The Controversialist: Arguments with Everyone, Left Right and Center
By Martin Peretz.
Wicked Son, 2023.
Hardcover, 352 pages, $28.00.
Reviewed by Chuck Chalberg.
If it can be said that a book occasionally arrives at just the right moment, Martin Peretz’s autobiography was published too soon, historically speaking. Available shortly before the horrors of October 7, it’s the story of a “controversialist” careening among the disputes between the left and the center-left, while always seeking to be in the middle of American intellectual and political life from the 1960s until today. And a mostly compelling story it is. At least it is primarily that until it begins to run out of steam somewhere early in this century.
But, oh, what a thoroughly compelling story, maybe even a dramatically important story, this story might have been if only Martin Peretz had had the prescience—or just plain good luck—to hold off telling it until, oh, until just about now. Why? Because so much of his story is about the two great loves of his life: America and Israel. And the national lives of both of those loves are at, or surely near, crisis points.
To be sure, there have been other intense loves in Peretz’s long life. Harvard, for one, would have been another good reason to delay this memoir. And The New Republic, for another, isn’t.
Then comes his wife of many years. After all, it was her inherited money that enabled Peretz to acquire the magazine in 1974. The two are now divorced, whether despite or because of his “gayness” to which he occasionally and almost offhandedly refers, and always with an, “oh by the way, did I happen to mention this” tone.
And then there are his students; yes, most of his students, but along the way and in the end, there remains one student in particular. That would be Mr. Perfect (in Peretz’s eyes), the ever decent, ever serious, always deferential, almost saintly Al Gore, or the sole Peretz student “who will go down in the history books.” Just how far down is yet to be determined.
By his own estimation, Peretz was a natural teacher. At least it came to him as “naturally as talking.” His classes were, not surprisingly, something other than rigorous. His opening line was borrowed from Herbert Marcuse: “Freud plus Marx equals truth.” Really? Apparently, it was his perennial opening lie, oops line, during a lengthy but never-tenured career as a Harvard lecturer.
And yet, even as a young teacher in the early 1960s, he was only “sort of a man of the left.” Unlike many of his students, Peretz concedes that he wasn’t a “real radical.” Just what sort of radical was a “real” Peretz radical becomes much clearer as the book proceeds.
Nor was he ever a real scholar. Early on in his academic life, a mentor told Peretz that he was a “skimmer” and not a “plumber,” because he lacked the patience to “go deep.” Peretz never forgot those words, especially since he knew then—and knows now—that they were “true.”
“Skimmer” might have made a nice, if quirky, title for this book. It certainly would have been a better choice than “controversialist,” since Peretz was at once something less and something more than that. Committed to building a society grounded in “social democratic values,” Peretz was never important enough to be the controversialist at any point during the course of the last half-century. Nor was he ever what he once might have aspired to be—namely, the standard against which to judge/measure others on any issue.
Nonetheless, Peretz was controversial among leftists, especially among leftists tempted by the totalitarian impulse and specifically among those on the left who were at once sympathetic to the Soviet Union and less than sympathetic to America or Israel—or both at once.
Apparently, for Martin Peretz, the “real radical” during the Cold War was essentially the anti-American, Soviet-sympathizing, totalitarian ideologue that he never was. And today? In all likelihood, such a character would be the anti-American, pro-Palestinian totalitarian ideologue that he is not. This is all the more reason that a Martin Peretz memoir in 2024 might have been a much more compelling read, perhaps even a relatively hot commodity.
“Conscience of the left” might also have been too grandiose a title, but that’s precisely what Martin Peretz has always seen himself as being. And in 2024, the left could use the good services of a good conscience, maybe even the good conscience of a sometimes marginalized man.
So could the country, for that matter. As the fall election approaches, the country needs liberals and leftists to sort themselves out—and then to separate. More to the point, it needs liberals to stop voting for leftists.
Would Martin Peretz aid and abet such an effort? Or would he actually reverse course and urge liberals to support conservatives? Or might he simply retreat, as he momentarily does in these pages, by reducing himself now and again to, yes, a “marginalized man.” That would be someone who finds himself so “marginalized” within his Democratic party that he currently places himself somewhere off to the “side of the margin.”
