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PARTISAN REVIEW
failed to play their part as a world power:-a failure which has
had disastrous consequences for themselves and for all mankind.
And the cure is this: to accept wholeheartedly our duty and our
opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world
and i;1 consequence to exert upon the world the full impact of
our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means
as we see fit....
The most remarkable thing about this perspective is that it
should only recently have become clear to American big business.
After the last war, the leaders of the Third International expected
that the United States would (1) replace England as the leading
world imperial power, and (2) dominate the exhausted postwar
Europe as the world's most powerful capitalism-"put Europe on
rations," in Trotsky's phrase. Yet it was the liberal Wilson who in
1919 had the international point of view, while the Republicans
led the successful fight against entry into the League of Nations.
(So too, twenty years later, the liberal Roosevelt understood that
American capitalism's problems could best be solved on a world
scale long before the business community woke up to that fact.)
The provincialism of American capitalism is revealed by this
strange reluctance to assume the imperial role to which its enor·
mous economic power called it, this inability to see that the League,
far from being the philanthropic enterprise which Wilson sincerely
believed it to be, was actually a potential instrument for world
power. The Bolshevik leaders better understood the interests of
American capitalism than the capitalists themselves, just as it was
Trotsky who years ago exposed in masterful fashion the fatal
weakness in France's position: that her economic weight was insuf·
ficient for the political role she was trying to play in Europe
against the powerful Germany economy-an insufficiency revealed
dramatically in June of 1940. Now, at any rate; Luce recognizes
that "In 1918 we had a golden opportunity, an opportunity un·
precedented in history, to assume the leadership of the world."
He does not propose to make the same mistake twice.
This turn towards imperialism has been accompanied, in
Luce's publications, by an increasingly liberal attitude towards
domestic matters. In 1937 I published a series of articles in the
Nation
on the Lucepapers showing their strong fascistic tendencies.
This was clear enough at the time, and yet their evolution has been
since then in the other direction. In this conjunction of imperial·
ism and domestic liberali.sm, the Lucepapers symbolize the whole
recent trend of big business policy.
