290
PARTISAN REVIEW
values of our civilization. This is the generation, after all, of the
triumph of the Book Clubs, columnists, and radio, the relative de–
crease in the number of book titles published, the Hollywoodiza–
tion of a continuous series of writers, the persistent banality of opera
taste and production, a dull local tradition in painting combined
with an offshoot of European non-representation which ran its
second-hand course in a decade and a half, a philosophic waste
in which John Dewey, with a set of ideas already reduced to a
shambles by the implicit criticism of history, has been the single
blossom. I do not mean that there have been no Americans talented
in the arts. There have been a number of musicians worth listening
to, writers worth reading, and choreographers whose productions
deserve looking at. But these have surely been few for a nation of
150,000,000; they have seldom risen above second rank; and the
best of them are not often the publicly acclaimed and accepted.
Let us remember that in France Andre Malraux, Roger Martin
du Gard, Andre Gide, Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Valery, Albert Cam–
us, Fran<;ois Mauriac, Colette, and Jean Cocteau have been the
best known and financially most successful writers of this same
generation.
The cause of our changed judgment on America is evidently in
us, not in any shift of our national stars. Culturally we remain what
we have been: a "semi-barbarian superstate of the periphery," de–
pendent still on the older spiritual soil in spite of new roots, with
Rome and not Athens the potential form of the future.
Let us not build a case out of counterfeit. The objective justif–
ication for the intellectuals' " reaffirmation and rediscovery of Amer–
ica" is in the first and sufficient instance political and military.
Under the given circumstances, a world political or military victory
of the Soviet totalitarianism is the worst possible secular evil. The
American political-juridical system is superior to the Soviet system–
under the practical circumstances, incommensurably superior. Only
with the primary help of American power can Soviet world victory
be prevented. American power is thus the lesser evil. Therefore, the
use of American power, and if it comes to full war the military
victory of the United States-headed anti-Soviet coalition, are just
and right, and rightly to be preferred.
