THE COLD WAR AND THE WEST
S9
remitting effort to keep a vision of the good society alive and to
judge existing institutions
as they actua'lly function
by the extent to
which they further that vision. Let me point out that a commitment
to such visionary ideals, no matter how utopian they may seem, is
the best conceivable safeguard against being taken in by the lies of
politicians and ideologues, West
and
East, who are in the business
of persuading the credulous to accept what they do at face value.
During the 30's, as everyone knows, many American intellectuals
whose radicalism began with a commitment to a freer and more
humane society allowed themselves to be persuaded-often against
the evidence of their senses-that the Soviet Union was dedicated
to furthering the values of the liberal-radical tradition. These intel–
lectuals finally turned against Communism, most of them, when they
decided that Stalin had betrayed the revolution, and some of them
turned in the late 30's to Trotsky, believing that a true proletarian
revolution would emerge out of the impending clash between the
fascists and the bourgeois democracies. (I recommend a glance at the
back files of
Partisan Review
to anyone who doubts that this pre–
diction was taken with the utmost seriousness by several of the most
intelligent political minds of the day.) When the true revolution
failed to develop and a new conflict began to shape up in the postwar
period between the VI{estern democracies and the Communists, these
same intellectuals cried not "a plague on both your houses" (as might
perhaps have been expected) but turned instead into vigorous sup–
porters of the Western cause. Everyone, as 1 say, knows all this, but
does everyone know what created the pattern? I think the pattern
was created by the notion that values are "unreal" if they cannot be
attached to power. This is a notion that grows direcdy out of the
Marxist's contempt for "utopianism" (an attitude, incidentally, that
many non-Marxist liberals have learned to share). There must al–
ways be a class or a party or a social force or a nation to supply a
basis for effectuating values, and if none happens to exist and the
energy is also lacking to send lonely cries into the wilderness in the
hope that someone may some day listen-why then, one can always
make a choice among the things that do happen to exist and then
proceed to convince oneself that one is following the best and most
"responsible" possible course. What becomes along the way of the
values that started the whole process is pretty obvious: they turn into
