"Probably Did More Than Any Organization to Expose the Society's Dark Side to the World"

"No smear campaign, this was an exposé. The covert program ginned up negative press and made the society toxic in the eyes of most Americans. The exposure neutered the ability of violent, conspiratorial, white-supremacist elements associated with the society to win elective office or dominate either the Democratic or the Republican party. And the ADL's campaign forced Birchers to spend time, energy, and resources fending off charges of extremism or bigotry. The incessant public conversation about Birchers as a hate-filled group generated the impression that the organization must be tainted and ought to be shunned."

Matthew Dallek at The Bulwark discusses how the Anti-Defamation League challenged the John Birth Society.

To Live Is to Maneuver

"Would Buckley really be so shocked by the growth of populism and illiberal nationalism and a creeping authoritarianism on the right? Surely, those afflictions in the late Obama years were hardly new, or any more daunting than they had been in Buckley's time. The true crisis on the right, I believed, lay in the fact that it no longer had anyone of Buckley's stature to keep the tablets. It still doesn't."

Brian Stewart at The Bulwark reviews Sam Tanenhaus's Buckley: The Live and the Revolution That Changed America.

"Those Words Feel Even More True Today"

"Fukuyama's pining for past ideological struggles suggests that the Last Man would eventually get bored with technocracy, consumerism, and the stultifying constraints of middle management—and seek new monsters to fight. America's flirtation with an authoritarian leader who promises he alone will fix the nation's problems and restore the country's past glory is a manifestation of this phenomenon. The greatest challenges to liberal democracy would not come from new ideological competitors but rather from complacency. 'Democracies survive and succeed only because people are willing to fight for the rule of law, human rights, and political accountability,' Fukuyama wrote in 2014."

Michael A. Cohen at The New Republic revisits Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History?"

"Well-Written and Superb History"

"There is a role to play in the United States for a serious political left to challenge the assumptions of the center-left and center-right and raise issues the mainstream parties and movements would otherwise ignore. But, as Maurice Isserman's book reveals, the Communist Party USA could never have served that purpose—because a healthy left, unlike the CPUSA, would be a loyal opposition, acting in the best spirit of the American experiment rather than supporting its enemies."

Ronald Radosh at The Bulwark reviews Maurice Isserman's Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism.

"So It Goes"

"At the very least, we can learn from Kissinger, who unhesitatingly supported Gulf War One and Gulf War Two, and every war between and since, that the two defining concepts of United States foreign policy—realism and idealism—aren't necessarily opposing values; rather, they reinforce each other. Idealism gets us into the quagmire of the moment; realism keeps us there while promising to get us out; and then idealism returns anew both to justify the realism and to overcome it in the next round."

Greg Grandin at The Nation provides "A People's Obituary of Henry Kissinger."

"Cold War II"

"Great powers, then, must not only have substantial populations and resources, but must also use them to support a world-class national industrial base in a prolonged and sustainable way. Neither state socialist crash programs that peter out over time nor bubbles and booms inflated by central banks in liberal market economies are adequate. To date in the industrial era, developmental states, both authoritarian like present-day China and democratic like the midcentury United States, have been more successful than communist regimes and free market liberal regimes."

Michael Lind at Tablet argues that we "are in a new era of global conflict."

"The Passing of an Era"

"And yet he also came across as a man of genuinely good will, in a way that didn’t feel like an act—just as it didn't feel like an act when he told New Times editor Yevgenia Albats in 2016 that his creed was, 'No blood,' or that he was ultimately 'a man of freedom': 'Freedom of choice, freedom of religion, freedom of speech; freedom, freedom—let them shoot me but I’m not going to renounce that.' Or when he wrote a warm letter to Bonner on her 85th birthday, expressing the hope that their shared ideals—'a democratic Russia, the rule of law, a more just world'—would someday be realized."

Cathy Young at The Bulwark marks the death of Mikhail Gorbachev.

And in a 2019 Foreign Policy article, Paul Musgrave tells the story of Gorbachev's Pizza Hut commercial.

"When the Cold War Ends, It Loosens Not Just the Motivation for Conservatives to Get Involved Internationally, but Also the Motivation for Them to Champion Democracy"

"We think of the end of the Cold War as reshaping the geopolitical landscape, but it also really changed economics and politics in the United States. There is a major recession in the U.S. at the time of the '92 election, and parts of California that have been propped up by government spending and the aerospace industry had collapsed almost overnight. There was this sense of uncertainty about what the world is going to look like going forward and who is going to prosper and who is going to fail. It's also at a pivot point in decades of deindustrialization and shifting toward a knowledge economy and a service economy. So things really were in flux, and I think the politics of the day reflect that."

