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PARTISAN REVIEW
appointments are inevitable. Democratic culture is the culture of moder–
nity and what, if not a war over modernity, is currently taking place?
Opposition to the democratic culture of modernity, in fact, is pro–
found. Democratic culture is usually compared to aristocratic culture–
but aristocratic cultures often contained the seeds of nascent democratic
idealism, and the opposition, despite Tocqueville's binary comparisons,
was less a matter of revolution than evolution. But the war that explic–
itly began on
9/rr,
and whose lineaments were clear long before many
Kaffeeklatsches and terror cells, is against a form of fundamentalism.
Under fundamentalism, every aspect of life is governed by a single set of
ideas. All of history, all of natural law, and all actions of the divinity are
seen as leading up to the present moment, granting incomparable power
and authority to the fundamentalist. Those laws also demand that they
be accepted universally and that great battles be waged on their behalf.
The fundamentalist does not believe these ideas have any limits. Goals
are not restricted to a particular place or a particular time. The place is
every place; the time is eternity. That is why fundamentalism is so often
expansionist. In this context, as the maxim goes, one man's terrorist is
not another man's freedom fighter. The goals of fundamentalist terror
are not to eliminate injustice but to eliminate opposition.
This is precisely the sort of mental universe that Hannah Arendt asso–
ciated with what she called "totalitarian terror." Writing more than a
half-century ago, she was primarily thinking of Nazi Germany and
Stalin's Soviet Union, but the ideas have far greater resonance. Like fun–
damentalist terror, totalitarian terror leaves no aspect of life exempt.
The state is felt to be the apotheosis of political and natural law, and it
strives to extend that law over all of humanity. Culture must exist in a
suspended state, an unchanging representation of the absolutist cult.
Moreover, reality never modifies totalitarian ideas; events do not prove
those ideas wrong or diminish belief. Instead, totalitarianism modifies
perceptions of reality to suit the ideas; the world is changed to fit with
the vision. Nothing is allowed to stand in the way. Opposition is guilt;
punishment is death. No injustices or so-called "root causes" necessar–
ily lead to totalitarianism and no mitigation of injustice, however
defined, will eliminate its unwavering beliefs. Democratic culture's dis–
contents shrink into insignificance as its threat is magnified.
This confrontation becomes more complicated simply because on the
democratic end of things, it is necessarily fraught with self-doubt and
conflict. For the very same ideas that have given American democratic
culture its peculiar character have now been reproduced on a larger scale.
Democratic culture remains a culture of dissent and discontent. Domes-
