Nat & Pat

[Valin]

City Journal

Maura Moynihan

February 18, 2019

When the news came last month that Nathan Glazer, 95, had died in Cambridge, I realized that I had never known life without this brilliant and delightful man, a treasured friend of my father, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. A visit from the Glazers was always an event of great excitement: Nat’s glamorous wife Lochi bestowed gifts from India; my mother Liz served a feast; Pat uncorked the wine. When Nat started to talk, I’d see a special joy in my father’s eyes. Forever bound by their coauthored 1963 book Beyond the Melting Pot, these two intellectuals, products of Depression-era New York City, prevailed in the defining modern debate—the totalitarian state vs. the rights of man—by disputing the fundamental tenet of Marxist thought, that class eclipsed ethnicity.

In their 1972 book Ethnicity—Theory and Experience, Nat and Pat argued that the “largest theoretical failure of Marxism was its inability to predict or to account for the ever more salient role of ethnic conflict—racial, religious, linguistic—in the modern age.” In 1984, then-Senator Moynihan declared, “the Soviet idea is spent. History is moving away from it at astounding speed”—an observation met with incredulity from all but his closest friends. While intelligence agencies repeated fearful prophecies of Soviet invincibility, Pat and Nat held firm, and they were vindicated in 1989, when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev presided over the peaceful dissolution of the U.S.S.R.

(Snip)

In my last pilgrimage to Nat and Lochi’s home in Cambridge, I asked him how it was possible that Communism persisted in Asia, that the hammer and sickle hung over China’s Politburo and remained the ideology of the ruling class in China’s orbit of poorer and smaller countries like Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. I had just returned from Nepal, where a vicious Maoist insurgency has for years ruled without impediment. Nat adjusted his spectacles, shook his nimbus of silver hair, and replied that while the Marxist state commanded no loyalty, it ruled by fear, and “Sadly, my dear, fear works.”

I shall miss the clarity and wisdom—and friendship—of Nat Glazer.