Reconciling revolution: An interview with Peter Dale Scott,
M. P. Byrne
On January 3, 2025, Platypus Affiliated Society member M. P. Byrne interviewed Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat, poet, and professor emeritus of English at the University of California Berkeley. His critical writings on deep politics have focused on the clandestine operations of the American state from Vietnam through the War on Terror. Scott’s books include The War Conspiracy: The Secret Road to the Second Indochina War (1972), Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1993), and most recently Reading the Dream: A Post-Secular History of Enmindment (2024).[1] An edited transcript follows.
M. P. Byrne: Throughout your work, you’ve expressed a deep faith in the importance and radicalism of the American Revolution, yet you’ve also spent your career chronicling the clandestine and criminal elements in the American state. What did the American Revolution mean to you and your cohort in your youth, and what does it mean today?
Peter Dale Scott: The final thing in Reading the Dream: we need to learn to reconcile the need to preserve the best of what we inherited with the urgent need to radically change it. I was reacting to what younger people were doing. They were obsessed with the need to change everything, and I wasn’t. I started with radicalism, but I didn’t want to change everything; I just wanted to stop the Vietnam War — a limited proposal. I began to realize that the war was a symptom of a bigger problem. But to me, it didn’t mean Herbert Marcuse’s perspective, whom some people wanted to kill. He came clandestinely to Berkeley in the 1970s and spoke to about 10 of us in a room. He was as extreme as you could get: he said, “our words are all corrupted by capitalism. We’re going to have to start with new words.”
I believed Marcuse’s mind had deteriorated since Eros and Civilization (1955), which had an immense impact on me. That idea of a clean break with civilization is the epitome of what I think would be disastrous. The Soviet experiment failed because it didn’t do what Vladimir Putin correctly did, which is to link to the existing faith of the Russian people. Lenin saw power in the street and grabbed it. It wasn’t a revolution at all; it was a coup, and you can’t get a lasting revolution out of a coup. The Chinese Revolution may have rejected traditional Chinese high culture at one point, but they were still connected to the popular culture, and they’re going to stay. There is a momentum built into Western culture, which is just one aspect of global culture; there is really only one culture.
MPB: As someone who emphasizes an unaccountable deep state aiming to preserve entrenched financial networks, what kind of political project did you see yourself contributing to with this work, and how did it relate, or not, to Marxism?
PDS: I was influenced by the Frankfurt School. I taught a course with Leo Lowenthal, who was one of the last and the least known of the Frankfurt School. I thoroughly bought into the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). Although I can’t totally recall what I thought then, the book’s idea seemed to be that the Enlightenment presents a paradox: it began well but now was a problem, and we had to go to something else. My study of Hegel left me with the belief that both the individual and society are dialectically developing in time, and the paradox of the Enlightenment is just one phase of that.
I see more value in Marx than in Lenin. I took the “Theses on Feuerbach” (1845) to heart. I didn’t have a definitive opinion on Marxism, nor did I have a head for economics, but John Maynard Keynes was the closest to somebody I believed in. People come up with political theories to fit their goals, such as the Chicago school of economics and the CIA. In the time of Students for a Democratic Society, the emphasis was on coming up with an authentic American radicalism.
MPB: How would you relate the totalitarian legacy of mass politics, and the desire for freedom from that repression, with your criticism of U.S. Cold War hawkishness?
PDS: Noam Chomsky always liked what I’d written about Indonesia and quoted it frequently. He hated what I said about Vietnam and John F. Kennedy. Chomsky made a fool of himself, because he said there’s no evidence that Kennedy would have pulled out of Vietnam, while there is a document that shows plans for it. But when the man from Czechoslovakia came to America, spoke to Congress, and thanked America for its role in helping to liberate Eastern Europe, Noam and Howard Zinn, in their wisdom, laughed at this man making a fool of himself by saying that. But they made fools of themselves.
