OUR cOUNTRY AND OUR. CULTUH
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achievement of the American system not under normal conditions
but under the stress of war and preparation for war. We have been
drawn, as Reinhold Niebuhr recently put it, into "an historic situa–
tion in which the paradise of our domestic security is suspended in
a hell of global insecurity." "Suspended" is the key word, for a good
many other satisfactions of American life similarly exist in a state of
insecure suspension. The fact is that the cold war has reduced social
tensions within the nation even as it has increased international
tension. The war-geared economy has made for conditions of
prosperity which again are typically taken to mean that 'good
Americanism' contains within itself the secret of overcoming the
hazards of history. The illusion that our society is in its very nature
immune to tragic social conflicts and collisions has been revived, and
once more it is assumed that the more acute problems of the modern
epoch are unreal so far as we are concerned. And in their recoil from
radicalism certain intellectuals have now made that easy assumption
their own. Not that they say so openly, but their complacence and
spiritual torpor quite gives them away.
Especially vulnerable in this respect are some of the ex-radicals
and ex-Marxists, who have gone so far in smoothly re-adapting them–
selves, in unlearning the old and learning the new lessons, as to be
scarcely distinguishable from the common run of philistines. In
their narrow world anti-Stalinism has become almost a professional
stance. It has come to mean so much that it excludes nearly all
other concerns and ideas, with the result that they are trying to
turn anti-Stalinism into something which it can never be: a total out–
look on life, no less, or even a philosophy of history. Apparently
some of them find it altogether easy to put up with the vicious
antics of a political bum like Senator McCarthy, even as they
grow more and more intolerant of any basic criticism of existing
social arrangements.
The old anti-Stalinism of the independent Left had the true
pathos and conviction of a minority fighting under its own banner for
its own ends; but that was back in the thirties and early forties. Its
function then was to warn-and though the warning was not heeded
the anti-Stalinists of that period played a vanguard role in that they
were the first to discern the totalitarian essence of the Soviet myth.
Since then, however, that minority political grouping has lost its
