The best political documentary ever

Just recently found it on Netflix, and it's available on instant. Believe me, if you like heady political discussion and argument, you will like this film whether you are liberal, conservative, or radical. Everyone will find parts of it to cheer, and everyone will find parts of it to boo, because just about everyone in intellectual politics is interviewed.

Arguing the World. Here's my review, though if you want the links you can find them here:

http://kunsoo1024.wordpress.com/2011/12/18/from-stubborn-socialism-to-obsessive-neo-conservatism-arguing-the-world/


Somebody reviewing one of Michael Moore’s movies once commented that while Moore’s ability to drive entire audiences to a standing ovation is a notable feat, a film maker who is a true artist ought to prefer that his/her film has audiences arguing in the aisles as the credits roll. I thought it was a good point, but I was hard-pressed to come up with a documentary film which could accomplish just that. And then, recently the recommendations robot at Netflix directed me to a documentary film entitled Arguing the World. In terms of stimulating thought and argument about the larger political issues, I can think of no more effective documentary film.

The film focuses on four dynamic figures of a group which became known as the New York Intellectuals, characterized primarily by Jewish ethnicity, radicalism in youth tempered by anti-Stalinism, cultural critique in middle age, and anywhere but anywhere in old age. The four are Irving Howe, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, and Daniel Bell. They were all raised in poverty in Jewish ghettos in New York City. They met at City College of New York during the 1930s. City College became known as the “Jewish Harvard,” because of the prominence of working class children of Jewish immigrants who would ditch poverty as adult career intellectuals. As legend has it, the professors themselves were mediocre, but the students would read and learn through arguing with each other. The dining hall contained various horseshoe shaped alcoves, and each one was claimed by some sort of clique (jocks, Catholics, etc.). As it happens Alcove One was perennially occupied by anti-Stalinist socialists, either Trotskyist or Second International variety (the SWP and SP actually merged for awhile, weird as that sounds to modern students of sectarian politics), while Alcove Two was occupied by the Communist Party activists and their fellow travelers. Often there were arguments and even altercations between the two, but more often each group kept to itself. The Alcove One denizens infused literature readings into their politics, lacing their Marxist analysis with smatterings of Dostoevsky, Proust, T.S. Lewis, the Bronte sisters, etc., and moved beyond even the Frankfurt School of Marxism in the blending of cultural criticism with politics. The subculture was also characterized by intense arguments, sometimes stimulated by alcohol consumption (a darker aspect of the old left which is known to the families but not often discussed even in the narrative histories).

These four began as Trotskyists, which leads me to my favorite quote in the film (I’m not quite remembering who said it): “We didn’t know he [Trotsky] was right. We only knew he was interesting. And in the Village then, to be interesting was to be right. Certainly to be uninteresting was to be wrong. And I’m not sure I don’t still hold to that.” I have to admit that I probably hold to that as well, as I frequently find my self disagreeing even when I agree. And Trotsky was a more interesting figure than Stalin, or even Lenin, and certainly more interesting than Norman Thomas (you get to see a rare clip of a Thomas speech in the film), though maybe not quite as interesting as Debs or Shachtman.

As they got older and left CUNY, the four, and others, pooled resources and joined as writers a magazine entitled Partisan Review – intending to be a literary magazine with a political philosophy emphasis. Now the film doesn’t get into the history so much, but Partisan Review actually has roots in the Greenwich Village intellectual milieu, which included John Reed, Max Eastman, and the Masses Crowd, and it may overemphasize a bit the divide between Alcoves One and Two in the broader sense, but perhaps not as it applies to these four individuals.

They were integral to the formation and development of Commentary Magazine, which began as an attempt to integrate Jewish radicalism into American democratic culture with complex cultural criticism, but the magazine ultimately slid into a more straight-jacketed ideological neo-conservatism, and exists now as a shadow of its more intellectually challenging past. But by the time the four were writing for Commentary, all of them, including Howe, had abandoned their CCNY-era radicalism and embraced a more skeptical and pragmatic liberal outlook, which sent them into different directions. The film examines the directions they took and attempts to find answers to the question of why like experiences could leave Irving Howe in the socialist fold (even if most self-proclaimed socialists regarded him as neo-conservative) while pushing Irving Kristol into the the Reagan camp.

