Toward the end of World War II the American Mercury, then under the editorship of Eugene Lyons, featured a series of articles in which a variety of authors defended their political-social stand. This writer’s interest focused on an essay by Oswald Garrison Villard, entitled “Credo of an Old Fashioned Liberal.” The article made it evident that Villard’s stand showed strong analogies with the gentlemanly and “Erasmian” version of Continental old liberalism—a liberalism, one might add, not so different from the liberalism once prevailing in England and in the United States during most of the nineteenth century. We do not thereby imply that there were no differences on that score on both sides of the Channel.1 In England, too, where, in a way, the Whigs had been “replaced” by the Liberals, the latter were increasingly exposed to leftist influences. In the Nineteenth century it seemed for a time that the Conservatives (Tories) had a chance to become the party of social reform—especially so under Disraeli and under the influence of Lord Randolph Churchill. This is by no means surprising if we recall that Continental conservatism and certain forms of paternalism went well together as illustrated by the patriarchal character of large land ownership. (In Sweden, in the past, Socialists and Conservatives, often have voted together against the Liberals, the party of big business and industry.) Yet by the end of the nineteenth century in Britain the competition of the Labor Party made itself felt and some of the Liberals drifted toward the left. Fabian influence was by no means innocent in this evolution. A Gladstone, a Rosebery, an Asquith, needless to say, were anything but leftists; but another factor also played a certain role, the split over Irish Home Rule, which was instrumental in facilitating the switching of sides of those Liberals who had nationalist leanings. Under the leadership of David Lloyd George the Liberal party moved to “left of center.” Their social program was strongly radicalized and this change had been promoted, fostered, and abetted by an ambitious young man who had deserted the Conservative party to become an ardent Liberal—the son of Lord Randolph Churchill, Mr. Winston Spencer Churchill, whose elevation to the rank of a “Great Conservative” is one of the most amusing misunderstandings in our time. (As a not-so-young Radical he campaigned for Lloyd George’s “war budget” against poverty, which was designed to make indigence as rare as the “wolves who once infected England’s forests.” The “Great Society,” Act One!)
As could be suspected, the Labor party finally reduced the Liberals to such a size that they became impotent in British politics and retained only some local influence in Wales. All they can do now is tip the scales in Parliament, provided a near equality in the number of Conservative and Labor MPs makes this possible. Nor does British party Liberalism have any longer a real program—neither politically nor economically.
The evolution of the term “liberal” in the United States, an evolution which took place only in the last thirty years, shows certain minor analogies with the change in Britain but has few equivalents on the Continent. This is so because there the “sectarian liberal,” as Carlton J. H. Hayes defined him, might have been prejudiced, inflexible, and petty, especially in his “anticlericalism,” but he had no leftist bent and, apart from his nationalistic proclivities,2 no identitarian mentality. How then did this change really take place? How was it possible that in the United States the word that means freedom-loving, generous, tolerant, open-minded, hostile to state omnipotence and antitotalitarian, came to stand for the very contrary of all these notions and virtues?
This process is easily explained. The “old-fashioned liberal” was often the man who refused to resist what might be called the Wave of the Future. The conservative (and even more so the “reactionary”)3 usually decided to make a stand against change, and change was largely a leftward movement. The leftist ideologies had all assumed (inevitably so, one might say) a “futuristic” character, a term we also find in the history of art, and it is not accidental that its major spokesman, Marinetti, became an ardent Fascist. The leftist ideologies all claimed the future, they claimed utopia, they claimed the millennium in a chiliastic spirit. They believed in the concept of a near-automatic progress (which needed just a little “push”). The road in this fictional direction had in their eyes the character of an “advance,” whereas conservatives merely adhered to the status quo and the reactionaries to a “backward trend.” The situation in this respect was not radically different on the Continent. It is certainly with a sense of irony that the Guide Bleu (Paris: Hachette) edited by Professor Marcel N. Schveitzer of the Sorbonne, said in its 1935 edition, “Málaga is a city of very advanced ideas. On May 12 and 13, 1931, no less than forty-three churches and convents were burnt down” (p. 562). The monarchy had fallen and the short-lived, infamous republic was moving “ahead.” It is obvious that an unimaginative martinet such as General Franco wanted to stop this kind of “advance.”
There were old-fashioned, i.e., genuine liberals who clung to their convictions; Albert Jay Nock, even H. L. Mencken were among them. But many others dreaded being called conservatives or reactionaries. As long as there existed a utopia at the end of the road, painted in the colors of absolute personal freedom, the genuine liberal was sure to be a “progressive.” Before the 1930s the “ultraradical,” the extremist (especially in America) was not the Socialist, not the Communist, but the anarchist. As a matter of fact, it took Americans quite some time to distinguish between the Communist and the anarchist, and to the average American for a long time the bolshevik was an unshaven, rowdyish creature who wanted no law, no order, but the eternal overthrow of everything—in other words, an anarchist. The more spectacular acts of violence were all carried out by anarchists, whereas Communists, believing in mass action at the right time, in military conquest and in civil wars, abhor individual action. Even in Russia the Communists (or, to be even more exact, the radical wing of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ party) had never carried out assassinations or acts of terror, and the very first Communists (Bolshevikì) who had suffered death for cause were those executed in the Civil War. Russian communism up to 1918 had no martyrs.
When I arrived in the United States for the first time in 1937 I had to give written assurance that I was neither a bigamist nor an anarchist. Violent, rampaging lawless freedom still seemed to be the menace. It was also the direction in which the world—to the less initiated at least—gradually seemed to be moving. Respect and authority were declining, divorce was becoming easier and more common, crowned heads were toppling, censorship was disappearing right and left, travel was becoming simpler, liberal parties were still scoring in elections in parts of the Western World. Thus the genuine American liberal could be fully convinced that with his political convictions the future belonged to him. It was only because of the leniency and the tolerance of Americans and British liberals of an age gone by toward the real leftists, that liberals became suspect.
