Ideological Migration

["Henry C.K. Liu" <hliu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

[ since the Lingua Franca article no longers appears to be available
on the web, i have re-posted Henry's forward of it in full to:

http://www.marxmail.org/lingua-franca-ex-cons.html

Les]


Hitchen is not the only one changing sides.

Lingua Franca, Volume 11, No. 1-February 2001
Volume 11, No. 1¡XFebruary 2001

The Ex-Cons
Right-Wing Thinkers Go Left!
by Corey Robin

ACCORDING TO POPULAR MYTH it was Winston Churchill who said, "any man
under thirty who is not a liberal has no heart, and any man over
thirty who is not a conservative has no brains." He didn't say it, but
his imprimatur turned a clever quip of uncertain provenance into an
axiom of political biography: Radicalism is a privilege of youth,
conservatism a responsibility of age, and every thinking person
eventually surrenders the first for the second. From Max Eastman to
Eugene Genovese, Whittaker Chambers to Ronald Radosh, intellectuals
migrate from left to right almost as if obeying a law of nature.

Or do they? After all, John Stuart Mill published his feminist classic
The Subjection of Women when he was sixty-three. In the last ten years
of his life, Diderot blasted France as the reincarnation of imperial
Rome and hailed the American Revolution as a repudiation of European
tyranny. And when George Bernard Shaw addressed the question of
politics and aging, he suggested just the opposite of what Churchill
is supposed to have said.  "The most distinguished persons," Shaw
wrote in 1903, "become more revolutionary as they grow older."

cont'd. at:  http://www.marxmail.org/lingua-franca-ex-cons.html



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