THE FUTURE OF SOCIALISM
235
The Betrayal of the Intellectuals
Official liberalism was the product of the Enlightenment, cross–
fertilized with such things as Unitarianism, science, bourgeois com–
placency, and a belief in progress. It dispensed with the absurd
Christian myths of sin and damnation and believed that what short–
comings man might have were to be redeemed, not by Jesus on the
cross, but by the benevolent unfolding of history. Tolerance, free
inquiry, and technology, operating in the framework of human per–
fectibility, would in the end create a heaven on earth, a goal accounted
much more sensible and wholesome than a heaven in heaven.
This rejection of the dark and subterranean forces in human
nature acquired a kind of protective coloration in a century of peace
and prosperity, like the nineteenth. Insight into evil became the prop–
erty of a few disreputable aesthetes and a few obstinate Christians.
But the rationalists were betrayed by their own god in the twentieth
century when history went back on them and unleashed the terror.
Freud, Kierkegaard, Sorel, Nietzsche had charted patterns of depravity
while the sun of optimism was high in the sky.
As
it sank, practical
men, like Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, transformed depravity into a way
of life.
Much more than a generation divides the liberals who denied
evil from those who accept it. The word evil is here a designation,
not an explanation; but, whether you use the vocabulary of religion
or psychoanalysis or antirationalism, whether you invoke Augustine
or Freud or Pareto, there are moody and destructive impulses in man
of which official liberalism has taken no serious account. Louis Jaffe
recently wrote of Justice Brandeis, "One felt that nothing in
his
system prepared Brandeis for Hitler." Brandeis was among the more
realistic of his generation: how much more unprepared were the
readers of the liberal weeklies, the great thinkers who sought to com–
bat Nazism by peace strikes, the Oxford oath, and unilateral disarm–
ament.
The type of the official liberal today is the fellow-traveler or
the fellow-traveler of the fellow-traveler: see the columns of
The New
R epublic
and
The Nation .
For the most chivalrous reasons they can–
not believe that ugly facts underlie fair words: however they look at
it, for example, the USSR keeps coming through as a kind of en–
larged Brook Farm community. Nothing in their system has prepared
them for Stalin. The official liberal differs from the Communist, who
knows what he is doing. He differs from the New Dealer, who has
learned some of the facts of life from the exercise of responsibility
