340
PARTISAN REVIEW
words Watergate - particularly because of its covertness - is a demon–
stration of progress.
It
is a sign of how our native provinciality has been
overcome, in both government and American society. What it means ac–
cording to Lipset and Rabb is that "more and more Americans have
learned to lace their biases with democratic restraint." This utterance
deserves to be recorded as Lipset's and Rabb's corollary to Pyrrhus's
definition: one more such demonstration of domestic restraint and
we are lost.
The tendentiousness of this argument is equalled only by the abuse
it does to history - the tendentiousness is in fact a part of the abuse.
Not only is the analogy weak and lame in all the ordinary senses; but to
invoke it with such emphasis is to assimilate the present to the past
in such a way as to dissolve the meaning of Watergate. Moreover, such
analogizing suffers from the special heavy-handedness, tone-deafness, and
myopia that commonly afflict certain kinds of sociologists when they
deal with questions that require historical sense and discrimination.
For what it leaves out is much of what came between the 20s and the
present - the world-historical experience of the 30s, 40s, and 50s of
authoritarian and totalitarian bureaucracy, and their accompanying
technologies. The whiff given off by Watergate, the scent that has sent
shivers down some American spines, does not come from burning
crosses. John Ehrlichman is no Grand Kleagle without hood and bed–
sheet. The real hallucination was that one kept expecting him momen–
tarily to materialize in a smart black uniform and jack boots - and that
one couldn't believe what one was seeing and hearing.
All analogies are imperfect, and their value lies in their suggestive–
ness. But try to imagine what it would have been like in 1906 to read
an article which argued as follows: "The Dreyfus case is at last over ;
the court-martial verdict has been quashed, Dreyfus has been readmitted
to the Army, has been promoted and given the Legion of Honor. Jus–
tice has been done, and the strength, resiliency, and fundamental sound–
ness of the Third Republic has been demonstrated again." We would
probably be justified in suspecting the disinterestedness of the writer of
such a piece. We might even suspect that this argument has certain
political ends in view. Later on a phrase was found for such perfor–
mances -
La Trahison des Clercs.
Or we can reduce the charge and
find Lipset and Rabb guilty of ideology - an intellectual misdemeanor
committed by intellectuals who claim not to believe in ideology. But this
is bound to happen when one tries to explain away something that needs
to be explained.
W.
P.,S. M.