America didn’t do it selflessly. America was pursuing its own aims in liberating Eastern Europe and the CIA did give its support. I always concede that there was CIA support for Solidarność — they bought them mimeograph machines, which by themselves can’t create a movement. It was support for something that was authentic, autochthonous, coming out of the actual environment. Conservative peasants allied with radical workers, and they were cemented together by the group of intellectuals in between. I had someone ask Adam Michnik, the head of Solidarność, if Czesław Miłosz inspired them, and the answer came back: no — it was Simone Weil. Looking at the Polish situation in the 50s, Miłosz figured you needed somebody Catholic and radical, and so he translated Simone Weil into Polish. This is an example of how culture can be political. You and I are not going to affect politics. On the cultural level, you can prepare for political changes to occur as the product of other forces.
MPB: Has America drifted to the Left or the Right over the course of the 20th century?
PDS: Right and Left. American hard power has been a disaster, and it's become more unprincipled, ruthless, and murderous in its last days, because it’s ending. The soft power has been good. A particularly important legacy of American soft power is something like Wikipedia, which is creating a global world opinion. This is what we need if we’re going to get a global consciousness, a voice of the people that can constrain governments the way Solidarność constrained the Polish government. It has to happen on a global level.
MPB: One could say that the New Left had a successful cultural revolution. Yet today, we are faced with many of the same political problems. Why?
PDS: We have a lot of catching up to do. The Iraq War was such an obvious fiasco. The movement against the Iraq War didn’t succeed. We’ve been waiting for something that will unite us again. Gaza is not that; the response is breaking people apart. You can have a pessimistic response, which usually means you don’t do anything, or you can have an optimistic response. I'm trying to be optimistic about the election. I was rooting for Kamala Harris, just as if I’d been at a football game on election day, but the next morning, with a clear verdict for Trump, I was frankly relieved. If Kamala had won by a whisker, we would be dealing with immediate problems. Can we be optimistic? Yes, we can. Trump has said the day that he is president, he will end the suffering. That's not an idle threat, not a boast. He's the one person who could do that. And if he investigated the Deep State, that would be good.
MPB: What lessons do the political failures of radical politics in the 20th century hold for humanity? Is there a future for radical politics, for overcoming capitalism?
PDS: I don’t speak for humanity. I speak for intellectuals who know a bit of history. Trump speaks for the people who don’t know history, and I could never compete with Trump on that level. It’s to the detriment of the Democratic Party that they were working so well on the intellectual level that they lost touch with their voters. It’s not an accident that Trump is going to have been president twice. He was in touch with something in the country that the Democrats had lost contact with.
Any democracy always runs the risk of a big mouth, or as they say in France, “a man on a white horse.” Democracy is in trouble everywhere. Neoliberalism has established the global polity of the present, it’s not working, and Trumps are turning up all over the world.
MPB: How would you relate the economic interdependence forged with neoliberalism to your vision of a globally interconnected culture?
PDS: There are positive and negative aspects to globalism. The positive aspect is that the standard of living in the Third World is coming up, and the negative aspect is that the standard of living in America is declining. The correct position is for these things to happen in a measured way, so that the pain in America is eased, and the export of production to the Third World is slowed down to make it more supportable to everybody. This is all happening in an undisciplined and unregimented way, and I would like to see more power wielded by international bodies that worry about the health of the global ecumene where we're all living together. Unfortunately, the United Nations has been so abused by the great powers, first by America, when they gave the votes to the assembly to overturn the Security Council (1950), and then that turned back against America. America now loses the assembly where it used to win, and Russia and China tend to win. It really struck me that there was a vote recently in the third committee that was something like 100 to 8, which were America, Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand — all the Anglophone countries — plus two more. The Anglophone countries against the overwhelming majority in the UN. That means that the UN is no longer a vehicle that America would accept for ruling the world. The League of Nations pathetically lacked any enforcement. The UN set up an enforcement procedure, which was made a mockery by America. We need to get some kind of regulation of things, where you try to make things work by making sure that nobody is suffering too much. We’re not doing a good job of that; people are suffering everywhere.
