I have a longish post up at Jewcy about Alan Wald’s new study of Commie lit. A taste:

It was on a trip a few years ago to that mecca of petit bourgeois decadence, Las Vegas, that I devoured Alan Wald’s The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left. This book is now widely considered the definitive text on the various trotskisant movements (or “groupuscules”) that peppered the Gotham cityscape in the twenties and thirties. Mostly Jewish, with as much a tropism for literature as for politics, these sons and daughters of immigrants started out as revolutionaries and wound up anti-Communists, either of a liberal or conservative stripe. (Wald deftly showed that the was as nerve-racking as it was satisfying, especially for latterday patrons of the establishment who traffick in selective memories about the old days and bygone struggles, who took what position when, who did what to whom.)

A number of these complicated and dynamic figures are now forgotten: If Herbert Solow can’t earn a place at the table for being the leading American Trotskyist before World War II, then he at least deserves recognition as the man who helped nurture the critical talents of one Lionel Trilling. Others are famous for their continuing influence (Norman Podhoretz is an advisor to Rudy Giuliani) and their semi-permanent positions on the mastheads of great, or once-great, journals of opinion like Partisan Review, Encounter, Commentary and Dissent. On the whole, they’re all defined more according to their ex-identities, those idealistic and embarrassing vestiges of a radical past which they’ve spent the second and third acts of their distinctively American lives repudiating. As Irving Kristol once put it, “As long as I can remember, I’ve been a ‘neo’ something. I was a neo-Marxist, a neo-Trotskyist, a neocon. Eventually I’ll just be a ‘neo.’”

Read more here.

Addendum: Jimmy Bradshaw has a fine take on neoconservatism also at Jewcy. (Note: This isn’t the second part of his four-part series on the state of the left. Just a bonus post.)