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PARTISAN REVIEW
in the economic sphere. Politically, too, in terms of the necessity of
halting Soviet expansion, a Western federation would decisively alter
the balance of power in favor of European democracy as well as lessen
its dependence on the United States. The Brussels pact of five nations
is nothing more than a military alliance of sovereign states, a feeble
substitute for the organic integration and promise of a United States
of Western Europe. Bevin and Attlee have just now begun to talk of
such a union, and that only under the compulsion of their fear of the
Soviet armies. But so far there is very little to show that the socialist
vision of the leaders of the Labour government is sufficiently broad
to lead them to take the initiative in organizing Europe on a basis
other than national atomization and rivalry.
If
Dos Passos fails us it is precisely when he appears to equate
democracy with "free enterprise." Anyone who has arrived at this re–
gressive equation has gone beyond wanting a socialist policy, let
alone a policy based on the strategic use of bourgeois disorientation
in the face of the Communist onslaught. But neither can this policy
be wanted or even properly grasped by those leftists, like Dwight
Macdonald and the more heady contributors to his magazine, who,
in their disgust with the absolute politics practiced in Moscow (and
in other capitals too) have taken cover in a position of absolute
morality and grandiose utopianism, swapping Lenin and Trotsky for
Tolstoy and Gandhi. Clearly, these people cannot do without saints
and without an ideology, that is, a construction in which operational
conceptions and empirical observation are replaced by wishing and
believing (and in this instance, also, by attitudes of irresponsible and
elegant intransigence gratuitously transferred from the sphere of
bohemian aesthetics to that of politics) .
There is no more crucial failure of political imagination than
the inability to comprehend that there is a price to be paid for decades
of socialist defeat and betrayal, and that manifestly the kind of de–
mands on man's nature and society made in the era of the primitive
accumulation of millenia! faith in socialism can no longer be made
with good grace or good sense. The consequences for the human
situation of the successive victories of fascism and Stalinism, and the
resultant fall of the level of civilization, can be evaded only in the
abstract propositions of ultra-leftism, from the standpoint of which
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