PARTISAN REVIEW
popular person is not going to have as easy a time as a popular one,
and it is absurd to argue that he has a "right" to it, though the
argument has nevertheless been made. True, the prevailing canons of
popularity may not be to our taste; all we can do, in that case, is to
try
to change them by persuasion and example; there is no principle
of Liberty that can be imported to render them null and void.
If
it is
commonly believed that socialists are assassins and bomb-throwers, it is
not likely that they will be given jobs, say, as policemen; all one can do
is
work to revise this belief, not assert that it is no one's business if a
policeman
is
an assassin.
This situation
is,
so far as the Communists are concerned, compli–
cated by three factors: ( 1) the nature of the Communist movement,
(2) the uses to which anti-Communism is put by various organized
groups, and (3) a frequent confusion between liberty and equality.
( 1) It is obvious to almost everyone, by now, that Communism is
not, properly speaking, an "opinion," not even an erroneous opinion of
a kind such that intercourse with it provides "the clearer perception and
livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error" (Mill).
It is a fanatical conspiracy, whose basic ideas are a set of paranoid
illusions, and whose "opinions" are mere stratagems. That this con–
spiracy can cause abundant mischief has been so convincingly demon–
strated that even the American Civil Liberties Union excludes Com–
munists from membership on its governing boards, national or local.
No doubt the ACLU regards this unhappily as being what Mr. Rovere
calls a "necessary evil"; but, then, most things in life--from being born
inter faeces et urinas
to being buried in the cold earth---can be re–
garded as necessary evils, though from another point of view they can
always be seen as contingent goods. No doubt, too, the ACLU can
claim that Communists are particularly dangerous to the specific pur–
pose for which it is organized; but the same claim can be made by
innumerable other institutions, including schools, colleges, trade unions,
ethnic and religious associations, even the post office. Of course, there
are areas where it is hard to conceive of a Communist doing any dam–
age, no matter how scheming a character he is, but every working
group, no matter how lowly, has its pride and will not easily accept the
role of a dump-heap for undesirables.
(2) There are various organized groups that have set about making
life intolerable for persons who may have, at one time or another, been
sympathetic to Communist causes, or merely lent their names to Com–
munist-sponsored letterheads, or who are still benevolently inclined
toward the Communist movement itself. These groups operate with a
