LIBERALISM AND CONSERVATISM
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pense of privacy? His answer is that when Americans are drawn into
foreign involvement they seek to impose their own national faith of
Lockeian liberalism on other nations: "And in a time of ideological war
the judgment of others by our norms brings, by automatic reflex, the
passionate and fearful intensification of those norms as they apply to
ourselves as well." But was it really "liberal absolutism" that inspired
Carthy until he had successfully intimidated the State Department, the
Cohn, and Schine? Was it ideological dogmatism that led Dulles,
Brownell, Nixon, and even Eisenhower to encourage or appease Mc–
Carthy until he had succesfully intimidated the State Department, the
Voice of America, the u.S. Information Agency, Congress, the Army,
and the Executive Branch itself? Hartz tells us much about the shape
of ideologies in America, but there is much ideologies do not tell us
about the convulsions of the last ten years.
A more concrete diagnosis of our failure to balance the claims of
privacy, publicity, and secrecy is found in
The Torment of Secrecy
by
Edward
A.
Shils. Hyper-pa.triotism, as he demonstrates, is produced by
the tensions engendered in a society that has had vast influxes of rapidly
assimilated immigrants. In their anxiety to retain ties with their home–
land and yet be accepted as unquestioned Americans, immigrants are
strongly tempted to make their ancestral enemies the nation's and to
assert the proof of their own Americanism by their sensitivity to the
"un-Americanism" of others. Groups compete for the purity of their pa–
triotism. Old-stock Americans are suspected by immigrant groups for
their stand-offishness, and the former, resentful of their displacement
in the seats of power by newer arrivals, are quick to scent alien radical–
ism
on every passing breeze from across the oceans. This restless anxiety
about the integrity of American nationality tends in times of crisis to
erupt into an irrational drive for solidarity and homogeneity. Too
impatiently and suspiciously watched, the melting-pot boils over.
Hartz would have us believe that a common, submerged liberalism
creates the absolutist mood of "witch-hunting," but Shils more accur–
ately identifies the American inclination to a "populistic" view of poli–
tics as the characteristic feature of McCarthyism. Populism identifies
the will of the people with justice and morality. This simplistic demo–
cratic prejudice, so strikingly evident in William Jennings Bryan, is not
confined to rural areas, the lower class, the uneducated, or the radical.
It is ubiquitous in a world where the press, the advertising agencies, the
public relations experts, and the pollsters constantly reinforce it. It is
not even peculiarly American, for there is a populist current in both
fascism and Communism. Wherever it flourishes it generates distrust of
