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PARTISAN REVIEW
rules over the society . In Poland, a regime, the Army, seeks to crush
and subdue the society- which is the working class , the Church, and
the peasantry . In Chile, a society and social structure which long
was democratic is now ruled by a narrow-based Army regime which
seeks to create capitalist and market forces by decree!
In the United States, the regime has always been subordinate
to the society. The values of the society are economic freedoms , civil
liberties, and individual rights; a limitation of state power through
checks and balances; a Constitutional system with emphasis on due
process and guarded by judicial review. These may , and sometimes
have been, twisted by regimes (particularly as the administrative
state and public bureaucracies compete with the corporate bureauc–
racies), but the values remain and the regimes are accountable to the
society.
Equally, in the United Kingdom and in the United States, the
protection of liberties and the rule of law antedate the capitalist
economy and are maintained by a strong institutional tradition, a
cumbersome yet basically protective legal system, and the play of
civil as against ideological politics. Any destruction of democracy
derives more from the polarization of a society into irreconciliable
factions than from the dominant economic class becoming fearful of
the "masses. "
To identify the administration with the society , or the culture
of the country, coarse as it may be in many ways, with the character
of its underlying values, is not only quite wrong but leads to gross
and misleading equations. Thus, in
The New Yorker,
that imposter of
Parnassus, George Steiner, wrote of George Orwell that he was
"resistant to both the Stalinism and the detergent inhumanity of a
technocracy and mass-media hypnosis of the kind toward which the
United States seems to Orwell to be moving."
To the extent that Orwell was a "little Englander," as many
British writers are, he would seek a different way from the mass
society of the United States and the closed, repressive society of the
Soviet Union. But on the overriding issue of the defense of freedom
and decency, his choice was unambiguous.
So, to the extent that we live in a society whose values are
rooted in traditions of freedom and pluralism, and are embodied in
continuing institutions in which accountability and consent remain
the foundations of the political order, we can say, without apology ,
that this is "our country ."
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