The Great Change, however, came only in the 1930s when certain Americans, who saw in their country primarily not their fatherland but the “American Experiment,” suddenly thought that the “Soviet Experiment” offered even more to mankind. This was the “Red Decade,” to quote the title of a book by Eugene Lyons.4 In other words, the vision of tomorrow now took another form. Liberty no longer was the ideal. Security and equality, the promises of international Socialism, rather than individual freedom now were the new goals. Mrs. Anne Morrow Lindbergh, in her book The Wave of the Future, pleaded for a more realistic understanding of National Socialism. Yet the disease of democratic utopianism and a certain materialism had already too deeply affected the American liberals for them to overcome the fear of clinging to a “lost cause.” They were too afraid to “miss the bus,” and the horror of “getting stuck with the ideas of yesterday” troubled them profoundly.5 They had no consistent system of ideas, no principles, no real leadership. They were drifting, and drifts are determined by winds and currents. These now carried them toward determinism and collectivism, toward a “secular monasticism,” and thus toward what can be called the opposite direction from their initial stand, into rank illiberality. At the same time they preserved a few hardly essential notions from their past and, as could be expected, flatly refused to give up their label. In the end we got the Great American Semantic Confusion, and it lives on to this very day.
The old liberal ideas on matters such as sexual morals, prison administration, capital punishment, and the emancipation of women largely survive, but it is in their basic outlook on the state and society that the old liberals in the United States (far more so than in Britain) have made an about-face of 180 degrees. Liberals in all ages have looked at the state, always prone to annexations, with a great deal of suspicion. This tendency of the state is especially marked in the democratic order, not only because democracy is inherently totalitarian but also because it works (to use John Adams’ term) with largesses, large-scale bribes, promises rashly and shrewdly made by the demagogoi. It matters little that the encroachments of the state tend in a subtle way to undermine democracy. Bureaucracy quickly assumes oligarchic and autocratic traits. Yet expansion, encroachment on personal rights, remains inseparable from democracy.6
The old liberal did not necessarily like the democratic notion of the “politicized citizenry.” As a matter of fact, he often suspected it of being fundamentally illiberal. However, his resistance against the new winds and currents was not only weak because he cherished so deeply the idea of belonging to the camp of the innovators, progressivists, and “dawnists” (an expression of Michael de la Bédoyère) hailing the new and damning the obsolete, but because he had previously been robbed of his sense of values. He had lost his philosophical props at a much earlier date. These had been eliminated half a generation before by philosophies such as instrumentalism and behaviorism, as well as by “polite doubt,” actually a refined form of positivism. This view has been represented so well in the American scene by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., grandson of a Calvinist clergyman, son of a theologically liberal physician and essayist, himself a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States—and a complete nihilist. Whereas pragmatism came on the American educational scene through that notorious institution of pedagogical training of which it has been said that there false pearls were thrown to real swine, the Justice influenced legal thinking, which in the United States is equally important to education.
As a real positivist Holmes could write that, “Sovereignty is a form of power, and the will of the sovereign is law because he has power to compel obedience or punish disobedience and for no other reason. The limits within which his will is law, then, are those within which he has, or is believed to have power to compel or to punish.”7
If these were his true convictions there was certainly no reason why he should have condemned the horrors of the French Revolution, of Sachsenhausen, or of the kontslageri of Stalin. Or was this only a lapsus linguae? Holmes could hardly have been more explicit when he wrote: “I think that the sacredness of human life is a purely municipal idea of no validity outside the jurisdiction; I believe that force, mitigated so far as may be by good manners, is the ultima ratio, and between two groups that want to make inconsistent kinds of a world I see no remedy except force. . . .”8
What a pity, a Nazi might say, that Holmes was not one of the judges at Nuremberg. (He died in 1935.) The Nazis also could have made monkeys out of the Allies simply by quoting him. And if the reader is not convinced by these passages, let us add another: “I see no reason for attributing to man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or a grain of sand. I believe that our personality is a cosmic ganglion, just as when certain rays meet and cross there is a white light at the meeting point, but the rays go on after the meeting as they did before, so, when certain other streams of energy cross at the meeting point, the cosmic ganglion can frame a syllogism or wag its tail.”9 There we have it: a grain of sand, baboon, Jew, “bourgeoisie”—let’s rub them out!
