Timothy complains:

There’s part of me that just wants this whole discussion to go away, or at least to feel like history and less like a record needle skipping in place.

It is history:

Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian Cuban totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so." Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

"While freely conceding that the Soviet Cuban regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian Cuban people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement."

It was nonsense then. It is nonsense now. When we abandon our principles to expedite creation of some ideal society, we fall short. That's not how to do it.

Quoting Bernard DeVoto, again:

A stanza from a currently unfashionable poet ends, "The way is all so very plain / That we may lose the way." Several stanzas farther along the phrasing changes a little: "So very simple is the road / That we may stray from it." The poem happens to have a religious theme but what it says holds true for some crucial acts of the intelligence.

A number of intellectuals who were communists have lately been explaining why they no longer are: discussing the reasons that led to their conversion and those that have produced their apostasy. The theological terms apply, for it is apparent, and indeed was apparent all along, that the phenomena are primarily religious. The typical ex-communist American intellectual in fact has experienced two conversions; whereas evangelical doctrine holds that to be saved you must be born a second time, salvation has required him to be born a third time. Such an experience puts the greatest possible strain on the personality. There can be only compassion for the agony he has felt, the double disillusionment, the necessity of twice rebuilding his shattered personal world. And his careful analysis of his experience can be valuable and useful.

Embracing communism, like religious conversion, is an act of the total personality. It is packed with private and even unconscious as well as rational and objective reasons, with emotion as well as intelligence. What the apostates have been saying shows that frequently intelligence played only a small part in it. Yet it played some part and they are eager to show that it was decisive in their apostasy, their repudiation of communism. I propose to discuss only their intelligence. We will agree that the American intellectual who became a Communist was, typically, a generous, warmhearted man, an idealist deeply disturbed by the catastrophe of the modern world and deeply concerned for the betterment of mankind. But how good was his thinking? . . .

Communism made its American converts not as a system of thought but as an eschatology, a millennial faith. . .

The communist formula said that reform was impossible: the non-communist pronounced the formula defective.

What followed was the most fundamental, the most widespread, and the most thoroughgoing reform in American history. To call it the New Deal obscures the fact that it was a sweeping revolution which had already begun to gather momentum when Roosevelt took office and some fundamental parts of which were unrelated to the movement he headed. All that need be said of it here is that it worked. It demonstrated that the generality of our intellectuals had correctly analyzed the situation, and the generality of them had some part of it.

I don't mean this as an apology for or defense of the New Deal. It was deeply flawed too, and there have since been many reforms. What I want to focus on is reform. It is possible. That the reforms will in time need reform - we undershoot or overshoot, muddling through as best we can given talent and context - is not just unavoidable, it is necessary. Live and learn.