@jonathanchait on Henry Wallace as part of a 'a left-wing splinter faction'... was run largely by members of the Communist Party.'
Writing about the Political Past, as an utterly failed attempt, at writing about the Political Present. Old Socialist scoffs!
In Mr. Chait’ s essay he forgets the charge that the Republicans made about The New Deal, ‘a generation of treason’ that brought Nixon to the American Political Stage! He also forgets that when Henry Wallace ran in ‘48, it was not a crime to be a member of The Communist Party! Even those Neo-Cons were once Trotskyites: Alcoves A & B at City College of New York! Mr Chait prefers a free floating defamation, rather than evidence, his essay is almost historical free imaginative variation.
Mr. Chait describes the Wallace political phenomenon as a ‘a left-wing splinter faction’ … Note again the historical resonance with the American Political Present, with the proviso that both the ‘Left’ and the ‘Right’, are both disenchanted with both major parties. Mr. Chait is unable to even address such concerns, as his central concern is to protect the New Democrats, from the benighted ‘Left Wing’ menace, even in its most etiolated form, of the now utterly disappeared ‘The Squad’ !
Chait presents Wallace as the ‘outsider’ of respectable bourgeois politics, though he would never use such a hifalutin term.
The 1948 Henry Wallace campaign, a left-wing splinter faction that opposed the Democrats but which stirred a fervor on the left, was run largely by members of the Communist Party.
Chait, besides being a New Democrat, is a lazy newspaper man/opinion writer ! Thomas W. Devine’s Henry Wallace's 1948 Presidential Campaign and the Future of Postwar Liberalism presents a very different picture, of the Communist involvement in the Wallace campaign: in the chapter titled ‘A FRENCHMAN NAMED DUCLOS A FRENCHMAN NAMED DUCLOS The Communists and the Origins of the Progressive Party’ That is available here :
https://flexpub.com/preview/henry-wallace-s-1948-presidential-campaign-and-the-future-of-postwar-liberalism
Should The Reader, in the political present, make a connection between Wallace as a Fellow-Traveler of Communism, and the present Dissenters regarding the War in Ukraine?
Mr. Chait prefers, again, the free floating descriptors ,with the addition of the Cold War Hollywood hysteria of The Manchurian Candidate.
Some progressives were communists. They had allies who were merely anti-anti-communist. The path of least resistance between them was to insist the entire issue of communist espionage was a lie. The existence of a loud liberal faction that hesitated to forthrightly denounce communism made it easier for reactionaries like McCarthy to tar the whole New Deal as a communist front. The most effective liberal response involved simultaneously demonstrating that liberals stood opposed to McCarthyism and communism alike. (Many liberals of the era treated the two evils as functional allies of each other — it is the explicit message of The Manchurian Candidate.)
Mr Chait become prescriptive, in its most capacious iteration, The New Democrats fighting off The Left inside the New Democratic Party itself?
The lesson here is that winning a culture war contains both an offensive and a defensive component. You can’t assume that you can frame the fight on your own chosen terms. If your allies are taking unpopular positions that the voters notice, you are giving your opponents an opening.
On the broad suite of issues the right is using today to wage a culture war, its accusations, like McCarthy’s, mostly consist of lies. Indeed, to the extent that Republicans endorse clearly hysterical claims about grooming, or open the door to wild lawsuits against teachers who tell their students they’re gay, they give Democrats an opportunity to turn these attacks to their advantage.
Mr. Chait is just another Opinion Writer, with a Party Loyalty, though not quite a party apparatchik, he is a propagandist whose attack on ‘a left-wing splinter faction’ might just also be aimed at another target Bernie Sanders?
Political Observer