History suggests that at least some leftists will come around to conservatism, eventually.
History suggests that at least some leftists will come around to conservatism, eventually.
‘S ocialism is coming,” J. A. Wayland, the publisher of Appeal to Reason, promised in 1902. “It’s coming like a prairie fire and nothing can stop it.”
A decade later, the founder of the most successful periodical in the history of the American left looked more prophet than crackpot. Socialists, particularly Wayland, imagined 1912 as the year of American deliverance from capitalism to socialism.
One gleans a similar mania on the left 114 years later. Socialist mayors in Seattle and New York; the Democratic Socialists of America members Melat Kiros in Colorado and Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York, who have ousted Democratic Party incumbents from deep-blue districts; Abdul El-Sayed’s nomination to the U.S. Senate in Michigan; and Francesca Hong, who once sought the abolition of Thanksgiving, now leading the pack of Wisconsin Democrats for the party’s gubernatorial nomination: These all indicate that, just as in 1912, socialists regard their moment as now.
With the attempted socialist takeover of the Democratic Party, Republicans might expect an exodus of moderates into their party. James Carville buttressed this belief when he told CNN that he had “no intention of ever being in the same political party” as left-wing streamer Hasan Piker. History undergirds this sense as well. Democratic voters cast ballots for Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump when their own party lost its way. Alienated party members in powerful positions — including Texas Governor John Connolly, National Endowment for the Humanities Chairman William Bennett, and Screen Actors Guild President Reagan — added to the Republican rosters after they subtracted themselves from the Democrats.
But if history is any guide, conservatives should expect a migration of Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and Democratic Socialists of America members — more than just the Bill Mahers and James Carvilles. The vision of blue-haired DSA convention delegates — waving fingers instead of clapping, using “comrade” in place of “Mr.” or “Mrs.,” calling mothers “birthing people” — evolving into right-wingers in good standing may conjure up a more surreal scene than anything in a David Lynch movie. But they will come.
One need only look at the early masthead of National Review to grasp the degree to which former leftists — some of a more extreme and hardened variety than AOC or DAC — populated the intellectual leadership of the postwar conservative movement. Suzanne LaFollette was born into the first family of American progressivism, Willi Schlamm at 16 won an audience with Vladimir Lenin in the Kremlin, Willmoore Kendall aspired in the mid-1930s to become “a Great Socialist Publicist,” Brent Bozell chaired Yale’s chapter of the United World Federalists, Russell Kirk voted for Socialist Norman Thomas for president in 1944, James Burnham advised Leon Trotsky, and Frank Meyer worked directly for future East German dictator Walter Ulbricht to promote “peace.”
The political reorientation of Burnham, Bozell, and company — or the later defection of intellectuals referred to as neoconservatives — represents the worst-case scenario for hardened leftists. J. A. Wayland took another route of escape.
Wayland, a veteran of the communal movement that imagined socialist Bantustans operating within capitalist America, had an epiphany before the turn of the century. He began to believe that socialism’s triumph would come only in the form of a national takeover. His socialism with a populist veneer mirrored that preached by so many within the DSA. But in headquartering his “Temple of Revolution” not in New York City as the DSA does but in Girard, Kansas, Wayland ensured that his fellow countrymen saw his movement as star-spangled socialism.
A tiny town of 2,500 in Southeastern Kansas became, in the words of one Appeal to Reason enthusiast, “the Mecca of Socialism, the center of the revolutionary universe, the place from which emanates the flashes of light and the glory that shall finally illuminate the world!” Frank O’Hare and Kate Richards, a sort of first couple of socialism, married at Wayland’s home in Girard. Mother Jones spent a winter there. Appeal to Reason writer Eugene Debs made regular pilgrimages. Upton Sinclair serialized The Jungle in the periodical’s pages ahead of book publication.
Wayland’s Appeal to Reason, between “Cancer Cured” and “Free Gold Watch” ads, informed readers that socialist schools would produce millions of Shakespeares, that socialist economics would eliminate unemployment, that socialist foreign policy would abolish war, and that a socialist criminal justice system would result in “almost no crime, for the cause of crime is injustice.” The paper’s publisher bought into the hype he ginned up. A headline five days before 1912’s elections read: “Indications Are That Truly ‘This Is Our Year.’”
Then Wayland’s friend Eugene Debs, in the high-water mark of the Socialist Party, won 6 percent of the vote in the presidential election. The result disappointed rather than heartened Wayland. Predictably let down by an ideology that promised everything but delivered nothing, Wayland planned an exit more honorable than the perfidy of the future defectors on the National Review masthead. The weekend after the election, Wayland ascended to his bedroom, wrapped a bedsheet around a gun, and fired a shot with the barrel inside of his mouth.
“The struggle under the competitive system is not worth the effort,” read the suicide note of the man who years earlier had compared socialism to an unstoppable prairie fire. “Let it pass.”
The beautiful idea of heaven on earth, a brotherhood of man, and the perfectibility of man seduces socialists. The failure to deliver on any of its promises inevitably shakes the faith of a few of the truest of true believers. Marx at least understood that history repeats itself “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”