PARTISAN REVIEW
ardent Communists, the problem of
their
poverty will be solved, and
the rest of the population will be held so tightly in the grip of the
police that their starvation will not bring any social disruption.
Liberal journalists like Max Lerner lament the fact, apropos of
the military superiority of the North over the South Koreans, that
Russian Communism can get people to fight its battles in Asia,
while the U.S. has been unable so far to launch any dynamic move–
ments for democracy. But this is just what one should expect. A
democratic regime cannot be imposed in the way in which the oc–
cupying Red Army sets up its own puppet dictatorships. Democracy
is real only as
it
is an organic growth from a whole society: the
political virtues necessary for it require the habits and discipline of
self-government, and, above all, a certain level of prosperity. Behind
this lament by liberals breathes the old hankering after the wave of
the future. However: mass enthusiasm for a movement is no proof
of its political value; Hitler commanded .an enthusiasm from the
German masses beyond that evoked anywhere by any Communist
regime; and presumably one doesn't wait to espouse liberal values
until one is sure they are the winning side.
A lament of this kind betrays another victory of Marxist propa–
ganda over the liberal mind in America. The light of present events
hardly reveals the last fifteen years as a shining chapter in the history
of American liberalism. Almost throughout, it is a record of bad faith
and bad conscience. In their fatal historical encounter with Marxism
American liberals succumbed to a fundamental duplicity: they never
committed themselves explicitly for or against Marxism, even during
the radical thirties; hence they were never compelled to bring the
parts of the Marxist system into confrontation with facts, nor even to
examine the way in which Marxism conflicted with the liberal ideals
they were supposed to have espoused; the result is that American
liberalism, crypto-Stalinist in the thirties, remains crypto-Marxist in
the fifties, the outlines of its ideological allegiances perpetually blur–
red. Naturally there follows the ritual substitution of demagogic
phrases for social realities- particularly to sustain some uncriticized
illusions about "masses" and "mass movements." Neither in the
ancient nor the modern world does history show that all mass revolts
were such as to benefit either humanity at large or the masses them–
selves. A revolt
in the name of
the masses may not be a revolt
of
the