Does it make us much happier to learn that the late Justice Holmes had a most humble opinion about himself? His pessimistic nihilism surely extended to his own person as we feel when we read, “I may work a year or two but I cannot hope to add much to what I have done. I am too skeptical to think that it matters much, but too conscious of the mystery of the universe to say that it or anything else does not. I bow my head, I think serenely and say, as I told to someone the other day, O Cosmos—Now lettest thou thy ganglion dissolve in peace.”10
This admission is not less dangerous because it is melancholic in spirit. It has, however, helped to establish a pattern which still is going strong, witness the opinion given by Justice Vinson in 1951 in connection with a trial of Communists: “Nothing is more certain in modern society than the principle that there are no absolutes, that a name, a phrase, a standard has meaning only when associated with the considerations which give birth to nomenclature. To those who would paralyze our Government in the face of impending threat by encasing it in a semantic strait-jacket, we must reply that all concepts are relative.”11
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. would have subscribed to this formulation half a century earlier. He once said that Emperor Franz Josef was a gentleman, but that the monarch was a “perfect illustration of my old saying that no gentleman can be a philosopher and no philosopher a gentleman: To the philosopher everything is fluid—even himself.”12 This means, in other words, that there is a real antithesis between philosophy and permanence, that there can be no immutable truths. The consequences of such an attitude, clearly catastrophic, have shocked a number of European philosophers,13 though others expressed analogous ideas. An Austrian legal thinker of considerable influence on both sides of the Atlantic, Hans Kelsen, drafter of the still valid republican constitution of Austria, has said that, “Justice is an irrational ideal. However indispensable it might be for man’s will and action, it cannot be reached by knowledge.”14 The real danger of this nihilism lies in the fact that its disciples find no reason to resist evil and are intellectually defenseless in the face of such diabolical menaces as National or International Socialism. Kelsen was once asked by Wilhelm Röpke what cogent argument he had against the Nazi extermination camps, whereupon he just smiled and shrugged his shoulders—even though, had he stayed on in Austria, he would have been one of their victims.15
The lack of well-grounded convictions, the absence of a belief in truth create a dangerous hunger. And since nature abhors a vacuum, the absolutes of the totalitarian systems suddenly find customers. The isms then appear on the scene and, as Fëdor Stepun said, “Give to the hungry demo-liberal-nihilistic world the ‘truth,’ but this ‘truth’ in reality is a lie and a travesty of religion.”16 Of course, as Keyserling has observed, there also exists, a real absolutism of the relativists (who remind one of Hayes’s “sectarian liberals”), but they fail in the emergency. They can be petty, stupid, and stubborn, but they cannot make a stand for the true good, even if such stand is in favor of the positive values inherent in the great religions of the West.18
This nihilism goes very well with the naturalism represented by Edward Lee Thorndike, who had a great influence at Teachers College, Columbia University. Dr. S. J. Holmes has well summed up the philosophy of Professor Thorndike in the following words: “Man’s traits, insofar as they are a part of his inheritance, owe their origin and biological meaning to their survival value. All natural traits and impulses of human beings must therefore be fundamentally good, if we consider the good as the biologically useful. Cruelty, selfishness, lust, cowardice, and deceit are normal ingredients of human nature which have their useful role in the struggle for existence. Intrinsically they are all virtues. It is only their excess or their exercise under the wrong conditions that justly incur our moral disapproval.”19 Was Professor Thorndike an isolated case of the lonely thinker or a real former of minds on a large scale? Dean Seashore of the University of Iowa said of him: “No school is uninfluenced and no humanistic science is unaffected by his labor.” Dean James E. Russell insisted that, “In developing the subject of educational psychology and in making it fit study for students in all departments, Professor Thorndike has shaped the character of the college in its youth as no one else has done and as no one will ever have the opportunity of doing.”20
There are interesting parallels between the nihilistic and materialistic undermining of the old-fashioned American liberal faith with relativist ideas and the erosion of the faith of the French upper layers prior to the Revolution through Voltairean skepticism, followed by the fanatical, yet in a way consistent philosophy of Rousseau. The nihilism inherent in the instrumentalism and pragmatism of John Dewey’s philosophy also provided Marxism with an opening wedge. If all spiritual values, if Revelation, if the concept of the natural law, if the Aristotelian tradition were “illusory” and Christian existentialism from St. Augustine to Kierkegaard were “unscientific,” then a naked materialism within and outside existentialism might well be the answer. As we have seen, de Sade had established this bridge between a subjectivist relativism and rank materialism.
In other words, not only the “drifting” of lost old liberals, but also a corrosive agnosticism helped to transfigure this set of ideas into the very opposite of what they first were. This is not the first time history has seen such a metamorphosis. One has only to remember the ideas and ideals the Reformers stood for, then look at the form and content of religious thought offered to students in the average “Protestant” theological seminary in the United States. (Here we are obviously not talking about the admirable fundamentalist or orthodox institutes of theological learning, which are in a minority and often sadly lack prestige.) The “outstanding” theological seminaries of the Reformation faiths are normally victims of the grandchild of Catholic Scholasticism, that is to say Rationalism, and of the grandchild of Catholic Renaissance, the Enlightenment. To make matters worse, there is the lamentable tendency to project modern, popular notions about “Protestantism” back to the Reformers.21 Not only would it have been interesting to see Luther’s reaction if anybody had called him a “Protestant,” a term of contempt coined by the budding Counterreformation,22 he would also have been amazed at being accused of advocating “private interpretation,”23 an early liberalism, the abolition of auricular confession, or of the Latin language in the ritual,24 humanitarianism, individualism, racial equality, democracy, etc. The Reformation was a rigoristic, conservative movement, a reaction against humanism, against the Renaissance, which eventually became totally transformed by highly secular tendencies emanating, to be true, from cultural trends in the orbis Catholicus. In other words, if we exclude fundamentalism and orthodoxy (or neoorthodoxy), “Protestantism” became its very opposite. And we cite this religious analogy because the same can be said of American liberalism, though even here we have glaring exceptions. Professor Milton Friedman, for instance, who teaches at the University of Chicago and acted as advisor to Senator Goldwater during the latter’s presidential campaign, still calls himself proudly a liberal.25 And so do others.
Since American freelancing leftism, parading under the stolen liberal label, is the result of an inversion of its former self, it does not present us with a truly systematic and coherent logical picture. It suffers from inconsistencies and contradictions. No wonder, since it is a halfway house, after all. Thus the American leftist or left-of-centrist,26 while talking basically the identitarian jargon of leftism, will suddenly inject into his talk ideas belonging to the liberal past. Not being a systematic thinker, but a person subconsciously torn between parts of American folklore, nineteenth-century reactions to Calvinism and radical leftism, he is not really aware of his dilemma.
