man like Douglas MacArthur in 1934-1935, at the beginning of the labor left upsurge was, as was understood at the time more likely) I also don’t think that a right Republican isolationist government of the kind that Herbert Hoover, a leading champion of Fortress America, or Robert Taft represented, much less a Vichy Style collaborator regime, which seems to be what Roth is portraying, could have won out in 1940, given the strength of labor and peoples movements. If it had, the lend-lease aid to Britain and the Soviet Union would never have materialized, and a conservative Republican government, even in the event of Pearl Harbor would probably not have fought Nazi Germany (the isolationists during the war became ardent 'Asia Firsters,' gung ho for the war against Japan as a war of revenge but curiously silent when it came to the war against Germany) and the Fascist Axis might have won the war. Hitler who declared war on the U.S. first because of the New Deal government’s aid to the British and the Soviets, would have had no reason to declare war on a right-wing Republican administration.

But historical fiction, as many scholars understand, has to be true to the core relationships not the historical facts. My beef isn’t with Roth whose work I respect enormously and whose novel I look forward to reading. It is with Paul Berman, for whom a Nazi victory would have meant the destruction of the Soviet Union, and the defeat of his and the old isolationists main enemies, the Soviets and the Communists. In France and other occupied European countries, leading lights of the anti-Communist 'anti-Stalinist' left often dropped out of politics rather than joining resistance movements, in which their enemies, Communists played a leading role. In some cases, members of the anti-Communist left became active collaborators with the new order if they had the right ethnic credentials.

Why do I think theses bad things about Paul Berman, whom I used to like personally when I thought of him as a scrungy New Lefty. It is because he can’t stop from red-baiting both Mike Gold, the major Jewish American man of letters of the 1920s and the 1930s, and the CPUSA, which aren’t germaine to Roth’s novel, in his essay, which hangs around the novel.

There are a few other somewhat academic bones I would pick with Berman. Readers could have had a much fuller and more intelligent analysis of Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, and even some mention of Keeper of the Flame, a powerful movie made from a novel starring Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn at the beginning of the war. In Keeper of the Flame, a 'hero' resembling Charles Lindbergh, who plots to turn his boy scout, mom and apple pie voluntary organizations into a mass Fascist movement, dies suddenly and his subordinates seek to hide the truth about him.

But back to Mike Gold, 'Moscow' Gold to foes and many friends in the period of the peoples front. Berman in his review puts quotes around proletarian writer and calls Mike a 'big hearted and small brained writer.' He even disrespects Gold’s classic Jews Without Money, which is not only an influence on Roth’s novel but an important work in both Jewish-American and general American literature.

It doesn’t matter that a wide variety of scholars have rediscovered Mike Gold in recent decades, showing that Gold’s involvement as an active open Communist in the leadership of the New Masses brought him into contact with a center-left literary culture that included Ernest Hemingway, his comrade for many years Richard Wright, and many others. It doesn’t matter that only an old hot stove league of red-baiters and those young writers for whom they offer some patronage takes seriously the view of 1930s popular front culture propagated by Irving Howe and other members of the cold war loyal opposition anti-Communist left, that is, a culture of 'party line' mediocrity that prostituted art to bad politics.

To better understand the world of proletarian fiction that Berman puts in quotes, readers willing to learn can see Barbara Foley excellent Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941 (Durham, N.C., Duke University Press, 1993) and Michael Denning’s fine The Cultural Front (New York, Verso, 1996) two major works which go beyond the official anti-Communist scholarship to portray a world of writers and artists of differing views fighting back against depression and fascism and in the process merging and advancing art and politics in new and creative ways.

There is also Writing From the Left another important work of Alan Wald, Robert Schulman’s The Power of Political Art: The Literary Left Reconsidered and many other recent works.