Ian Ward at Politico interviews Nicole Hemmer, author of Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s.

"May Be No Better Introduction to What This Kind of Dark, Surrealist Statism Feels Like"

"What was true of the Soviet Union in its death throes in the late 1980s seems even more applicable to Putin's Russia today, where policies are justified with paeans to an official nationalism known as Russkii mir, or 'Russian world.' This Kremlin-sanctioned worldview suggests Russia is no ordinary nation-state but a unique, conservative 'civilization,' historically distinct and even genetically superior to its European neighbors. Since returning to the presidency in 2012, Putin has increasingly invoked this civilizational discourse to champion the interests of ethnic Russians, Russian speakers, and civilizational compatriots beyond Russia's geopolitical borders. Russia's 2008 war in Georgia, 2014 annexation of Crimea and proxy war in Donbas, and the all-out invasion of Ukraine in 2022 have all been justified in terms of Russia's supposedly unique civilizational mission. Consequently—rather than just a fig leaf for the Kremlin's neocolonial ambitions—Russkii mir is a concept worth comprehending in its own right."

Mark Lawrence Schrad at Politico explores Russian nationalism through the 1989 Soviet movie City Zero.

"Beginning in the 1980s and Continuing On, His World Has Become Ours"

"If you're looking for the roots of today's bizarre conspiracy-and-anger-driven politics, you need to look further back than the presidency of Donald Trump or even the rise of social media or talk radio—back to the accusatory, inflammatory, wild-eyed rhetoric of the John Birch Society in the 1960s and 1970s."

Edward H. Miller at the Los Angeles Times argues that "[t]oday, all of us are stuck on the roller coaster of Robert Welch's political imagination, and we can't get off."

"The Cold War Was Perceived as a Kind of Moral Crusade"

"One man, Frank Kameny, was fired from his role in the Army Map Service in 1957 because of his sexuality. He decided to fight the decision, framing the discrimination against him as a civil rights issue rather than an alleged national security issue. By 1965, Kameny and other gay men and lesbians were picketing outside the White House and helping other fired employees with their court cases. And although in 1975 the Civil Service Commission announced new rules that meant gay people could no longer be barred or fired from federal employment because of their sexuality, discrimination continued in other agencies where employees had security clearance, like the NSA, where Shoemaker worked."

In a 2020 Time article, Suyin Haynes discusses the history of the Lavender Scare.

Anti v. Anti-Anti

"The 'no enemies to the left' posture makes it difficult to separate the democratic left from its undemocratic elements. If you meet any objection to abuses on your own side by changing the subject to the greater evil on the opposing side, then you never have to define what kinds of ideas or behaviors by your allies you won't accept. If they are willing to justify authoritarian abuses abroad, they would be willing to justify them domestically if given the opportunity."

Jonathan Chait at New York writes that "[w]hether to denounce illiberalism on the left when it occurs or instead to aim all hostile fire rightward is, in my observation, the key divide within the progressive intelligentsia."

"Still Pack a Bold Punch"

"Both volumes urge recognition of illiberalism for what it is: a clear and present danger to constitutional democracy—not a loyal opposition with which one breaks bread and compromises. Both take a realistic view of American conservatism's peculiar susceptibility to conspiracy theories and toxic identity politics. Both implicitly reject the idea that the fever will break if only the forces of liberal democracy extend their hand in a show of good will. People are sometimes rational. Often, they are not."

At Politico, Joshua Zeitz returns to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s The Vital Center and Richard Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics.

But Michael Brenes and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins at Dissent call for "a break with the anxieties that drove Cold War liberalism."

"Our Enemies Did Us a Favor by Pointing to Our Flaws, Because It Played a Role in Spurring Us to Be Better"

"Today, we still have enemies, but we no longer have the morally organizing idea of liberty versus tyranny that shaped our self-concept during the Cold War. We no longer see the need to sell our way of life to others around the globe. Many Americans shrug at the prospect of the Chinese government crushing freedom in Hong Kong, or Eastern European countries closing universities and independent media. We don't see ourselves as leading Team Liberty."

