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Katha Pollitt and Andrew Sullivan

the breakfast table
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from: Katha Pollitt

Clearing the Table of Yesterday's Crumbs

Posted Tuesday, May 5, 1998, at 12:41 PM ET

Andrew,

You have a sly way of encoding your political slant in statements you then present as our shared views. Very clever! Thus, just to clear this morning's table of yesterday's old toast crumbs, I don't share your view of President Clinton, as you breezily conclude, if by that you mean your view that the President is close to evil, uniquely immoral and irresponsible, worse than Reagan or Bush--whose hostility to gays and gelid indifference to AIDS, I note, don't seem to bother you as much as Clinton's fine-words-that-butter-no-parsnips. I also protest "reverse racial discrimination" as a way to characterize affirmative action, which (as I guess you know) I support. So, really, we don't have the same view of President Clinton: we both dislike him, but for different reasons.

I also don't want to leave our May Day thread without challenging your equation of Communists and Nazis. Yes, in some ways Stalin was as murderous as Hitler; certainly, to a Spanish anarchist, and many ordinary citizens caught in their regimes, they were equally bad news. As my ultra-leftist friend Jeff says, when we speak of fascism, we must not forget to include Red fascism. But when you wonder why in this country, a demonstration of communists is regarded more indulgently--or, as I would say, with less alarm--than one of fascists would be, I think you are forgetting the very different domestic roles of these two political strains.

In this country, the legacy of American Communists includes some good things: opposition to segregation and racism, for example, going way back to the 30s. The Old Left was very important in the civil-rights movement, which now even the far right concedes was a Good Thing, but which at the time it bitterly opposed. The Old Left stood for things that benefited lots of people and that lots of people who were quite anti-communist also supported--the New Deal, unions, the safety net, civil liberties, even (just a little) women's rights. Note: I'm not saying all these things were without their complications or downsides, or that there wasn't an element of self-interest or calculation involved (in the CP's advocacy of free speech, for example, which didn't extend to Trotskyists, whom the CP was glad to see investigated by the govt. in the late 40s I think it was). I'm just saying that the Old Left was active in a lot of very mainstream social causes, often on what everyone now agrees was the right side.

But I can't think, off hand, of any great contributions to our polity made by members of the American Nazi party, the German Bund, the Ku Klux Klan or other fans of Hitler. Can you?

Cheers,
Katha

ps. Just got your Vatican post. More soon.

the breakfast table
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from: Katha Pollitt

Clearing the Table of Yesterday's Crumbs

Posted Tuesday, May 5, 1998, at 12:41 PM ET
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Katha Pollitt is a columnist at The Nation. Andrew Sullivan is a senior editor at the New Republic.
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