WILLIAM PHILLIPS
401
thirties and forties, it seemed necessary to dispel the illusions about
Russia and the Communists because so many people who should have
known better were taken in. Now, on the other hand, with the excep–
tion of those who cling to a half- baked idealism, the whole country
has no illusions about the Communists. Also, at that time, the un–
masking of Stalinism was part of the struggle on the Left, to educate
honest but mistaken radicals and liberals, and to free the Left from
the corrupting effects of its association with the Communists. Today,
however, people may be muddle-headed, but no serious person on
the Left is pro-Communist. Neither on the Right nor on the Left can
the problem now be said to be the failure to recognize the nature of
commUnlsm.
The problem for the country is not whether it understands the
aims of the Communists, but whether there is a national interest and
if
so what its relation is to this understanding-in other words,
whether the support of democracy is always in the national interest.
As you know, Marxists have usually claimed that there is no national
interest, that there are only class interests, and that the so-called na–
tional interest in this country is only a mask for the interests of the
dominant economic class. This is probably too schematic and reduc–
tive a view of national motives. Nevertheless, many recent American
policies certainly seem to suggest that the government has tried very
hard to prove that Marx and Lenin were right. True, there have been
instances when the country did not appear to act either in the inter–
ests of the nation as a whole or of anyone class. I must confess that I
see no explanation for this but stupidity-the kind of myopic stupid–
ity that comes from the national addiction to empirical, day-to-day
thinking. And I do think stupidity has been underestimated as a fac–
tor in history by Right as well as Left ideologues.
When you talk about the cultural decline, it is not clear whether
you think this is connected with our political predicament and there–
fore with the question of freedom. If so, then what you take to be the
signs of cultural decline must be seen as part of the political situation .
For what are the cultural anarchy, the reign of pop, the popular dis–
tortions of modernism-what are these triumphs of the market
if
not
products of the system of advertising and packaging. And this is the
system that
is
supposed
to
save our freedoms and preserve our cultural