And not being aware of his dilemma, he is prone to the worst miscalculations in dealing with truly systematic thought abroad. Hence his naive belief that (to quote only one instance) Russian Marxism could be liberalized to the extent that Western “capitalism,” treated with Socialist hormones, could finally meet it halfway. The meeting, naturally, can be effected, but only in such a way that the flexible is bent like a blade against a concrete wall until it touches the rigid. We can be gradually socialized, communized and sovietized: Industries can be “nationalized”; but it is difficult to see how Russian industry or agriculture could ever be transformed into private property without (a) the collapse of the secular religion of communism, and (b) a transitional period of total chaos and anarchy. Revolution always remains a possibility (though in a totalitarian state a fairly remote one) but from an evolutionary viewpoint socialism is always a dead-end street. Yugoslavia now experiences this difficulty. If you have the two long legs of free enterprise you can run; with the short legs of socialism you barely walk; but with one long and one short leg you fall on your nose.
We must also beware of believing that ideologies can be dealt with in the abstract, i.e., without any reference to national psychological situations. British and American thought looks with disfavor upon “systems,” airtight explanations of history, religion, psychology, economics, etc.27 It does not like extremes. It has a horror of going down to roots (“radicalism”) or of embracing the Absolute.28 Thus it is not merely the transitional aspect of American left-of-centrism that gives it its confused character, but also the “Anglo-Saxon” isolation made worse by a dislike for system, method, and logical rigidity. Witness Oliver Wendell Holmes’s insistence that no gentleman can be a philosopher.29
If one peruses the Thirty-Nine Articles of the “Liberal Creed” as presented in James Burnham’s brilliant Suicide of the West,30 one is immediately aware of the frequency of contradictions and of the highly eclectic character of the “tenets.” Point 9, for instance, saying that governments have the right to expropriate (though not without reasonable compensation) its own nationals or foreigners, is clearly a leftist proposition. But to say, as Point 17 insists, that Communists have a right to express their opinion, is a liberal, not necessarily a leftist view. Yet when it is deprived of its corollary, i.e., that Fascists and Nazis ought to have the same right, it is a parti pris for a specific type of leftism against another one and thus becomes illiberal. Point 38, declaring that everyone has the right to form and join trade unions, is liberal rather than leftist, but if the formulation were to the effect that everybody gainfully employed should be forced to join a union or a specific union, then we would be face to face with a genuinely leftist, antipersonal and coercive demand stemming from a social totalitarianism that might even be endorsed by the state. (Of course the closed shop and the union shop are rather “democratic”: no escape from conformity and horizontal pressures.) Point 19, stating that corporal punishment, except possibly for small children, is wrong, is also liberal and not leftist. The pros and cons of such an issue have a great deal to do with ethnic-cultural patterns. (Corporal punishment has a stronger tradition in Northern and Eastern than in Central or Southern Europe.) Point 8 is interesting because it states that progressive income and inheritance taxes are the fairest form of taxation. Is this liberal or leftist? Here the answer is not easy. It is not only part of American, but also of Western folklore that the rich ought to be “soaked.” As long as the majorities endorse this practice (and they do), it must be considered democratic—even though it is contrary to the democratic principle of equality, because if the rich man pays 50 cents and his less affluent fellow-citizen only 25 cents of his dollar in taxes, equality before the law becomes a sham.31
Yet, whatever our exegesis of Mr. Burnham’s test, it is obvious that American leftism, which no longer deserves the name of liberalism, has a transitory character, but the transition takes place progressively from rightist to leftist positions. This evolution, moreover, is not only in harmony with the likings and leanings of the semiintellectuals who provide American moderate leftism with leadership but is also largely consonant with the instincts and aspirations of the masses—of the American masses as well as of the masses anywhere else.
There exists, primarily in America, a myth to the effect that the masses are noble, good, decent, honest, and that they are merely misled by diabolical eggheads of the leftist persuasion, by a tiny minority with key positions in education, publishing, the press, the theatrical world, and the movie industry. This, however, is a gross and dangerous oversimplification. There might be certain “sound instincts” in the multitudes, but since they consist of human beings and not angels, they are also subject to animal instincts and to specifically human frailties: envy, jealousy, egotism, greed, avarice, pettiness. Their sense of justice is not always strong, their sadistic drives can be well developed, their sense of fairness impaired, their knowledge limited, their historic memory bad, and so forth. Thus the question remains whether the American moderate leftists have injected new and evil ideas into the American scene or whether they have not rather exploited negative drives, have appealed to the seamier side of human nature and, above all, have achieved whatever popularity they have by merely formulating cleverly and coherently the ideas and notions which could be found inchoately before their rise to eminence, before they took over the intellectual leadership of the nation. In spite of the fact that American leftists were quite adroit in importing ideas from Europe and have acted consistently as agents of European ideologies, propagating them either in toto or in selected fragments in a new synthesis, they were never insensitive to local American notions. Take merely the curious expression “Americanism”: Communist propaganda in the late 1930s and early 1940s operated with the slogan “Communism is twentieth-century Americanism.”
In other words, American leftism derives its strength from an interplay between imported ideas, cherished popular American traditions, and appeals to the higher or, if need be, to the lower human appetites. Communism, socialism, “welfarism,”32 ideas from the French Revolution, or “democracy” are clearly importations. The anticolonialist crusade, which has done such tremendous harm to all concerned, rests on American folklore (as far as it does not also derive some impetus from the democratic dogma), whereas Woodrow Wilson’s program to “make the world safe for democracy” has idealistic undertones, and the “sexual revolution,” so dear to the non-Marxist left anywhere, appeals to baser instincts.
