That in The Red Decade author Eugene Lyons was describing the Communist-dominated American Left of the Depression-wracked 1930s and 1940s makes his observations even more meaningful, for it is sobering to be confronted with how little has been gained by hard experience.
Looking backward from a time when, according to surveys, more millennials would rather live under socialism than capitalism, it's apparent that Lyons was documenting not just a historical moment but also a species of historical illiteracy as unchanging as it is poisonous, its utopianism able to flourish only at the expense of independent thought.
What Lyons found far more unsettling was the credulity of those in the vanguard of progressive thought: leading figures in academia, entertainment, publishing, media, and the highest councils of government, from New York to Hollywood and everywhere between.
While among them were many convinced ideologues, more numerous still were the careerists, or those simply following political fashion, sentimental liberals drawn to causes by the magic words: "Justice," "Democracy," "Peace." Lyons well understood the seductive power of the call for fundamental social transformation, but he also knew, as did few others, that it invariably led to the naming of enemies and the doling out of retribution, and to unspeakable moral chaos-and that it didn't even work.
Given his intimate acquaintance with the Left, Lyons well knew what calumnies the publication of The Red Decade would bring down on his head. At the time, especially in elite circles, the charge of "Red baiting" was akin to that of racism, sexism, or homophobia today; whether made in anger or with premeditated intent, it was enough to halt any challenge to the Left's worldview.
True enough, the Democrats have long cast themselves as the party of the dispossessed, and their policies have steadily moved the country leftward; and it is also the case, as Lyons recounts, that during the New Deal years, leading administration figures, including Eleanor Roosevelt, unknowingly served as props at Communist-sponsored events advertised as "Democratic and anti-Fascist." But following the Hitler-Stalin pact, even Mrs. Roosevelt distanced herself from the radicals.
Eugene Lyons was certainly a cynic, but unlike his fellow ex-leftist Whittaker Chambers, who famously declared, "I know I am leaving the winning side for the losing side," he was not a pessimist.
https://www.city-journal.org/eugene-lyons-the-red-decade
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