Dorothy Day Was More Radical Than Any Of Them Your somewhat provocative idea for Tuesday

There is a remarkable consistency in the neoconservatives from its founders such as Irving Kristol, his wife Gertrude Himmelfarb, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Irving Howe,  and others, that they all were originally Trotskyites and, so, atheists right up to the last celebrity convert to it, Christopher Hitches who was, as well, a Trotsyite in his youth and, I guess, something of one when he was famous mostly as a columnist for The Nation, up through his star moment when he broke into a wider fame by kicking an elderly nun and servant of the poor around.  Whether it was the fame he got from that which led him on to more plentiful pastures of following the money into neoconservatism in the Bush II regime or if he'd have done it anyway, I'm not going to look through his columnage to try to discern.   He was a notable liar and a rather slippery sleaze who  had duped some not unintelligent people on the actual left with his silver tongue - the way they openly pined for him at The Nation after he crapped on them as a means of leaving them behind was embarrassing.   Even the champion cynic and savage critic of the neo-cons, Gore Vidal, had bought his act up till that point.

Once they decided to dump Trotsky, then dead and unable to represent any venue of dreams of power, such as their despised and hated rivals, the Stalinists had, the founding generation went over to the cynical right-wing conservatism of Leo Strauss, who presented religion as a necessary lie for the stupid and ignorant masses but one which the elite had no need for.   Other than Hitch, whose fame and fortune depended on God hating, I'm unaware of the others talking much about their atheism.

It would be nice to have the time and resources to be able to contrast the atheist left with the religious left to compare the phenomenon of apostasy to the far right between the two but, alas, I don't.   Perhaps someone else could and we might be able to conclude something important about it.   My takeaway based on what a religious Christian would have to deny to make that trip - pretty much the entire Gospel and the earliest tradition of radical economic and social justice and even equal distribution of goods, in order to make that conversion.   I think a really religious Jew who took the prophets and The Law seriously (Leviticus 19:18, Hillel's most famous aphorism containing the entire Law) couldn't be a neocon either.  I think that what the phenomenon shows is that the materialist "left" never had what it took to be a real leftist to start with, the Trotskyites, the Stalinists, various other Marxists, .... their "leftism" was always unfounded in their ideology, I think it was more strategic and a matter of using moral stands in the same way Strauss presented the utility of religion as a useful lie.  Useful for swaying the masses, who had a real stake in the things that religion leads to more naturally than materialism does.

In my criticism of Emma Goldman I noted she had done some useful things in documenting the crimes of the earliest rulers of the Soviet Union as an eye-witness to much of the bloodshed and the early imposition of oppression.   Late in her life, when she saw how Trotsky was parading around North America and, especially, in response to the Trotskyist response to her closest colleague, Alexander Berkman's account of Trotsky's role in the bloody suppression of the  Kronstadt rebellion (sort of like the Solidarity movement in Poland, on the other end of Soviet history) she wrote a pamphlet documenting the lies of the Trots.   While I wouldn't say anyone named was beyond reproach in telling the whole truth and nothing but, it makes interesting reading.   In it she notes that Trotsky wasn't above using the same violence and oppression that Stalin became notorious for, only that, since he'd lost the power struggle with Stalin, he didn't get the chance.  Something that his later day descendants still try to do through the Republican Party.

I will note that, as I mentioned the other day, typical of the atheist "left" she didn't let a chance to slam religion go unused.

The average Communist, whether of the Trotsky or Stalin brand, knows about as much of Anarchist literature and its authors as, let us say, the average Catholic knows about Voltaire or Thomas Paine.

Which is remarkably what I've come to conclude about your average and even most elite atheists, such as Goldman who, none the less, feels themselves entirely competent to comment on and judge the entire history and range of Catholic, Christian and religious thought and practice.   Such as this line from the same essay.

Trotskyists no doubt consider it bourgeois sentimentality to permit the maligned sailors the right to speak for themselves. I insist that this approach to one's opponent is damnable Jesuitism and has done more to disintegrate the whole labour movement than anything else of the "sacred" tactics of Bolshevism.

I will bet you anything that I could search the entire corpus of Goldman's scribblings and not find any evidence she knew anything more than a few bromides, probably gleaned from WASP putdowns of Catholics she'd heard in New York, concerning the history of the Jesuits and social justice.  I doubt she ever heard of the Paraguayan Reductions, free soil they set up in the 17th century, one of the more enduring experiments in social justice and probably unique in the period it lasted, until the expulsion of the Jesuits on the order of Charles III in Spain.

Dorothy Day fled the atheist left for Catholicism, started Catholic Worker, joined and struggled with and for the least among us, held solid to pacifism and her own brand of Christian anarchism (though she was The Anarch, a joke her friends are said to have told in her presence) was entirely better humored and more loved than Emma was and died, many of those who knew her are convinced, a saint. Her life, over many decades, testifies to her actual belief in what she was doing, it was no convenient lie for her and unlike the famous, absurdly mythologized, do-nothing "left", she did something.