It is in the domain of sex, “below the belt,” and probably in this region only, that the liberal principle has been preserved. (To which one might add another “biological” stand, antiracism.) American leftism not only is antipuritanical, it stands for libertinism. (To what extent the defense of homosexual practices, a cause popular with the uncommitted left the world over, is due to the strong identitarian strain in leftism, will always remain an element of speculation.) The American non-Marxist leftist is naturally feminist, and the leftist bent of the female feminist—the ex-suffragette type—is very marked in America. But the American leftist is not really a lover of women, and one also has to keep in mind that the American matriarchy is a myth.33 Women in America have a very wide ghetto in which they rule supreme, but they have neither the influence women have in France nor (of a different type) in Italy, nor in the upper layers of central and Eastern Europe. In Spain, nay, even in misogynist England, one can imagine a ruling Queen, but America could not conceivably elect a female President. (A female Vice President succeeding a male President? Perhaps. But a lady “stumping” the country?)
Libertinism, however, is frowned upon by the stricter leftist ideologies. Although homosexuality was not infrequent in certain Nazi circles and even had its advocates in proto-Nazi groups,34 it was savagely punished by the Nazi authorities. In the concentration camps the homosexuals were assembled into punitive units with distinctive marks on their uniforms. In the Soviet Union, too, homosexuality is considered a crime—which indeed makes no sense taking into consideration the deterministic character of the official Soviet philosophy.35 (As a matter of fact, since materialism rejects the notion of free will, why should there be any punishment for anything? De Sade asked this question earlier.)
The American uncommitted left retains, apart from its sexual antipuritanism, a few humanitarian residues from its genuinely liberal ancestors. It usually has a dislike for capital punishment, though this sort of retribution was first abolished in Western civilization by the Hapsburgs in Tuscany36 and Austria and by Catherine II in Russia. It was later temporarily reintroduced in Austria and Russia, but after 1898 Emperor Franz Josef pardoned every culprit condemned to death—with one exception. (In 1898 the Empress Elizabeth was murdered in Geneva by an Italian anarchist: Franz Joseph’s practical abolition of the death penalty was a Christian reply to his own loss in a great dialogue with God. Nor was Gavrilo Prinćip, murderer of his nephew and heir to the throne and virtual initiator of World War I, executed.)37 In Russia the death penalty was practically reabolished by Alexander II (after having been once abolished by Catherine II) and remained almost in abeyance until the Communists became the masters of the country: It was reserved mainly for assassinations or attempted assassinations of members of the Imperial family. As a matter of fact, it is psychologically very difficult for a monarch to sign the death warrant for one of his subjects with whom he is connected in a father-son relationship. (Here also lies the reason for the ready abdication of dynasties, since they cannot easily fire at their “children” in times of stress and revolts.)38 In republics the situation is radically different, because the person of the magistrate is less important, the democratic republic works with abstractions (the constitution, the law, the general will) whereas monarchy is personal government.39 According to democratic doctrine the citizen revolting against a “duly elected government” is revolting against himself. He is not a parricide; he is a suicidal maniac. He deserves no pity.
Yet apart from these humanitarian leftovers, the not strictly Marxian (but usually Marx-tainted) uncommitted American leftist, the man arrogating for himself the label of “Liberal” is by no means a friend of liberty, of personal freedom. Even when he seemingly espouses the cause of liberation and emancipation, as in the case of the American of part-African ancestry, he immediately invokes the strong arm of the law, the intervention of secular government in the social domain. The net result of such ubiquitous and total legislating and intervening might then be another “noble experiment” such as we had in Prohibition.40 Here precisely lies the false “liberal’s” radical deviation from the ideals of those liberals whom he brazenly but wrongly claims as his ancestors: in his adulation of the omnipotent state and his genuine contempt for the independent person. His real or pretended “humanism” in the “biological” domain41 (sex, race, death penalty) is matched by a totalitarian outlook in nearly all the others. The Roussellian strain is here even more evident than the earlier and milder American leftist tradition as represented by Jefferson, Paine, Rush, and Jackson.
We shall have more to say about the American pseudoliberal later on. Here we merely want to cite a few passages from a book which was published in a moment of great fear and tension among uncommitted leftists living in the United States, i.e., after the fall of Paris in June 1940. At that time the German armies had reached the Channel and the brown heirs of the French Revolution, together with their Fascist allies, were ruling all over Europe from central Poland to the Spanish border and from the North Cape to Libya. Only Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, the Balkans, and, of course, Britain were not in their grip. The Third Reich, moreover, was intimately allied with the Soviet Union, which provided Germany with much needed raw materials and above all with high octane gasoline enabling the Nazi war machine to retaliate savagely against the British air attacks.42 Poland was divided between two totalitarian empires, Rumania had been shorn of Bessarabia with German permission, and the rape of the three Baltic republics happened with Hitler’s connivance.43 The Soviet press sided completely with the Third Reich and Soviet foreign policy gave full support to the National Socialists.44
The disappointment in the left-of-center camp was great because National Socialism, especially in America, had been regarded as a “rightist” movement. Red Russia and Brown Germany now were in the same camp and nontotalitarian democracy was fighting with its back against the wall. Some of the American leftists hoped that their country would come to the aid of “European democracy.” (There were also American conservative interventionists because their heart was on the side of the liberty-loving British monarchy and of the valiant Finns during the “Winter War” of 1939-1940.) Yet in the immediate future there was no indication that Congress would declare war against Nazi Germany and a very large number of American leftists, in their boundless sympathy for the Soviet Union, were radically isolationist. The “American Youth Congress,” a Red front organization, convening in late 1939, booed President Roosevelt because he had seemed sympathetic to the fighting Finns, but applauded Mrs. Roosevelt who (thanks to the kind ear she lent to Joseph Lash) spoke words very much to their liking. Up to the invasion of Russia there were practically no American leftist volunteers who came to the aid of Britain, although they had flocked in very great numbers to the International Brigades in Spain in order to participate lustily in the greatest sadistic orgy the Western World had experienced before 1939. There were volunteers for Britain, there were people raising funds for the Finns, but those were not leftists.
