A stroll through the latest New York Times Sunday Book reviews reveals a shocking contrast of treatment between a democratically elected American president, Republican Ronald Reagan, and peripatetic "revolutionary" Che Guevara, who imprisoned thousands and supervised firing squads in Cuba and elsewhere. Which figure do you figure received a more positive profile in the Times?
A review of U.K. historian Gary Gerstle’s The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order -- America and the World in the Free Market Era by US history professor Kevin Boyle was headlined “Ronald Reagan’s New Economic Order, and What It Meant for America.” The reviewer’s tone tracked with the book’s anti-capitalist perspective (the red flag is the Marxist neologism “neoliberal” in the title).
Gerstle carefully recreates the new order Reagan wanted to put in its place. It had its origins, he says, in classical liberalism’s faith in the free market as the guarantor of both individual liberty and the common good. In the mid-20th century a handful of European intellectuals and their American acolytes gave that faith a new name -- neoliberalism -- and an institutional home in a scattering of generously funded research institutions and iconoclastic university economics departments.….Government wasn’t the solution, he said again and again. It was the problem. Cut its regulation, slash its taxes, lower its trade barriers and capitalism’s genius would be released, the American dream restored.
Needless to say, that’s not what Boyle or Gerstle think happened. They're mainly concerned with American racism, which they link to American capitalism.
Over the next eight years Reagan laid the neoliberal order’s foundations. Gerstle emphasizes its market side -- the administration’s busting of the air-traffic controllers’ union, its deregulation of key industries, its dramatic reduction of the wealthiest Americans’ tax rate and its attempt to construct a Supreme Court hostile to the New Deal order -- which, as it turned out, released the force of greed more than it did the genius of the marketplace. The administration’s racial policies, Gerstle says, centered on the drug war it waged on young Black men, though he could have chosen any number of other positions as well -- from the ravaging of public housing to the quiet resegregation of public schools -- so thoroughly was race embedded in the Reagan Revolution.
Contrast that with the more positive framing of Communist “revolutionary” Che Guevara. Etelka Lehoczky, who writes about comics for NPR, gushed over a half-century-old graphic novel about the cool lefty T-shirt icon, under the headline “A 50-Year-Old Graphic Biography of Che Guevara That Still Feels Fresh.” The subhead: “First published in Argentina in 1969, Héctor Germán Oesterheld’s “Life of Che” has finally been translated into English.”
Well, finally!
Lehoczky’s treatment isn’t wholly fawning, but Communist Che certainly comes off better than democratic president Ronald Reagan. In fact, she sees Che’s mindset as on the same wavelength as those who support Ukraine!
Ernesto “Che” Guevara may be a timeless revolutionary icon, but that doesn’t mean his biography is necessarily a story for our time. If Héctor Germán Oesterheld weren’t a remarkable writer, it probably wouldn’t be. Revolution was an inherently Marxist concept for Guevara, who gave up his key role in building Fidel Castro’s new Cuba to fight for global communism, guerrilla-style. His outlook doesn’t translate very well to a world that’s watching Ukraine -- a republic that won independence when the Soviet Union fell -- attempt to defend itself from an authoritarian Russia.
Or does it? As told by Oesterheld in the graphic biography “Life of Che,” Guevara’s story is about values far deeper than communism -- the same values that, in fact, have inspired people around the world to express support for Ukraine….
The critic admitted to, but did not detail, Che's “brutality and ruthlessness.”
