POWER AND IDEOLOGY
245
suming that he ought to be doing a bit of spiritual empire-building-is
his
defeatism about the modern world. After all, he is not the only
traditionalist to remember better days and a stabler world. There is
De Gaulle: my favorite conservative statesman, I have
to
admit.
If
we
must
have conservatism, let it
be
Gaullist, that is, intelligent,
courageous, and frankly authoritarian. Then there was Churchill-a
Liberal Imperialist (in British terminology) rather than a Tory, but
distinctly a Burkean, and so a representative of the school
Mr.
Halle
admires. Now the odd thing about Churchill and De Gaulle is that for
all their basic conservatism they have been remarkably successful in
adapting themselves to their age. I fancy this has been partly due to
their sense of the material possibilities opened up for their respective
nations by science and technology. They are, in this sense, modern.
Moreover, they are not distressed by the notion that democracy-in
the full and original sense-is not workable: they never thought it
was. This is the European cynicism that Americans get so angry with
when they encounter it for the first time. Democracy is an American
faith. Few Europeans have ever quite shared it, and even those who
do generally concede that the system works best at the municipal level.
Parliament is largely a sham which hides the reality of Cabinet govern–
ment. The British have known this for a long time, just as they have
long known that (in a phrase familiar to classicists) a democracy
cannot govern an empire.
It
is one thing or the other:
if
you take
your democracy seriously, you must give up your possessions. Both the
British and the French have made this discovery recently, precisely
during the years when the Americans began to travel in the opposite
direction.
Is this why Mr. Halle sounds so melancholy, or is he unaware
that he and his fellow-thinkers are currently engaged on the important,
and indeed overdue, task of providing the new American Establish–
ment with an ideology suited to its current role in the world? To me
he sounds like Marc Aurel when he ought to be sounding like Cicero.
The burden of empire rests wearily upon his shoulders. Worse still,
he conceives it his duty to impress upon his readers the importance of
not taking the material world too seriously. His solution of the moral
problem inherent in politics is a Platonist one. There are two realms:
that of the senses, in which we unfortunately have to live, and that of
spiritual ideas. Only the second is truly real. The material order is an
inferior copy of the spiritual, or ideal, order. This can be proved by
experience, even by experiment. "In human creation the idea always
comes first." Religious conclusions naturally follow: "The Platonic
