Fair and balanced, or actually too kind?

The Nation article doesn't reflect the majority view on the American Left. 

Timothy Carney at the Washington Examiner.

Did the Castros win?

Many conservatives cursed Obama for liberalizing relations with Communist Cuba. 

Many other conservatives applauded him for abandoning failed sanctions in exchange for free enterprise.

Meanwhile, an article by Tom Hayden in The Nation, the liberal American magazine, applauded Obama's decision as a "victory for the Cuban revolution" and a final vindication for the Castros.

The Nation article doesn't reflect the majority view on the American Left. 

But at the moment that Communist dictatorships Cuba and North Korea come back into the news, its love letter to Castro reminds us how divided the American Left was during the Cold War.

And remains, looking back, about the Cold War.

It was that more than - well, as much as - issues of race that put a fatal fracture into the labor-liberal alliance that was key to the New Deal coalition supporting Democratic progressivism.

Labor as well as some liberals and some socialists like those affiliated with the DSA were resolutely pro-Cold War.

But many liberals were all along as soft-headed on communism as FDR and in consequence as anti-Cold War as Henry Wallace.

The radicals were and remain flat-out pro-communist, from Bill Ayers to Michael Moore.

The line between the liberals and radicals wasn't so much a line as an area of blur.

As then, as now.

Since the close of World War Two, there has always been a kind of "America First," anti-interventionist, isolationist anti-Cold War opinion in play in America, and it was characteristic of many of the mass participants in the anti-war movement of the Vietnam Years.

But the anti-war outlook of the left ranged from the view of many liberals that communism wasn't all that bad (right wing dictatorships were much worse) and anyway was rarely a true threat to the radical view of the children of Marx and the New Left that capitalism in general and America in particular were so awful that communism was better and our enemies, pretty much any of our enemies, ought to prevail.

Hayden's celebration of the Cuban Revolution, for example, looks in part like an argument aimed at liberal fans of the Difference Principle of John Rawls' Theory of Justice, alleging as it seems to do that in Cuba party dictatorship and socialism played a key role in significantly improving the lot of the island's worst off groups and perhaps even a majority or near-majority, relative to what their fate was under capitalism in the past and might well be under capitalism again.

Tom Hayden celebrates a victory for the Cuban Revolution

But the rest of his argument adverts to other liberal/radical values.

Despite the US embargo and relentless US subversion, Cuba remains in the upper tier of the United Nations Human Development Index because of its educational and healthcare achievements. 

Cuba even leads the international community in the dispatch of medical workers to fight Ebola. 

Cuba is celebrated globally because of its military contribution to the defeat of colonialism and apartheid in Angola and southern Africa.

Joan Walsh and Michael Moore could join this celebration, along with Bill Ayers and very likely Barack Obama.

<Aside>

Carney's stories about Ted Kennedy and the KGB ought to be put side by side with the stories we so often read in the left press about Nixon undermining the Paris peace talks in 1968.

(There are other stories about Kennedy undermining American policy towards Britain on behalf of the terrorists of the IRA.)

</Aside>

Carney concludes,

With regard to Cuba, the current debate is mostly over the best means for ending a Communist dictatorship, and how to bring political and economic freedom to the island. 

As so often, the debate is framed in terms of gratuitous global altruism.

No national security motives?

Then to hell with it.

Besides, if the justification for popular democracy is that it empowers those not in and who do not control the government to in a measure protect themselves from those who are or do there is no justification for imposing it when or in a manner in which it predictably will have the opposite effect.

As it would if, in Cuba as in Russia and in varying degrees in Eastern Europe, restoration of rule by parties led to or was accompanied by restoration of capitalism, itself accompanied by the immediate or eventual loss to the lower orders or the common people as a whole of key institutional supports of their livelihood and general welfare along with a thorough looting of the national patrimony of socialism.

And I do here refer to exactly the benefits brought to the lower orders by the revolution that Hayden himself wrote of.

Those and others of the like ilk.

Yes, I have not forgotten that the counter-revolution against communism not only eliminated the worst features of that system but also features of it that, in certain important respects, made it better than the all too capitalist capitalism to which Russian and Eastern Europe were delivered up.

Not enough better to make it better in net than capitalism, even for the lower orders and ordinary folk.

But better in those specific ways.