586
PARTISAN REVIEW
DB:
What do you mean by the counter-cyclical or counter-factual?
DR:
Counter-factual: imagining what the world would have been like
had the United States not entered the First World War, but sought to
broker a peace between Germany and France. And what Wilson was like
- a Southerner and therefore pro-British, a polished Southerner, with the
country vulnerable to anti-German propaganda, which is astonishing for
you to think about today.
It
was much stronger against the "Huns" in the
First World War than against the Nazis in the Second. Some states for–
bade the teaching of German. In general, I did not go for conformity, but
I also disliked attitudes of contempt.
DB:
Some would suggest that this nation is moving rapidly toward a kind
of "mass conformity." Do you see that?
DR:
My own attitude really has been critical of that view. It was Erich
Fromm's view.
"Kleinbiirger
to the lower middle class." Deprecating. It
was until recently Christopher Lasch's view - the common view. But it
was never my view. I shouldn't say "never." It was not, in the years we're
talking about, my outlook. And I've indicated it to the extent that the
people who read
The Lonely Crowd
said, ''I'm other-directed and there–
fore benighted." For example,
C.
Wright Mills had this contempt to a
high degree. In his book,
White Collar,
there's a picture of conformist
white collar people and their occupations. I read the interviews on which
the book is based. One of these interviews was with an Italian life insur–
ance salesman . And from it, Mills gives a picture of the "bleached white–
collar worker." My sense was a totally different reading of that interview.
The salesman was doing something valuable for his clients, providing
them with life insurance. He loved his company. He was full of gregari–
ous energy. And to see him and others simply disparaged as "white collar"
was wrong. I was alert to that quite early.
DB:
Do you think the idea of mass conformity - it doesn't have to neces–
sarily mean the lower class - the idea of the other-directed, applies to, say,
the Clinton administration?
DR:
Yes.
DB:
The Clinton administration seems very aware of not wanting to
alienate either side - or any side for that matter. And I see it that way and
not as contempt for anything that's lower.
