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education, sophistication, the niceties of law, the independence of
poli–
ticians, and the moderation of a system of checks and balances.
Populism suspects those with power, position, and responsibility
of
conspiring in secret to frustrate the will of the people, whether the con·
spirators be the bankers, perfidious Albion, the Jews, the Catholics,
01'
radicals. Gripped by this melodramatic view of the world, the populist
mentality dreads privacy, lusts for publicity, and is nervously obsessed
with secrecy.
It
is, of course, a pigeon-hole into which McCarthy, with
his mania for conspiracy and publicity, his gravel-voiced contempt for
the striped-pants boys of the State Department or the Eastern urbanity
of an Acheson, and his urge to invade the institutional independence
of
the military and political bureaucracies, neatly fits without the
rulfle
of a feather. He and his cohorts found wide scope for their talents
in
a situation made explosive by the revengeful resentments bred by twenty
years of Democratic rule, the inevitable frustrations of the cold war,
in
which a MacArthur could have no quick and glorious triumph,
and
the actual, if limited, danger of Communist conspiracy, which some
officials had recognized too late.
Just as psychology has clarified the normal by investigating
the
abnormal, so can the structure of a free society be envisaged by the
analysis of our traumatic response to the Communist problem.
What
a free society needs is that balanced recognition of the value and limits
of privacy, secrecy, and publicity which the McCarthy era highlights
by contrast. Here Shils makes significant use of the feudal factor which
Hartz finds to be so important by reason of its absence from American
society. Whereas American liberals have tended to scorn English society
for its aristocratic snobbishness and reserved gentility, Shils argues
that
hierarchical habits of deference, restraint, and mutual confidence have
kept the English from becoming addicted to the heady intoxication
of
total publicity and absolute secrecy as panaceas for the Communist
danger.
If
this sounds conservative, it is, as Hartz's theme should remind
us, a line that American conservatives have never taken.
It is more to the point, however, that Shils's pluralistic plea for
diffused centers of power, that respect each other's autonomy is an
effort to define a common ground upon which both an intelligent
liberalism and conservatism can stand. The suspicion that there is no
such meeting-ground is itself a symptom of social derangement.
The
alienation of many intellectuals from American politics and business
in the past, like the bitter anti-intellectualism of many politicians and
businessmen since the 1920's, has led both liberals and conservatives
into the tragic error of seeking allies in extremist advocates of similar·
