Exit Right Quotes

“He read Kolakowski on the danger, implicit in all utopian movements, that if the material of human nature proved too weak or brittle to withstand the stresses that the utopian architecture tried to impose upon it, then the architects might prefer to discard the humans rather than their precious blueprints. He”
― Daniel Oppenheimer, Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century

“Marx inherited his philosophical belief from Hegel,” Eastman wrote. “It is a belief that the world is evolving of its own necessary motion, and by a ‘dialectic’ procedure, ‘from the lower to the higher.’. . . But it is not sensible to take utopian aspirations out of your own head and attribute them to the external world. And no matter how much you disguise the process by calling the world ‘material,’ and by invoking the word scientific, it is not science to do this. It is just the opposite—religion. It is primitive, unverified, and unverifiable belief in what you want to have come true.”52”
― Daniel Oppenheimer, Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century

“There was a profound difference, he believed, between American democracy and the so-called “democracy” of places like the Soviet Union. And the credit for that difference didn’t just go, as certain sectors of the Left would have it, to the people throughout American history who’d defied the system. It went to the system as well, for its capacity to absorb dissent and respond to it constructively. America was more than he’d been able to admit in the past. And the best aspects of the Left, of himself, were more of America than he’d realized.”
― Daniel Oppenheimer, Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century

“The other novel aspect in the essay was the shift in his attitude toward America. No longer was he willing to take as a given that the nation’s flaws, which he acknowledged were many, added up to a totality that was deserving only of condemnation, critique, and revolution. That attitude made sense, he wrote, when you were comparing it to a socialist utopia that existed only in the imagination. It”
― Daniel Oppenheimer, Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century

“Kolakowski’s own essay in the volume was a particularly brutal exercise in deconstruction. He made the case, methodically and relentlessly, that state ownership of the means of production could persist over time only through coercion. He held up to bone-dry ridicule the Marxist preoccupation with class conflict to the exclusion of all other sources of conflict in human life and politics. He analyzed and then undermined what he saw as the “primordial hope” at the heart of Marx’s vision, which was the idea that in the socialist future there would be an end to alienation, to the separation between man as a private being and man as a political actor. In its place “man returning to perfect unity, experiencing directly his personal life as a social force.”
― Daniel Oppenheimer, Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century

“. . Since this is a generation that willed itself from childhood directly into adulthood, it still has its adolescence to go through—for a man can never skip adolescence, he can only postpone it. And”
― Daniel Oppenheimer, Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century

“I stopped arguing about religion long ago,”67 Burnham said to one of his comrades, when asked whether he was going to respond to Trotsky’s defense of dialectical materialism. The remark rippled quickly through the revolutionary grapevine to Trotsky, who was so infuriated by it that he fired off another long essay, “An Open Letter to Comrade Burnham,” almost before he’d come down from the last. And with that the last pretenses of comradeship fell away.”
― Daniel Oppenheimer, Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century