When McCarthyism came into full swing, these intellectuals found themselves in a tight spot. They had become anti-communist to the point that they were slamming not only the C.P. itself for its ties and loyalty to the Soviet Union, but also the liberals who downplayed the American communist’s complicity with the mass killings carried out by their more “successful” Soviet counterparts. None of the intellectuals’ was particularly enamored with McCarthy as a matter of style, but while Kristol protests that he referred to McCarthy as a “vulgar demagogue” while implicitly supporting the carnage McCarthyism was wreaking on innocent people and the culture at large, he and other Commentary writers did not object to the underlying witch hunt process which ruined the lives of people who had been guilty of nothing more than attending socialist meetings while in college. At this point, Irving Howe broke away from many of his friends; and while slamming communism and even to some extent defending American culture, he attacked McCarthyism on civil liberties grounds- a frame that the others were unable or unwilling to adopt. Their defensiveness as exhibited in the interviews of the film is remarkable. On the one hand they protest that they did in fact “question” methods being used, but on the other felt that some sort of process was necessary.

Howe and other anti-Stalin socialists started the independent socialist quarterly Dissent (there is a recurring theme in the film that when Intellectuals don’t know what else to do, they start a magazine). The idea was to revisit socialism as a goal or a hope in a non-ideological manner, and outside of the auspices of any particular organization or program, while maintaining critical independence of thought and analysis. Kristol dismissed it as ideologically anachronistic and irrelevant, but by the time he was asked to comment he had already turned to the dark side and it’s unclear whether he was at that point unable to segregate his personal opinions from his political agenda. But the debate raged and an indication of the prominence of the debate in the NY Jewish subculture came a couple of decades later when Woody Allen, either unaware or uncaring that the reference was somewhat obscure on the national level, dropped a line into his acclaimed movie Annie Hall referencing a peace reached between Commentary and Dissent so that they merged to form the magazine Dysentery. Of the millions who have watched the Academy Award winning film over the decades since, probably only a fraction of them understand the reference. But that it made it into the movie is an indication of how strong the debate was in NY Jewish subculture.

The documentary then moves into the 1960s and the contentious relationship between the NY Intellectuals and the New Left. It doesn’t go into the initial discussions where Howe’s protege Michael Harrington attended the Port Huron conference and left with some frustration. The episode is described in some detail in Maurice Isserman’s If I had a Hammer, which is a brilliant summary of the history of the American Left. The film covers mostly the summit talks between Dissent and SDS. Howe and Glazer describe their interactions with upstart activist Tom Hayden, whom they regarded as a potential totalitarian – romantic utopian politics within a good looking guy completely into himself. The Intellectuals were paternalistic and condescending. The New Lefties were charged and emotional. It didn’t go well. There are interviews with New Leftists including Hayden and Todd Gitlin, and you can tell that it’s still a sore point.

(More below the fold)

The film provides a framework – the NY Intellectuals were never known for their social graces in arguing with each other or anyone else. As Diana Trilling noted, “they didn’t know how to behave.” But they were frustrated at the oversimplifications and the refusals of the New Left intellectuals to grasp the dangers of moralistic politics at the expense of self-criticism and, more importantly, critical examination of the opposition to the forces you are opposing. In other words, they saw the New Left embracing Castro and Mao as better alternatives to Stalin, while rejecting anything positive about American culture (except as certain histories of protest might conform to the governing ideology), and became frustrated with canned political responses about “the establishment” and accusations of compromise motivated by vested interest in the system.

Not mentioned in the film is an anecdote (a short version found in his NYT obituary) where he spoke at Stanford (as told by Michael Harrington) and encountered a noisy Maoist group. One of them accused How...