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DIANA TRILLING
politics would today be as dated as the cultural tastes of another
era; and this
is
as true for Republicans as for Democrats. Just as in
America, if only in the North, we inevitably develop a liberal
Republicanism much influenced by the more progressive views of
the Democratic party, so in England Toryism has been bound to
borrow social attitudes from the Left. This is the law of modern
political development in the democracies, at least until such time as
political reaction may organize itself to impose its malign power on
the scattered forces of progress: progressivism, liberalism, enlighten–
ment are the dominant, conservatism
is
the recessive, political trait
of modern democracy. We see the law in operation even in Lord
Denning's report, where the moral tone of a Tory jurist is little
distinguishable from what we might expect of a spokesman from
the Left.
But then there is the actual British Left itself, whose contribution
to the contradictions presented in the Profumo affair was not a
small one. Political opportunism has of course never shunned a good
scandal as a means of embarrassing an opponent. The fact, however,
that it was the British Labour party, England's advance-guard in social
reform, that detonated this particular public scandal
is
an aspect
of the case that has been understandably minimized by commentators
of the liberal persuasion: it
is
not comfortable to contemplate where
the Labour party was led by the opportunity of Profumo's misconduct.
For although, historically, socialism has always been the party of
puritan values in personal morality, for some time now in the
Western democracies there has been a large if unspecified and
unexamined assimilation of political libertarianism and personal–
cultural libertarianism. When the Russian revolution deserted the
libertarian personal-cultural platform
it
had first formulated for
itself-free love, free abortion, free divorce- it required a profound
alteration in feeling among its adherents in the democracies to ac–
commodate this retrogression; we can put it that it was with this
cultural swing that the Russian revolution ceased for many people
to be a social experiment and became, instead, just another form
of established power. Whoever has wished to preserve the significant
distinction between Soviet Communism and democratic socialism has
had to deal not only with the political authoritarianism of which
cultural authoritarianism
is
such a firm buttress but also with Russia's