At this juncture the non-Marxist left in the United States went into a huddle and produced a “Declaration on World Democracy” also signed by a few people who (so one would think) did not really belong to their camp. There is something exceedingly hurried about American life. There is a certain affection for publicity and little time to read full texts to which people affix their signature. Thus it happened that the book called The City of Man—A Declaration on World Democracy45 was published over the names of Herbert Agar, Frank Aydelotte, G. A. Borgese (Thomas Mann’s son-in-law), Hermann Broch, Ada L. Comstock, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Christian Gauss, Oscar Jászi, Alvin Johnson, Thomas Mann, Lewis Mumford, William Allan Neilson, and Gaetano Salvemini. But it also bore the signature of William Yandell Elliott, Hans Kohn, and Reinhold Niebuhr. Especially in the case of Niebuhr I had great doubts that he saw the complete text.46
The small book has a Declaration, a Proposal and, finally, a Note as to the origin of the document—and a real document humain it is. The Note informs us that a group of friends began meeting in October 1938 and that they drew up a memorandum in May 1939. A “Letter of Invitation” for a “Committee on Europe” was drafted and mailed on March 28, 1940. This letter was signed by G. A. Borgese, Robert M. Hutchins, Thomas Mann, Lewis Mumford, William A. Neilson, and Reinhold Niebuhr. The first conference of the committee was held May 24-26 in Atlantic City. Further meetings took place in Sharon, Connecticut, on August 24 and 25, 1940. There the final drafts of the book were made. It is significant that though new members lined up, Mr. Robert M. Hutchins dropped out. He was too shrewd to put his name to a text about which the late Father Walter Farrell, O.P., then a leading Thomist in the United States, commented quite rightly: “This book represents one of the earliest and most concrete conquests of Hitlerism in America.”47
The “Declaration” and the “Proposal” are also interesting because they still use the term “liberal” in its classic context, yet they defend a clearly illiberal (or antiliberal) totalitarian democracy quite in the Jacobin tradition. The language in which this document is written is distinctly of an extreme leftist character and, whereas socialism is mentioned as something here to stay, and as organically pertaining to the “Janus head of democracy,” communism gets only a few snide side remarks. (“Monopoly capitalism” and the “ruling classes,” however, get it really in the neck.) The book merits special attention because it expresses its message in ringing terms and openly identifies democracy with religion, presenting it as a religion. According to the signers it is “the plenitude of heart-service to a highest religion embodying the essence of all higher religions. Democracy is nothing more and nothing less than humanism in theocracy and rational theocracy in universal humanism.”48 Involuntarily the remarks of R. H. Gabriel and Crane Brinton come to one’s mind: that owing to its irrational-unscientific character the only chance of survival for democracy is its metamorphosis into a religion.49
The signers are kind enough to find some virtues in the “higher religions” and indeed very exalted ones in the faith founded by “Jesus, highest of the Jewish prophets,” but democracy is the highest all-embracing religion which as a “universal religion of the Spirit acknowledges with reverence the incorruptible substance of truth which lies under the surface and errors of the separate confessions risen from the common ground of ancient and medieval civilization—democracy, in the catholicity of its language, interprets and justifies the separate creeds as its own vernaculars.”50 In other words, as long as the Catholic, Lutheran, Eastern or Anglican theologies talk the jargon of Democratese, they will be tolerated.51 Democracy in the meantime will practice a severe and eclectic benevolence towards these slightly obsolete denominations: democracy “explains and annexes all dogmas as symbols.”52
How this is done we discover in a passage which reads, “The fundamental principle is that the democratic concept of freedom can never include the freedom to destroy democracy and freedom. If no liberty is granted to the murderer and arsonist, no liberty can be granted to whosoever and whatsoever threaten the divine spirit in man and above man.
“This is—in an interpretation suited to modern man—the spirit which Christ called the Holy Ghost.”
This seems to take care of the whole theology concerning the Holy Trinity by infallible deduction—not from the Vatican but from the White House, because we also read, “The religion of the Holy Ghost, and nothing else, is the ‘spirit of the New Testament’ of which the President of the United States spoke.
“This universal religion, harbored in the best minds of our age, this common prayer of democracy militant, was anticipated by sages and saints of all ages. Its substance matured out of whatever rose highest in man’s speculations and hopes.”53
One wonders who these sages and saints were—certainly not Dante, St. Thomas Aquinas, Shakespeare, Milton, Calvin, Luther, Nicholas of Cusa, Goethe, St. Ignatius, or Kierkegaard. The Enlightenment, naturally, fares quite well. Hence, after enumeration of the virtues and foibles of the Christian and Jewish faiths,54 we get the statement that “. . . finally, the optimistic philosophies of enlightenment which provided a background for America’s Declaration of Independence, postulated the primal goodness and nobility of man as a myth conducive to his final nobility and goodness.”55 This sentence is heartening in at least one respect: It declares a myth the Roussellian concept of good and noble man.
The Catholic Church, as one might expect, comes in for a great deal of criticism, and one is amused to hear that the allegiance of Catholic Christians to the City of God (not, for a change, to the City of Man) must be disentangled from “bondage to Vatican City as a foreign potentate in feud or trade with other potentates.”56 And with the “foreign potentate” we come clearly to the language of the Know-Nothing movement.
The future is reserved almost exclusively to the super-religion of democracy. There is no return to the spiritual fleshpots of the past. “We shall not imitate the backward course of Julian the Apostate . . . or of the Roman populace running for asylum and atonement to the old gods after the capture of their city by the Goths. We shall not return, under the counsel of despair, from a higher and vaster religion to lesser ones.”57 The “higher and vaster” religion is not symbolized by the Cross and the Lamb that bears the sins of the world; not by Baptism of water, not by Mount Sinai and Mount Tabor and Mount Carmel, not by the Torah and the Gospels, the Lord’s Prayer and the Nicene Creed, but by the click of the voting machines behind the green curtains, by the swish of the guillotine, by the ghastly tragicomedy of the Storming of the Bastille, and even more so by the nauseating massacres in the Vendée.
