OUR COUNTRY AND OUR CULTURE
believe; but rather that movements, established and on the make, use
force to modify ideas and ideas to justify force. This presence of
coercion, actual or threatened or even unconsciously felt to be
threatening, is one important meaning of the dwindling of liberty.
What would presumably clear up a lot of "confusion" and
"drift" to which many intellectuals publicly "confess," is some
urgent moral orientation which they could embrace-and babble
over; the sort of thing some of them have found and lost at least
three different times-with little intellectual continuity between them
-since the middle thirties. But one should not let such people inter–
fere with the serious and important task of understanding the main
drift of modern society.
The reason one feels foolish making programmatic statements
today is that there is now in the United States no real audience for
such statements. Such an audience (1) would have, in greater or
lesser degree, to be connected with some sort of movement or
party having a chance to influence the course of affairs and the
decisions being made.
It
would also (2) have to contain people who
are at least attentive, even if not receptive, to ideas-people among
whom one has a chance to get a hearing. When these two conditions
are available one can be programmatic in a "realistic" political way.
When these conditions are not available, then one has this choice:
To modify the ideas or at least file them and hence, in effect
and at least temporarily, to take up new allegiances for which con–
ditions do exist that make working for them realistic.
Or: To retain the ideals and hence by definition to hold them in
a utopian way, while waiting. Of course these two ways can be
combined, in various sorts of tentative holding actions. Neverthe–
less, they present a clear-cut choice.
There are reasons for taking the first way: one might judge
that dangers are so great one has to fight with whatever means are
at hand, so if Truman ,and company are the only ones around, then
support them and try to defeat the Tafts or MacArthurs. Bore from
within for so long as you can breathe down in the old wormy wood.
Well, my judgment is that world conditions and domestic affairs are
not yet that perilous.
"A principle, if it be sound," wrote Morley, "represents one
of the larger expediences. To abandon that for the sake of some
seeming expediency of the hour, is to sacrifice the greater good for
