~7B
PARTISAN REVIEW
Chambers may
be
exaggerating in saying that in those years it
was the Popular Front mind that dominated American life, but he is
hardly exaggerating when he specifies that it was that mind which then
dominated most "avenues of communication between the intellectuals
and the nation. It told the nation what it should believe; it made up
the nation's mind for it. The Popular Fronters had made themselves
the 'experts.' They controlled the narrows of news and opinion.... The
nation ... could not grasp or believe that a conspiracy on the scale of
Communism was possible or that it had already made so deep a pene–
tration...." And the fierce resistance which Chambers encountered
when he finally broke through with his testimony to the nation at
large was essentially a symptom of the anguish of the Popular Front mind
and its unreasoning anger at being made to confront the facts of
political life. The importance of the Hiss case was precisely that it
dramatized that mind's struggle for survival and its vindictiveness under
attack. That mind is above all terrified of the disorder and evil of his–
tory, and it flees the harsh choices which history so often imposes. It
fought to save Hiss in order to safeguard its own illusions and to escape
the knowledge of its gullibility and chronic refusal of reality.
Where Chambers goes wrong, I think, is in his attempt to implicate
that mind in the revolutionary ethos. Hence his distorted picture of the
New Deal as a "genuine revolution, whose deepest purpose was not
simply reform within existing conditions, but a basic change in the
social and, above all, the power relationships within the nation." The
proof? The New Deal was bent on replacing the power of business with
that of politics. But this
notion
is altogether too narrow, too one-sided.
Of course the New Deal was bound to increase the power of government
in its effort to pull the economy out of depression and to save business
from its own follies. The New Deal is unrecognizable in Chambers'
description of it. H ere again he proceeds in accordance
with
the method
of pure ideological deduction, this time deducing the New Deal from the
revolutionary intention he imputes to the Popular Front mind. He is
in error, it seems to me, in his evaluation of that mind. I see that mind
not only as unrevolutionary but as profoundly bourgeois in its political
amorphousness, evasion of historical choice, and search for formulas of
empty reassurance.
It
is the bourgeois mind in its mood of good will
and vague liberal aspiration, the mind of degenerated humanism glowing
with the false militancy of universal political uplift.
It
wishes to main–
tain its loyalty to free institutions and at the same time to accommodate
itself to the Communists, particularly so when the latter oblige by playing
the game of not being "real Communists" at all but democrats of the