MPB: If the Russian Revolution was a coup, what were the American and French Revolutions?
PDS: It was a good thing that the American Revolution happened. John Adams pointedly said to Thomas Jefferson that the war wasn’t the revolution; the war happened after the revolution had already taken place in the hearts of the American people. I quote that constantly, but I don’t accept the necessity of having done it by war. In the short term, force can always deal with an immediate situation more than nonforce. But in the long run, it’s the opposite.
In Adams and Jefferson — the fact that they could reconcile, given how they treated each other when they were politicians — we can see that America has the power to reconcile. There are aspects of America that are forgotten now: the Great Awakenings, which led to the end of slavery. America became a country where no archbishops or monsignors were in control. America is a free-for-all for religion, and that's been good for religion: it’s produced bad religions, good religions, and saints, like Dorothy Day.
MPB: In a 1985 interview, you said that the Left does not understand the incidental element of things like the Kennedy assassination — that they have no room for anomalies. Could you elaborate on that?
PDS: I got into a fight with Howard Zinn. I wrote an essay to prove that Kennedy had been planning to withdraw from Vietnam. Howard phoned me and said, “Peter, you don't want to publish this essay; it’s bad politics.” I asked why, and he said, “You're implying that it made a difference who was the president.” I said, “That’s exactly the point I'm trying to make.” And he said, “No, the whole system is wrong. Just changing a president doesn’t change anything.” The whole point of my essay was to prove that Kennedy was about to do something significant, which would have gotten us out of Vietnam.
Chomsky was abroad at the time. He came back and arranged for my essay to be in his book.[4] What I didn’t know was that Noam was preparing to demolish my essay because he so strongly disagreed. He wrote a whole book — Rethinking Camelot, his worst book — to refute what I claimed.[5] I don't know anyone who thinks that was a good book. Dan Ellsberg had dozens of emails with Chomsky about all of this. We both felt that Noam was getting very precise about a historical detail in which he was dead wrong.
MPB: What is your disposition towards the French Revolution?
PDS: A revolution should preserve and advance. The French Revolution became very violent very quickly, and was particularly hard on the Catholic Church. It’s going to become corrupted. The world we’re in is radically corrupt. This is the theme of the Book of Genesis: everything we do is tainted. Every revolution, no matter how noble its beginnings, is going to become part of the world and worldly. It’s sad to see what has happened to America, which has always been an oligarchy, and it’s clear now. But there have been good oligarchs as well as bad oligarchs. We might say that the great presidents of the U.S. were Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy. What do they all have in common? They come out of the oligarchic class. Kennedy was nouveau riche, but the other two were from the established Roosevelt family. They moved America forward. The progressives and income tax did something to reduce the disparity in wealth and income that is the great plague of today, and that disparity was reduced right down to about 1980 — the Reagan Revolution. Reagan's formula, to scrap all the things that the government has been doing and liberate wealth to proliferate again, has been further compounded into increased inequality.
MPB: Is your work an appeal to a new New Deal?
PDS: I talk about the future as a casino. Some things are known — the sun will rise again — but everything is speculative: you can bet, but you can’t know. There’s no science for betting. But what I can do is analyze what I think is wrong in the system as we now have it, and define the problems that need to be corrected. Ignorance holds us back. Some people exploit ignorance as a way to move forward. Trump wants to lie about things because he can get his agenda more easily if people don’t know the facts. The elephant in the room is the one thing that doesn’t get debated in Congress: the defense budget. When Trump was elected, he promised to increase the budget. They took a vastly increased defense budget that came from Trump and increased it more.
MPB: Doesn’t the defense budget abet the development of American soft power as well?
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https://platypus1917.org/2026/05/01/reconciling-revolution-an-interview/
