I found little to argue with in Burke's speech and was a bit taken aback by his contemporaries' response to it. At first I could not understand why they would argue with a strategy that seems so reasonable and rhetorically savvy. Burke seems like the only adult in the room, the only one who can admit that a revolution must be launched by a dicourse that invites rather than shuns. He sums up an argument Quintilian would be proud of:

We convince a man by reason of the values which we hold in common. Propaganda (the extension of one's recruiting into ever widening areas) is possible only insofar as the propagandizer and propagandized have kindred values, share the same base of reference. If you and I agree on a criterion of of justice, I may turn you against a certain institution, such as capitalism, by showing that it makes for injustice. But no matter how well put together my arguments might be, they would be pointless in this case unless you were relatively in agreement me as to the desirability of justice. Particularly as regards the specific problems of propaganda, the emphasis upon the antithetical tends to incapacitate a writer for his task as a spreader of doctrine by leading him too soon into antagonistic modes of thought and expression. (271)

But Burke's fellow communists don't share his vision. It seems too cooperative with capitalist/democratic ideals; his vision simply isn't revolutionary enough.

The passage of time and the obvious failure of the "revolutionary" (arhetorical) tactics of many writers of the far left allows me, like Lentriccia, to criticize their strategy as wishful thinking and historical revisionism. Friedrich Wolf makes a false analogy when he likens Burke's use of the term "the people" to Hitler's "das volk." True, both were appeals to a wider group of people than those who might charactarize themselves as "workers," but the social and historical situation in 1930s Germany could not have been more different than in the U.S. The value of the deutsch mark was virtually nil by the time such rhetoric became effective in Germany; though the U.S. was experiencing an economic depression at this time, its effect was not to unite the country class-wise but to divide it. The depression caused many who might otherwise have described themselves as workers to see themselves as middle class: there was and is little social advantage in a class-conscious nation to identify oneself as working class or poor. What Burke seems to be arguing for here is a symbolically acceptable, context-sensitive symbolism that appeals to those who could (but chose not to) identify as the "workers" of communist mythology. It is a way of accessing and undermining that which capitalism has worked to obscure. Burke's critics seem to me to be terribly conservative in their "liberalism"; their lack of symbolic flexibility (which they saw as staying "true" to the communist vision) ultimately lead to their symbolic and material demise in the United States.