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PARTISAN REVIEW
a depression pennitting reshaping of political thinking is unlikely, so
also is a huge surplus the spending of which could lead to a healthy
controversy outside the warring military services and their highly
placed civilian partisans. Everywhere we look, then, there is room
for change only within a narrow margin, if we interpret change in
terms traditional among intellectuals.
At home, indeed, only the cause of racial emancipation remains
to arouse enthusiasm. And this cause differs politically from the old
New Deal causes
in
that it represents for many liberals and intellec–
tuals a withdrawal from the larger statist concerns-it is a cause
which is carried into personal life and into the field of culture where
it attracts many reflective young people who appear apathetic to
civic and electoral politics. By its nature, the field of race is one
where everyone can have a hand: institutionalization has not pro–
ceeded nearly so far as it has with economic underprivilege. Thus,
every state has some form of social security, but only a few have an
FEPC; and, as many Americans become more sensitive to inter–
personal considerations, they feel it imperative to work for the amel–
ioration of racial slights that would not have troubled an earlier
generation. But, as we have indicated, the demand for tolerance of
Negroes cannot replace, politically, the demand for "economic equal–
ity": it is a very great and aggravating demand to make on children
of white immigrants who are paying off the mortgage on their first
suburban house.
v
Thus, in the postwar era the home front could not be for
liberal intellectuals the arena for major policies, mobilizing a majority
coalition, that it was in the 1930s; the focus had shifted to foreign
policy. But for this the New Dealers and the intellectuals were gen–
erally unprepared. In particular, they were not prepared to view
the Communists and the Soviet Union as the enemy in the way they
had earlier recognized Fascism as the enemy, and for this failure
they were to suffer seriously. Not many New Dealers had actually
been pro-Soviet: the liberal politicians, lawyers, and civil servants had
little in common with Popular Front writers, who were contemptuous
of refonn and addicted to slogans about Marx, the proletariat, and
