68
DAVID
RIESMAN
could develop the traditions of freedom preserved in our best uni–
versities, private and public. And while most Americans are cynical
about politicians, I am not: there is much courage and disinterested–
ness among our best senators and congressmen. Every one of those
senators and representatives who has been liberal and enlightened
on the questions dealt with in this symposium faces virulent attacks
from the radical Right-that
is
from groups that have a constituency
in virtually every congressional district and can muster funds in every
district. Each congressman
is
in effect a "small businessman;" and
while our political system is obviously out of joint in many ways, a
few courageous men in office remind us of how greatly it protects
political and civil liberty.
Yet institutional forms are noribund
if
not to tied to individual
attitudes.
If
people feel impotent and hapless, elections are only a
source for bad jokes.
If
professors retreat from large questions to
safely specialized ones, they will neither test nor defend their own
civil liberties or those of others.
If
we do not feel that we can
control our destinies either from day to day or in the long run,
freedom becomes an empty word, another shell in the cold war. The
cold war needs to be brought under control primarily because it can
lead to catastrophe. But it has the ancillary danger that, while it lasts,
the defense and reinterpretation of freedom
is
made far more dif–
ficult, as illustrated by the young egocentric chauvinists who call
themselves the Young Americans for Freedom. Even the possibility
for safely attacking unfreedom and repression in the Communist
countries requires a peaceful world, that is, a world not faced with
the threat of nuclear war, hence one where political and ideological
conflict can be a source for growth. Those traditions in the West
that make for openness and fluidity, for spontaneity and vigor
in
persons and in institutions can under stress become frozen as part of
the defensive armor of "the American way of life."
5. It
is
rare that anything human is an unmixed evil, and even
the cold war has had some beneficent effect upon political thought.
It has led many intellectuals to reexamine the values of their own
culture, including its popular variant, as against an earlier xenophilia.
The danger here, however, is that of moving from complaint to
complacency. To some degree, moreover, the cold war has facilitated
making American political thought more cosmopolitan, and even
