262
DAVID RIESMAN
the last years of Eisenhower, despite the two defeats of Adlai Stevenson,
men began to run for Congress and the Senate and to take part
in
political life who were as much at home
in
the world of ideas as their
predecessors were in the court-house crowd or the Masonic Lodge of
small town Republicanism. Indeed, the whole discussion of disarma–
ment and foreign policy in the United States has become more open,
more sophisticated, and more widespread in the last few years; pre–
occupations once confined to
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
and
a few other specialized or sectarian groups can now be shared with a
far wider audience, inside as well as outside the Administration. The
difficulty, as so often in history, is that events appear to outpace the
rapid growth of understanding and of the political concepts and forms
that might bring about a more creative domestic and foreign policy.
The spirit of McCarthyism reflects long-standing discontents and belli–
cosities in America, for our society is one where men and groups are
accustomed to mobility, to expansion, to progress and secular growth, and
the Cold War now provides a wider stage for the drama of winning and
losing, of growth and senescence.* The antibodies against McCarthyism
are not hardy, and free debate concerning alternatives remains muted
and constricted (compared with, for instance, Canada). But what makes
the radical Right so ominous now is less its impact on civil liberties and
domestic affairs, an impact that can be held in check in the give and
take of poltics, than its potential power, in cooperation with mindless
militancy in other countries, to jeopardize, at least in the Northern
latitudes, the human enterprise itself. Political plagues become more
devastating when a single plane or Polaris submarine can carry more
death than all the bombs of World War II.
.. Cf., for fuller discussion, Riesman and Michael Maccoby, ''The American
Crisis," in
The Liberal Papers,
edited by James Roosevelt. (Doubleday Anchor
Books, 1962),
pp.
13-47.