Mona Charen at The Bulwark writes about "What We Lost When We Won the Cold War."

"In the End, She Had Fallen in Love with Her Own Martyrdom"

"Sebba argues that Ethel was the victim of a combination of Cold War hysteria and bad relatives, and that she went to her death with 'dignity, confidence and courage'. Her Ethel is a 'profoundly moral woman' who 'believed she was dying to make sure that she left her sons with not simply the memory of a mother they loved but a human role model of how to live a good life'. Of course 'she could not confess to something which she had not done.' But that wouldn't have been necessary. If she had agreed to tell the government that Julius was a spy, then even after he was already dead her execution would have been called off."

At the London Review of Books, Deborah Friedell reviews Anne Sebba's Ethel Rosenberg: A Cold War Tragedy.

"It Will Be a Long Time, I Imagine, Before a Better Account of Art and Thought in Mid-Twentieth-Century America Appears"

"The Free World does not have a single, comprehensive argument; it contains many disparate arguments, only a few of which I've touched on here. It is based on a vast amount of research, biographical, historical, even economic, which shows (though it doesn't obtrude—Menand is too graceful a writer for that). Though he has not overcome my skepticism about some of the artistic and cultural developments of the period, he has nevertheless taught me a good deal."

George Scialabba at The Baffler reviews Louis Menand's The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War.

"Neither Carrots nor Sticks Have Swayed China as Predicted"

"Nearly half a century since Nixon's first steps toward rapprochement, the record is increasingly clear that Washington once again put too much faith in its power to shape China's trajectory. All sides of the policy debate erred: free traders and financiers who foresaw inevitable and increasing openness in China, integrationists who argued that Beijing's ambitions would be tamed by greater interaction with the international community, and hawks who believed that China's power would be abated by perpetual American primacy."

In a 2018 Foreign Affairs article, Kurt M. Campbell and Ely Ratner write that since World War II "Chinese realities upset American expectations."

"A Politico-Cultural Counterpart to the Marshall Plan"

"Despite the genuine threat to attendees' physical safety (the Soviets had kidnapped and 'disappeared' several critics from Berlin's Western sector), the event attracted such luminaries as A. J. Ayer, James Burnham, Herbert Read, H. R. Trevor-Roper, Sidney Hook, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Carlo Schmid, as well as five honorary presidents–the eminent philosophers Bertrand Russell, Karl Jaspers, John Dewey, Benedetto Croce, and Jacques Maritain. Delegates also included 'the cream of the anti-Stalinist left,' such as Arthur Koestler and Ignazio Silone, some of whom had been imprisoned in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Fascist Italy, or Falangist Spain. Indeed, one of the forum's organizers, Margarete Buber-Neumann, had been incarcerated by both Hitler and Stalin."

At The American Interest, Michael Allen and David E. Lowe look back to the 1950 creation of the Congress for Cultural Freedom.

"To Deploy Literature in the Service of Their Respective National Interests, and the Willingness of Writers to Be So Deployed"

"In this context, Mary McCarthy comes off more poorly than most of the other writers chronicled in this account. With customary cockiness, she claimed that novelists could make a special contribution to the broader effort of understanding the Vietnam War amid its conflicting imperatives and narratives: 'What we can do, perhaps better than the next man, is smell a rat.' Yet even as ­McCarthy questioned the accounts she was given by the U.S. and U.S.-supported government officials in Saigon, she credulously swallowed the self-­presentation of the North Vietnamese. In addition to suffering from poor sales of pamphlet versions of her writing about the situation in Vietnam, McCarthy was criticized by the likes of Diana Trilling, in the New York Review of Books, for committing the mortal sin of any serious and self-respecting intellectual: ordering one's capacities for genuinely liberal and open inquiry and analysis to the affirmation of static ideological purposes." 

Randy Boyagoda at First Things reviews Duncan White's Cold Warriors: The Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War.

Holidays from History in the Sun

"We all love a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an ending—preferably a happy ending but, above all, some clearly demarcated final page with a lesson. The lesson of 1989 is that there is no grand march, no dialectic of thesis versus antithesis resolving in some synthesis, no moral arc bending toward justice—or toward any particular thing. History is an unending whirlwind, and we're caught in it."

Fred Kaplan at Slate reflects on the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

And Larry Elliott at The Guardian describes what was lost with the end of the Cold War.