PARTISAN REVIEW
9
followed communist modes of argument know, of course, that
Trotskyite is the label they use for any criticism from a liberal or left
position.
If
I give the impression that I am complaining about what
happened, I should correct it. On the contrary, anyone who has not
seen the communists up close, I am convinced, has had an
incomplete political education.
It
is a requisite for understanding
much of what goes on in the world today. It certainly helps one to
understand the Soviet mind. And it enables one to grasp how people
are trapped by movements and ideologies, and why so many persons
of good will, who believe injustice and in democracy, fall for radical
postures that have nothing to do with either. The communist experi–
ence might also provide some insight into the kind of political self–
hypnosis that may lead ultimately to left-wing terrorism.
w.p.
ONE YEAR AFTER THE RESTORATION.
After nearly half a cen–
tury, the Republicans have finally elected a president who offered "a
choice not an echo" in repudiating the "me-tooism" of the party's past
candidates from its centrist wing. Identifying himself with FDR as a
determined advocate of change, Reagan has succeeded in his first
eight months in office in enacting a negative version of the New Deal
by sharply reducing, without serious opposition from the Democrats
in Congress, both taxes and federal spending on social programs.
But the hour is clearly too late for a real counter-revolution reversing
the enormous increase in the powers of the federal government that
began in the 1930s, just as the creation of the welfare state and sev–
eral decades of sustained economic growth eliminated some time ago
the possibility of a "transition to socialism" led by the working class
in the democratic capitalist societies of the West. Perhaps if Taft
rather than Eisenhower had been elected in 1952, or even if Nixon
had not been laid low by Watergate after his landslide 1972 victory,
it might still have been possible to restore - at least temporarily - an
unregulated capitalism and a balanced federal budget. But such
things were not to be: the capture of the White House by old
believers has at last taken place in an unpropitious time of stagfla-