It is obvious that under these circumstances the Religion of Democracy takes precedence over all the other creeds of lesser breeds, and that therefore they ought to be placed under surveillance. The Proposal tells us bluntly that too much separation between Church and State is not good and that certain controls of religion are quite in order.58 “The hour has struck when we must know what limits are set by the religion of freedom, which is democracy, to the freedom of worship.” (As symbols of the “religion of freedom” one might mention Socrates and the cup, Le Mans and the noyades, the hunger blockade of 1918, Dresden, and Hiroshima.) For this purpose an inquisitorial investigation is necessary in order “to determine what religious and ethical traditions are of greater or lesser value for the preservation and growth of the democratic principle. . . . An inquiry into the religious heritage of the Western World should try to discover which of its elements are more apt to cooperate with the democratic community and consequently more deserving of protection and help by it, and whether other elements, conversely, are by their nature and content committed to the support of fascism and other autocratic philosophies and intrinsically so inimical to democracy, or at least so ambiguous, as to become a source of additional danger in the hour of peril.” A careful reading of the book shows that neither the Four Square Gospel Church nor the Mennonites nor the Assembly of God is meant by these oblique references. It is primarily the same “international” Church, run by a “foreign potentate,” which the National Socialists also had singled out for their most violent attacks, and in the second place the Church founded by Martin Luther, without whom the Reformation as we know it, would never have taken place.59 It is comforting to know that Rome and Wittenberg (though Geneva less so) draw the common ire of American and German identitarian leftists—not to mention the masters of the Kremlin.
As we can clearly see, there is no burning love for real freedom among the signers of this noble declaration. This is proved partly by their repeated attacks against liberalism and against the freedom of religion, as well as by their desire to amalgamate all “higher religions” into “vernaculars” of Democracy, the new State Religion. This new religion was also to have a ritual, an “unsectarian liturgy” for which “university and college chapel services and exercises” provide a “provisional model.”60 Here we are very near to the worship of Robespierre’s “Supreme Being” in colorful ceremonies and perhaps equally near to the efforts of the Nazis to establish a national Church by forcefully amalgamating Lutherans, Calvinists, and Catholics into a “folkic” and “dejudaized” Christianity, which would supplant pity and charity with heroism and other ancient Germanic virtues. Hitler tried to start the process of unification by appointing bishops in Germany’s Lutheran Church—there were none since the Reformation61—and while many a pastor donned a brown shirt, the best minds in the Evangelical Church started to protest and to band together in the Bekennende Kirche (“Professing Church”).62 These men, who met for the first time at Barmen, refused to see in their Church a “vernacular of National Socialism.”
One might take in one’s stride the book’s constant socialistic propaganda and the remarks to the effect that a “planned economy is implicit in the spirit of democracy.”63 More total and totalitarian are the visions of a world state with a rather amusing nationalistic undertone. “Of all fading fatherlands, one brotherland will be made, the City of Man; and that the United States must be made the Uniting States. No number is prescribed to the stars on its flag.”64 It is nice to think that the signers had a vision of the coming world state with the United States as its Piedmont, its stepping stone, that they craved a global state representing a Greater America. This would not be so terribly bad if this Greater United States were loosely federated and not strictly centralized. Yet the language we hear provides us with a rather different impression. “The day comes when the heresy of nationalism is conquered. . . . Then above the teeming manifold life of free communities . . . there will be a Universal Parliament representing peoples, not states—a fundamental body of law prevailing throughout the planet in all those matters that involve interregional interests . . . an elected President, the President of Mankind—no crowned emperor, no hereditary king . . . embodying for a limited term the common authority and the common law; and a federal force ready to strike at anarchy and felony.”65 This sounds grim. “The President of Mankind”—maybe Julian Felsenburg out of Robert Hugh Benson’s Lord of the World. On top of it we have the federal forces ready to strike everywhere. Thus if anybody were to challenge the “dictatorship of humanity” (p. 34) in the name of God, or perhaps only in the name of personal freedom, the federal forces would collar him.
One has to read a bit between the lines in order to guess the total and totalitarian character of the “religion of democracy.” I will help the reader by emphasizing certain words in the following passages with italics: “In the decline of Western civilization the collective purpose of democracy, with its commandments of discipline and loyalty, had given way to a corrupted liberalism with its claim of unrestricted liberty for each one to act as he pleased . . . the concept of a vital democracy must be dissociated from the notion of a disintegrated liberalism. . . . There is, indeed, no liberty but one: the right, which is a duty, of making oneself and others free through absolute allegiance to the final goal of man. All other liberties are the rewards of battle. There is no comfort but one: pride in the duty performed.”66
Democracy must be dogmatized, it must be “redefined.” It should be “no longer the conflicting concourse of uncontrolled individual impulses, but a harmony subordinated to a plan, no longer a dispersive atomism, but a purposeful organism.”67 Here we have clearly another case of “African democracy” for the white man, of Mr. Sukarno’s “directed democracy.” Democracy, according to the signers, teaches that “everything must be within humanity, nothing outside humanity.”68 This viewpoint results automatically in either atheism or in a modified pantheism. Here we have Rousseau, Robespierre, Marx, Lenin, and Hitler rolled into one.
