Book Review: The Romance of American Communism by Vivian Gornick

The Delusions of Useful Idiots: Gornick’s Love Letter to Tyranny Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism is less a book than a hymn, a soft-focus eulogy to one of history’s most failed, most murderous ideologies. She romanticises a political cult that enslaved millions, as if it were some noble coming-of-age story. This book is not history. It is nostalgia for totalitarianism, drenched in longing and self-delusion. Gornick’s subjects, American Communists of the 1930s to 1950s, are portrayed not as ideological zealots, but as tragic heroes. We are asked to weep with them as they lose their faith, their illusions, their comradeship. But Gornick never fully confronts why their faith had to be abandoned: because it was rooted in a lie. Not a noble dream gone wrong, but a lie from the start. The Communist Party USA was a puppet of Stalin. It bent its knee to Moscow, flipped its positions with every shift of Soviet foreign policy, and defended the indefensible, from the purges to the pact with Hitler. These weren’t dreamers, they were apologists. Yet Gornick brushes this off with the wave of a wistful hand. “They believed in something,” she sighs, as if sincerity makes a cause just. But sincerity in the service of evil is not virtue. It is fanaticism. What Gornick calls “romance” is what Orwell called doublethink. Her interviewees speak of moral purpose, of sacrifice, of struggle, while serving a party that crushed dissent, demanded obedience, and destroyed lives. And she lets them. The reader is rarely challenged to ask whether these people were right, only whether they were passionate. In her view, the tragedy isn’t Communism’s catastrophic outcomes, but the emotional loss these cadres felt when it all fell apart. This is the central problem of the book: moral inversion. The victims are the activists who lost their faith, not the millions who lost their freedom. Gornick does not celebrate liberty, but loyalty, to the Party. To the Cause. Even after acknowledging the betrayals and brutality, she remains entranced by the aesthetic of revolutionary fervour. She cannot fully break the spell. In this sense, The Romance of American Communism is a cautionary tale, though not in the way Gornick intended. It reveals how intelligent people can be seduced by ideology, how they can confuse moral passion with moral truth, and how they can cling to the illusion of righteousness long after the evidence has shattered it. This book should be read not as history, but as pathology. A study in political longing gone wrong. Gornick wanted to show us idealists. She ended up showing us useful idiots, still clinging to their red banners, even as the gulags swallowed the innocent whole. Verdict: A beautifully written apologia for tyranny. Dangerous in its sentimentality. Required reading for those who want to understand how bad ideas persist, not because they are true, but because they feel good.