Jeane Kirkpatrick: from “social democrat” to champion of death squads

She gained national prominence as both UN ambassador and a prominent foreign policy advisor and spokesperson for the Republican administration of Ronald Reagan, on whose National Security Council she served as the only woman and the only Democratic Party member.

Her deliberately cultivated image at the UN was that of an American chauvinist bully, unashamedly threatening smaller nations with the cutoff of American aid and even military aggression if they failed to toe Washington’s line. She was equally unabashed about defending the crimes of America’s anticommunist allies, from the mass killings and torture carried out by Latin American military regimes, to Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the South African apartheid regime’s use of force against both neighboring African states as well as its own oppressed black majority.

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Kirkpatrick’s political development followed a path worn by a generation of intellectuals who, while initially attracted to the ideals of socialism, had no genuine association with the working class or confidence in its revolutionary capacities and bowed before the anticommunist onslaught of the American political establishment.

In 2002, Kirkpatrick explained her own early attraction to socialism while participating in a forum with other former members of the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL) and the Social Democrats USA, including figures ranging from Sandra Feldman, president of the American Federation of Teachers to Marshall Wittman, the former spokesman for the Christian Coalition.

She recounted that her introduction to the ideas of socialism came from her grandfather in Oklahoma: “My grandfather explained socialism to me as a very small child as a system that was more fair than other systems, and more fair than the system we had in Oklahoma at that time. I hadn’t the slightest notion what system we had in Oklahoma, I might say. But my grandfather did, and I was prepared to take his word for it. The distribution of everything, he said, was more fair. It sounded good to me.”

She explained that years later, as a college student in Missouri in the mid-1940s, she joined the YPSL and, as a graduate student, studied under the German social democratic émigré and member of the Frankfurt School, Franz Neumann.

Kirkpatrick said that her own subsequent evolution away from socialism was grounded on the conviction that it is impossible to “change human nature,” the most commonplace bourgeois cliché utilized to justify everything from sweatshop exploitation to wars of aggression.

Nonetheless, she adds, “I was an active Democrat.” She continued: “At the same time I was studying German social democracy, I formed the view that the New Deal and its various forms, the Fair Deal and Hubert Humphrey’s style of democratic politics, was of the same sort of species as German social democracy. I still believe that, somewhat.”

Prominent among the figures within this layer of right-wing American social democrats was Max Shachtman, who was to have an influence on Kirkpatrick and others who became identified with the neo-conservative movement.

A founder of the American Trotskyist movement, Shachtman broke with Trotsky in 1940. Under the pressure of public opinion generated by approaching war and in particular the Stalin-Hitler pact, he and a petty-bourgeois layer within the movement, then the Socialist Workers Party, rejected the defense of the Soviet Union against imperialism and developed the position that a new form of exploitative class society had arisen in the USSR.

From an opponent of Stalinism from the left—from the standpoint of socialist internationalism—Shachtman became an opponent from the right—from the standpoint of US imperialism—a position that he consummated 10 years later with his public support for US imperialism’s war against Korea. Over the course of the next two decades, Shachtman moved steadily to the right, adopting positions of extreme anti-communism and acting as an advisor to the AFL-CIO labor bureaucracy. Meanwhile, he dissolved his organization—as well his politics—into the right-wing remnants of social democracy, ultimately ending up in the Social Democrats USA, with which Kirkpatrick was herself once affiliated.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2006/dec2006/kirk-d12.shtml