One wouldn’t normally look to a nearly 50-year-old Woody Allen movie for insight into our current political moment, but Annie Hall, the unlikely winner of the Best Picture Oscar in 1977, just might provide it. With its cameos from Marshall McLuhan and Truman Capote; not to mention its mocking of the personal ads in the New York Review of Books, the “fascism” of National Review, and other affectations of the New York literary scene; the film seemed too parochial and neurotic for a mass audience. Most of these intellectual hit-and-runs were likely lost on Peoria.

Among Allen’s obscure quips in his quest to woo Diane Keaton in her title role was: “I heard that Commentary and Dissent had merged and formed Dysentery.” Yet Allen might not have been totally off base by pairing these two journals. By 1977, Commentary had nearly completed its journey from the social democratic Left of its early years to the neoconservatism that has defined it ever since. Dissent never wavered from its fondness for Marxism and hopes for democratic socialism, but for years it was not unusual to see Dissent contributors such as Paul Goodman, Alfred Kazin, Sidney Hook, and Irving Howe writing also for Commentary. What these journals—and add in the now defunct Partisan Review (d. 2003) with this cohort—had in common in their earlier parallel lives was left-wing anti-Communism, or Cold War liberalism if you prefer, and a penchant for understanding politics primarily through a literary lens.

Cold War liberals may have been weak-minded and timorous, as James Burnham and others never tired of pointing out, but they understood that Stalin was no hero, that Soviet Communism was an obstacle to social democratic aspirations in the West, and fellow-travelling was not to be tolerated. Equally important for Cold War liberals was the disposition to see America as a decent country, even as they remained highly critical of American capitalism, militarism, imperialism, and racism.

The latter point was not always to be expected. Left-wing intellectuals reveled in their alienation and contempt for America especially when the Great Depression seemed to validate their Marxist worldview. But sometime early in World War II Mary McCarthy shed her aloofness, consciously recognizing she wanted America and its allies to win. Her attitude quickly spread. Shortly after the war, Partisan Review startled the Left’s intellectual circles by noting “a reaffirmation and rediscovery of America is under way,” and Lionel Trilling grudgingly conceded that “for the first time in the history of the modern American intellectual, America is not to be conceived of as a priori the vulgarest and stupidest nation of the world.”

On some questions, many of the Dissent-ers sounded increasingly like neoconservatives, and might have completed the odyssey to the Right but for their stubborn attachment to dreamy socialist utopias. (Some of those at Partisan Review, such as William Barrett, did shed their socialist commitments—the key step, as it turns out—and became neoconservatives.) At the very least, a number of these conditionally pro-American Old Left figures understood early on that the so-called “New Left” of the 1960s was bad news for democratic socialists. Irving Howe thought the New Left amounted to “kamikaze radicalism.”

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The Old Left decisively lost (and ultimately surrendered) this intramural fight, but the conditional American loyalty remained. Enough so that in spring 2002, just months after the 9/11 attacks, Dissent’s then-editor Michael Walzer, whom The New Republic’s Martin Peretz described as “the unanointed dean of the American left,” threw down the provocation, “Can There Be a Decent Left?” A serious student of just war theory among other issues, Walzer was appalled by what he perceived to be “the barely concealed glee that the imperial state had finally gotten what it deserved.” Needless to say, his essay was not well received at the very moment that Bush Derangement Syndrome was taking hold.

Fast forward to the present moment, when the Left has radicalized past the 9/11 “blowback” thesis to embrace Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, seeing our enemies as morally superior and hoping openly for the defeat of America and the destruction of Israel. Hamas and Hezbollah, feminist celebrity Judith Butler asserts, “are social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left.” She also described the Hamas attack of October 7 as “armed resistance.”

Worse is to come, however, on the more “respectable” left, where a full-scale revisionist attack on Cold War liberalism is under way. Yale’s rising star Samuel Moyn calls Cold War liberalism “a catastrophe—for liberalism…a betrayal of liberalism,” because its defensive crouch kept liberals from arguing for “an ambitious liberal reinvention of politics and society,” and collapsing ultimately into a collaboration with the dreaded “neoliberalism” of the 1980s and ’90s. This revisionist effort, which is really just an updated version of the New Left’s hatred of the liberal establishment from the 1960s, requires a complete airbrushing of Stalinist fellow-traveling, relegating the Cold War conflict to a frivolous sideshow. If pressed, you might expect Moyn and other new revisionists to say they would much prefer if Henry Wallace had triumphed over Harry Truman in 1948.

The point is, the current furies of the Left are not the product of Trump Derangement Syndrome, though he delights in aggravating it on a daily basis. It will not subside when he leaves office. The “decent Left” of the Cold War liberalism era and of Michael Walzer is dead and gone. The Left’s dysentery is here to stay.