Will Success Spoil Anti-Communists?

Seventy-five years after Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary, saw the lights going out all over Europe, they were unexpectedly turned on again in the fall of 1989. A friend of mine, a well-known conservative, suggested that I keep an eye on the news media’s coverage of these stirring events. For the liberals, he believed, a little “spin control” would be necessary. They couldn’t really enjoy what was going on, but they wouldn’t be able to admit as much, either.

A column by George Will partly confirmed this guess. “Some liberals,” he wrote, “seem disoriented. They are even made morose by recent events.” The New Yorker, however, contrived to detect a silver lining in the cloud of an anti-Communist revolution—the imminent demise of anti-Communism: “That the cold war may be ending, and that forty years of nuclear dread might diminish, and that anti-Communism, an engine that has propelled so many American political careers, could fall into disuse—a newspaper reader hardly dares to be so hopeful.”

TB

About the Author

Tom Bethell

Featured Tags

Seventy-five years after Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary, saw the lights going out all over Europe, they were unexpectedly turned on again in the fall of 1989. A friend of mine, a well-known conservative, suggested that I keep an eye on the news media’s coverage of these stirring events. For the liberals, he believed, a little “spin control” would be necessary. They couldn’t really enjoy what was going on, but they wouldn’t be able to admit as much, either.

A column by George Will partly confirmed this guess. “Some liberals,” he wrote, “seem disoriented. They are even made morose by recent events.” The New Yorker, however, contrived to detect a silver lining in the cloud of an anti-Communist revolution—the imminent demise of anti-Communism: “That the cold war may be ending, and that forty years of nuclear dread might diminish, and that anti-Communism, an engine that has propelled so many American political careers, could fall into disuse—a newspaper reader hardly dares to be so hopeful.”