https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/07/06/the-pathology-of-american-communism/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first
The Romance of American Communism, by Vivian Gornick (Verso, 288 pp., $19.95)
Progressives may be riding high these days, but Vivian Gornick believes they lack good role models as they set about trying to “achieve a more just world from the bottom up.” Gornick, the New York journalist and memoirist whose radical feminist writings appeared regularly in the Village Voice, believes The Romance of American Communism is what they need. Verso has reissued her 1977 book, a group portrait of the men and women of her parents’ generation who embraced Communism during its mid-20th-century heyday.
Much of America scorned the “old Reds,” to use Gornick’s term. The reasons why come through clearly in the interviews she conducted. Her quixotic mission is to make us warm to her interviewees even as they relate, in excruciating detail, how disillusioned the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) left them. One testifies to “all the bullying, all the petty despotism, and all the real horror of being tied to the Soviet line.” His comment is typical. Summarizing the book’s recollections of life in the Party in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, Gornick writes: “There are many, many Communists who remember with fear and self-loathing the cruelties both inflicted and received” in the name of “democratic centralism,” the Leninist concept around which a “vicious tyranny,” the CPUSA, was built.