Now edging toward his middle eighties, Martin Peretz has lived a highly political and boisterously American life. A man of the left and an American patriot, he is a rare bird today—and, therefore, possibly even a controversial one, not to mention an iconoclastic one.
Ah, there is the title. Either “The Iconoclast” or perhaps “Left Wing Patriot.” Born and raised in the Bronx when New York City was less a melting pot than a “TV dinner,” Peretz initially made his way to Brandeis and Max Lerner, a fellow Jew who was also in love with “America as a civilization.”
Then came Harvard, where Peretz quickly became a self-described “Harvard patriot.” To be sure, the university “didn’t need my patriotism, but I didn’t care.” The Protestant establishment was beginning to welcome ethnics, especially Jews, in significant numbers. And it was Peretz’s “good fortune to walk up to this golden door just as it was opening up.” Rather than lament or attack past discrimination, Peretz appreciated his opportunity and took full advantage of it.
Harvard was a godsend for this highly secular Jew. And today? Both Harvard and The New Republic, which he sold in 2012, are very much in his rearview mirror. But his eyes are at least occasionally on them—especially on Harvard, which Peretz notes has “returned to its roots.” How so? It’s once again about the business of “training ministers for a theocracy.” That line, which is not at all a lie, is the best one in the book and yet another reason why this memoir should have been delayed by a year.
Still, what is here is well worth the read. A leftist who loves America. What’s not to like? Peretz was also a leftist who voted for Nixon in 1972 because he was certain that a President George McGovern would abandon Israel, not to mention a leftist who publicly commended Nixon for his support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War of 1973. He also was a leftist who thought that the Kennedys in general were “phonies” and that Bill Clinton in particular was “shallow and needy.”
Peretz was a leftist who found room for not one but two Charleses (Murray and Krauthammer) in the pages of TNR, a leftist who could oppose the nuclear freeze movement and support Reagan on the contras, as well as a leftist who trashed Hillary Clinton’s nationalized health campaign and urged the removal of Saddam Hussein.
Later, Peretz was also a leftist who initially regarded Barack Obama as a “blank screen on which to project our fantasies” before having serious second thoughts about a president who was “disassociated from all the grounded loyalties” that had rooted one Martin Peretz in the Democratic party. And now Peretz is a leftist who sees Donald Trump as not just a “coarse, money-powered populist” but as a “lesson to Democrats” and their “arrogant elitism and one-worldism.” Finally, Martin Peretz is now some sort of an aging leftist who is willing to reveal that he worries about an America “without traditional guardrails.”
As if all of that is not enough, Martin Peretz also confides that he was once trapped in an elevator with Salvador Dalí before telling his readers that Gene McCarthy’s leftism was “my kind of leftism, if it even was leftism,” before concluding that he is a leftist who has now “lost the left.” In sum, Peretz is both an iconoclastic leftist and an honest one, even if he claims not to be able to remember for whom he voted in 2004—and even if it turns out that he is no longer a leftist of any kind.
But in the meantime, a few questions remain: Did Peretz lose the left, or did the left lose him? And just where would this “sort of” leftist be today, politically speaking? Would he be content to call himself nothing more than another controversialist offering commentary on the passing scene? Or would he prefer to remove that mask and the one behind it? And if so, might he now regret that he didn’t wait a bit longer before offering this memoir?
In other words, would a 2024 Martin Peretz memoir, a memoir written after he had finally emerged from a very different sort of closet, have turned out to be the memoir of an unabashed and unqualified American patriot rather than a more narrowly defined “sort of” left-wing sort of patriot? And would such a memoir have made irrelevant this 2023 memoir, a memoir which was grounded in his own neediness? That would be a neediness that demanded that his friends and enemies still regard him as some sort of a left winger—and not at all the uncloseted patriot that he had finally become.
John C. “Chuck” Chalberg writes from Bloomington, MN.
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