Reds in the family

How my relatives' extremely non-moderate views influence my thinking

My grandfather, Jose Yglesias, passed away when I was 14 years old, long before I was a writer or had anything resembling my contemporary political views. I was very close to him as a kid, I named my son after him, and I’ve thought a lot about his work and his ideas over the years.

I read my first Jose Yglesias novel, “Tristan and the Hispanics,” shortly after he died. It was a weird experience.

In the novel, a young white Ivy League student’s Cuban-American grandfather passes away, and he’s sent by his parents down to Tampa to deal with the funeral and the Latin extended family. Which is to say that right after my grandfather died, I read an account of a fictionalized version of myself dealing with the aftermath of the death of a fictionalized version of my grandfather. My father, Jose’s son, is also a novelist and a screenwriter, and my grandmother Helen was a novelist and an editor, too. But Jose was a journalist as well as a fiction writer, and he wrote books like “The Franco Years: The Untold Story of Human Life Under Spanish Fascism” and “In The Fist of the Revolution: Life In a Cuban Country Town.”

His work is much more humanistic than mine, but it’s recognizably journalism. And even though his are human-scale stories, he’s clearly making big points about big ideas — including the blunt claim that there was a 40-year arc of “Spanish Fascism,” which I believe many scholars would dispute.

Both Jose and Helen were Communists for quite some time until leaving the Party after Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization process began. Of course, taken literally, de-Stalinization was good. Whatever you might make of Khruschev-era Communism, it was better than Stalin-era Communism. For true believers, though, the revelation that Stalin was, in fact, very bad was broadly disillusioning about the whole trajectory of the Communist enterprise. But while Jose and Helen left the Communist Party, they were not the kind of people who flipped and became anti-communist rightists or Cold War Liberals. He was always, as far as I knew, one variant of left-wing radical or another. And that was part of a broader family milieu — my uncle was an SDS leader at Columbia and co-wrote Black Panther leader David Hilliard’s autobiography.

Everyone’s family seems normal to them, but objectively, these are not mainstream political affiliations. And even though it’s very much not my politics, it’s something that I know a lot about, in I think a different sort of way from most people. A much more typical trajectory is to grow up in a family with normie politics and then learn about exciting radical ideas in college. I had much more the opposite experience of going to college and learning about the idea of making an incremental change in a path-dependent context.

Anti-Communism as anti-fascism

An idea I picked up listening to mid-century Communists — something I’d rarely seen represented in mainstream culture until it suddenly popped up in “Oppenheimer” — was that affiliating with Communism was just commonsense.