396
WILLIAM PHILLIPS
of the Americans. Obviously, the policies of the United States make
no sense morally, politically, militarily, not even in its own terms,
in terms, that is, of "anti-communism" or the "national interest."
But it should be clear by now that opposition to the war - or to
America - is scarcely enough on which to build new socialist policies
or theories. Nor is it any reason to romanticize all revolutionary or
militant movements, or to fail to distinguish, say, between the ad–
vanced consciousness of the revolutionary Czechs and the tragic
limitations of the North Vietnamese, who, after all, were forced to
support the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. My own feeling
is
that the brightest revolutionary hopes have been sustained by the
Czechs, who brought to socialism a glimpse of its human
possi–
bilities. And I suspect it is an awareness of these distinctions, not the
intellectual baggage of the West, that kept Susan Sontag from
identifying with the Vietnamese, despite all her good
will.
But whether or not one agrees with her analysis, her specula–
tions are so wide-ranging that one is led to think about many of the
questions occupying the Left. And a central one is to be able to
distinguish between movements claiming to be revolutionary or
social–
ist. I am not talking, let me make clear, only about democracy
in
societies or movements calling themselves socialist, though I see no
reason for pretending not to care about it just because some anti–
Communists were unable to think about anything else, and I am
aware that many of the old arguments for democracy served to
dis–
miss
all radical activity. The truth is that the warnings about dem–
ocracy, while they have alerted us to the dangers of Stalinism, have
not led to any democratic radical movements. What I have in mind
is some kind of objectivity, some overall political view, that might
permit one to be partially sympathetic with the aims of some radical
movements without losing one's critical faculties or giving up one's
real goals. For example, it is one thing to believe that Western-style
democracy is not possible in primitive countries, and that to insist
on democratic socialist movements in Asia or Latin America amounts
to a rejection of any revolutionary activity. But it is something
else
to write off the West and rest all one's hopes in backward revolu–
tionary forces. Unfortunately this stance is fashionable now and one
can understand its appeal to those, like the Blacks, who expect
