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PARTISAN REVIEW
The victory over Fascism in the Second World War by no
means resolved this moral crisis but posed it in a new form. While it
eliminated Fascism as a serious political force and discredited it
morally, it established the claim of Communism as a legitimate
political force both at home and abroad. During the Second World
War, the Communists were in the forefront of the fight for national
liberation from the national enemy. Close to one-third of the Italian
electorate has consistently voted for Communist or pro-Communist
parties; in France the corresponding figure is close to one-quarter. Yet
the ruling elites of Italy and France have consistently treated the
Communist parties as being unqualified to participate in the govern–
ment. The consequence has been a distortion of the democratic
processes through legal and political practices which have succeeded in
excluding permanently a large segment of the electorate from active
participation in the government.
The United States has been spared this moral dilemma of having
to violate a basic principle of democracy for the sake of protecting the
democratic processes. The United States has never had to choose
between Fascism and Communism, for both threats to American
democracy were always remote, however much the aberration of
McCarthyism made it temporarily appear that Communism was the
main issue America had to fight at home and abroad. Thus, while the
nations of Western Europe risked national disintegration in the
struggle to the finish between democracy and the two totalitarianisms,
America was able to present a united national front against the two
enemies from without: first against the totalitarianism of Fascism,
then against that of Communism. The simplistic moral stance of
Secretary ofStateJohn Foster Dulles, dividing the world into good and
evil nations and the morally tainted neutral ones, expresses on the
moral plane the simpIe political and military confrontation of the Cold
War. Thus the United States became the "leader of the free world,"
both by dint of the actual distribution of political power and of the
simple moral position it could afford to take
vis:~-vis
the enemies of
the "free world." That ascendancy of the United States to un–
challenged and seemingly unchallengeable leadership, not only in the
"free world" but in the world at large, effectively concealed the actual
decline of the collectivity called the Western world and the trends
toward deterioration within the United States itself.
What sapped the moral strength of the United States was not the