Whatever disagreements Marxists of the mainstream Communist tradition may have with some of these writers and whatever disagreements they may have with themselves, they all portray a political culture far more critical, participatory and diverse than the 'anti-party line' cultural criticism purveyed by Partisan Reviewers, Commentary Magazine men, post 1975 New York Review of Books reviewers, the New Republic after its purchase by Martin Peretz and for the hoi polio the New York Post after its purchase by Rupert Murdoch. For of these cultural policemen of yesterday and today, all politics was verboten except anti-Communist politics, and more than a half century of bad criticism was and is being produced to buttress that politics.

When it comes to Mike Gold, if readers want to take a trip, they could go to my graduate Alma Mata, the University of Michigan, where the learning still often transcends in quality the football, (something that is also true at my own Rutgers University but not quite in the same way) and learn about Mike Gold by studying his personal papers. Mike Gold was as much part of that of the dialectical process as that we call the popular front as Paul Berman is of its negation, which was nurtured, privileged and funded by the U.S. government through so-called Cultural Freedom Committees in the high cold war period These committees and their various journals aimed at people in the arts sciences and professions ran interference for the U.S. government while it supported dictatorships of the right who in the 1950s oppressed a large part of the human race in the name of anti-Communism, which for literati became anti-totalitarianism. There gold came was far more plentiful and came from Fort Knox than the vastly exaggerated 'Moscow gold.'

There is one last somewhat odd point Berman makes that deserves some response. Berman mentions Soviet money and 'secret cells' for the CPUSA in the late 1930s to suggest that Communists might have done very well had a Lindbergh collaborator regime been established in the U.S. But he seems to say this in a peevish and hostile way. I guess he knows that the French, Italian, Yugoslav, Chinese, Vietnamese and other Communists won over tens of millions of people and buried the Big Lie still so important to Berman that they were agents of a Soviet led world conspiracy by their leading roles in the anti-fascist anti-Japanese imperialist resistance.

The much higher level of activism that Communist militants had as against their socialist and other rivals on the left, their ability to transcend sectarianism and build coalitions of action, along with their internationalism and their commitment to socialism meant a thousand times more than any 'Moscow gold,' as even the Nazis who sought to kill old Communist party functionaries on the Eastern Front as they sought to round up Jews and Gypsies understood.

What sort of resistance would Berman expect in a collaborator America, an underground calling itself the Sidney Hook Liberation Front? New Republic writers and readers leading a dockworker strike against deportations of slave laborers and 'racial inferiors' in New York or San Francisco?

Would Berman agree with a right-wing Dutch Social Democrat, put by the Nazis in a concentration camp, when he heard of the Soviet victory at Stalingrad, which inspired the prisoners, to say 'this is a dark day for Europe.' Would he look askance at the Italian socialist labor activists, freed from Mussolini’s prisons by Americans, who laughed and shouted 'Duce, Duce, Duce' when they were addressed by ILGWU leader Luigi Antonini, henchman of far right-wing Social Democrat David Dubinsky, with anti-Communist platitudes.

I don’t know for sure where Paul Berman would have stood in 1941 in the face of an American fascist government that was openly anti-Semitic somewhat in the tradition of Admiral Horthy in Hungary and the Romanian monarchy, not nearly as bad as Hitler or even Petain’s Vichy but clearly Hitler’s friend and ally. I think I know where he stands now, at least at the moment, neither for Bush nor Bush’s enemies, but reserving most of his fire for the people of the left trying to build a center-left coalition, trying to make sure that a second Bush administration doesn’t build upon and enlarge the domestic and foreign policy disasters of the first. Philip Roth from everything that I have ever read by him is part of the movement and the solution, as we used to say when both Paul Berman and I were a lot younger to what has happened to the United States in the Reagan-Bush I & 2 era. That is not where Paul Berman is coming from today and the casual red-baiting of Mike Gold, the contemptuous attitude toward proletarian literature, and the superficial treatment of Jewish-American literature, that he parades in the New York Times leads backwards toward problems, not forward toward solutions in both understanding and addressing the crisis we face.

--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs. Send your thoughts to pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.