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anyone need be ashamed; the prospect of thermonuclear warfare makes
analogies with the recent past quite irrelevant, while some recent
casuistic exercises on the morality of shooting one's neighbor if he ap–
proaches one's shelter afford an instructive foretaste of the quality
of life that will await the survivors.) The fear of a catastrophe has now
been joined to the conviction that militant and unremitting anti-Com–
munism must inevitably polarize world politics, encompass every political
conflict everywhere in the larger struggle, heighten the internal tensions
within the antagonistic societies, and thus ultimately produce thermo–
nuclear war. This conviction has been strengthened by the Kennedy
administration's (unintended) demonstration that a flexible anti-Com–
munism is impossible.
The President's advisors took office apparently determined to
pursue a policy of flexible anti-Communism. They were soon em–
phasising their anti-Communism at least as much as their flexibility.
Why? Intellectuals notorious for their critical views of American in–
stitutions (however inconsequential the criticisms might actually be),
firmly convinced of the value of pluralism (if less convinced, some of
them, that they lived in a pluralistic society), they had reason to
demonstrate, publicly, their unquestioned loyalty to their society. Brief–
ly, they feared the unreasoning political hysteria of their countrymen.
They were induced, then, to reinforce the latter's anti-Communism.
The "Alliance for Progress" has been accompanied by the crudest sort
of pressures for an anti-Castro front; the congressmen who escorted the
Secretary of State to Punta del Este were less interested in land reform
in Latin America than in sanctions on Cuba. That land reform can
hardly be pursued energetically by the administration in these circum–
stances seems clear. Professor Rostow's recent ignoble journey to Paris
to ask NATO help against Cuba constitutes a sufficient commentary on
the futility of attempting to develop a new politics on old ideological
assumptions.
Systematic anti-Communism seems peculiarly incapable of fusion
with a radically innovating social policy. The melancholy post-war
history of Western European Social Democracy is instructive: demo–
cratic socialism, as practised by it, is difficult to distinguish from welfare
capitalism (and has little persuasive power beyond the borders of
particular countries). European Social Democracy has done rather little
to give a positive political content to anti-Communism, even if it has
succeeded in keeping Spain as an informal rather than a formal NATO
ally. More than the suspicion that systematic anti-Communism
is
dif–
ficult to join with a new democratic politics underlies its recent
dif-
