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R. H. S. CROSSMAN
him a fascist or a Nazi. In the truest sense of the word, these American
anti-liberals seem to me to be reactionaries, inspired not by a de–
termination
to
capture power but by a nostalgic desire to return to the
era of old laissez faire and White supremacy.
As such they are dangerous enough. Even modest success in
mobilizing votes this autumn will enable them
to
put on a brake suf–
ficient to render the racial problem insoluble, just as they are already
strong enough to prevent the Administration from grasping the op–
portunities for coexistence with the Soviet Union. They will never
become the conquerors of democracy, like the Nazis: but they could
certainly be its wreckers.
There is one more comment I would like to make on this dis–
concertingly readable book. In politics as in war, it is a fatal mistake
to underestimate the enemy. Of course, one can show that Mr. Burn–
ham's anti-liberal ideology can be ridiculed and demolished just as
easily as the liberal ideology at whose expense he has such fun. Mr.
Burnham himself remarks on the wayan ideology blinds its adherents
to the facts, undermines their power of objective judgement, and in the
last resort cuts them off from reality altogether. But what could be
more utterly remote from real life than the picture he himself paints
of an Administration penetrated by fellow-travelers? How can a sane
man condemn Mr. Kennedy for .softness to Cuba and give a history of
East-West relations since 1956 without a single mention of the Sino–
Russian conflict--<>r, indeed, of any changes within the Communist bloc?
But to ridicule Mr. Burnham's own ideological blindness is not
the end of the matter. Indeed, I am sure that the gravest mistake we
can commit is to underrate the importance of his attack on liberal
thinking and on liberalism in government. There is a real danger that
books like
Suicide of the West
will
be
disregarded or made fun of by
those who most need to take them to heart. Though he himself is
guilty of it, Mr. Burnham strikes home when he accuses us of moral
asymmetry, and reminds us that it is not only the Left of the thirties
which falls under his indictment. With the wisdom of hindsight, we all
now condemn the attitude of so many American liberals and British
socialists to the Moscow trials, and the double standard by which they
condemned those features of Nazi totalitarianism, to which they turned
a blind eye when they recurred in the Soviet Union.
In the 1960s, the area of moral asymmetry has changed; but its
extent is just as great as ever. The right-wing enemy which we find it so
easy to ridicule and condemn has not changed much since thirty years
ago. But to the left of center it is no longer at the altar of Russian