In the City of Man we see quite clearly the Thirteen Point Program of American pseudoliberalism behind whose mask hides the not strictly Marxian left. And here are the points:
1. Utopianism. Some sort of salvation for all lies in the future. The great promise refers not to the theistic Heaven but to a coming “Age of Man”—or Mr. Henry Wallace’s “Century of the Common Man.”69
2. Planning which is “implicit in the spirit of democracy.”70 It begins with economic planning, continues with “social engineering” and finally produces “planned elections.” Man no longer has the primacy; he is made subordinate to The Plan. In the end we have the total victory of geometry and arithmetic on the human level. Man as a cipher is the end of man.
3. Centralization as opposed to local rights and “privileges.” (The Rule is supreme; there are no exceptions, no “privileges,” no deviations.) No planning is possible without centralization, and there is no utopia without planning. (Utopia will come automatically, yet we have to plan for it: an inner contradiction without solution and present in all leftist creeds.) Free Will is rejected as a dangerous fiction (if it existed it would have to be respected) and there is little freedom—“individualism” would become a term of abuse!—because it interferes with the blue prints guaranteeing the “foreseeable.”
4. Identity, Sameness. The “masses” (Humanity) consist of identical units of mere “individuals” (exchangeable grains of sands) not “persons.” To be different, to think or act differently, becomes a crime. Where differences exist, they are declared to be meaningless. Where they cannot be “explained away” and when they cause trouble to The Plan, they call for enforced standardization, expropriation, demotion, exile, and, in the more extreme cases, execution—measures, to be sure, which could not yet be taken. But they are encouraged abroad where all leveling movements and actions get the full sympathy and encouragement of the “local left.”
5. Majoritism. There are minorities (never majorities) who are obnoxious and are declared to be the real cause of all or at least most iniquities. These conspiratorial and domineering minorities are not content to be “like everybody else”; they crave privileges, thus depriving the “underprivileged” of their rights; they destroy equality, identity and “social harmony.”71 The main criminals are the “ruling classes” composed in the United States of the “white Anglo-Saxon Protestant minority,” of the “Catholic hierarchy,” “anti-Zionist Jews,” “big industrialists,” “brass hats,” bankers, and “ultraconservative rightists,” a rather motley crowd. (In other countries the minorities forming objects of leftist hatreds are noblemen, Jewish newspaper owners, Armenians, modern artists, lawyers, “clerical” politicians, stockbrokers, etc. Leftist ideologies rest on the existence of “badmen” who can be made objects of general hatred.)
6. The hostility against organized religion. The standard leftist reaction to religion—as long as it does not bow to the leftist establishment in humble subservience and permit itself to be infected with leftist ideas—is the effort to eliminate it from the market place, from all public life. (Leftist forces in other climes act differently: There extreme separationism is supplanted by complete state control.)72
7. The Socialist hatred for free enterprise (“anticapitalism”) because a free economy puts a premium on hard work, thrift, and ambition—the natural enemies of “equality.” A free economy gives man the chance to build up a little fortress of his own, to escape state omnipotence. (State welfarism is just one more means of firmly establishing state control over the citizenry.)
8. Closely connected with this attitude is antifamilism. The family as a closed and emotionally marked-off unit is an obstacle to total sameness and contains a hierarchic element (authority, domination) which the leftist with his hatred of the “father image” thoroughly dislikes. “Dynasties” of all sorts are a special target for leftist attacks.73 The inheritance of fortunes and all other forms of the accumulation of wealth74—regardless of how it is used—must be prevented by the jealous and envious state with a system of progressive taxation.
All attitudes, all laws and regulations designed to protect the family (and sex, its root) morally are ridiculed and rejected. The only element inherited from a liberal past is the American leftists’ indifference to man’s biological views and behavior patterns. While prone to deny it, he is in all other domains a subtle or even shameless authoritarian.
9. Intolerance. “Inflexible principles must be stated in a renovated law, beyond which freedom is felony” (City of Man, p. 77). Genuine liberalism stands for freedom and tolerance. American leftism wants freedom only for the different shades of the “Liberal” Establishment and thus carried out on a social basis a kind of “Internal Inquisition”75—especially so in the intellectual field (universities, colleges, stage, film industry, radio, television, publishing, press, administration).
10. Allied with this attitude is statism which characterizes leftism perhaps more than anything else. When the designers of The City of Man accuse the teachers of totalitarian philosophy of proclaiming, “Everything within the state, nothing against the state, nothing outside the state,” they merely want to divert our attention. And it is the state at the highest level, in its most centralized aspect that the American Leftists worship, i.e., the federal government.
11. Linked with utopianism is Messianism which more often than not has not a personal but rather a racial or national character. The vision of the signers who see the world state as global-scale United States shows what a provincial role they assign to the American people—or rather, to the American government. Their collective Messianism is twofold. Not only is the American Republic pressed into the role of a Messiah but also democracy, the “ancient hope of man” (p. 28). Democracy rests, according to this text, on the “common prayer of democracy militant which must be the hymn of democracy triumphant” (p. 36). We have here, no doubt, an analogy to Comte’s Positivism which was a secularized version of the institutionalized Catholic faith.76
12. Anticolonialism. This Messianism has the task of eventually saving all mankind, but in the meantime it must be the savior of the colonialized nations and tribes. Thus anticolonialism forms part and parcel of the American leftist’s creed.
13. Interventionism. Finally, there exists, last but not least due to Utopianism and Messianism, a highly aggressive interventionist and bellicose element in American leftism which, however, is not serving genuine American interests but those of the great leftist ideologies—provided they bear the official leftist stamp. The American leftist indeed is not pledged to pacifism. “Peace at any price is peace at the price of submission,” the signers of the City of Man (p. 22) explain to us bluntly. Such statements, to be sure, become invalid if America is menaced by distinctly leftist powers of the international brand. Then the “better Red than dead” formula is only too frequently appealed to. Yet holy wars against “reactionaries” (be they real ones or merely competitors of other leftist groups) are quite within the American (and frequently the British) leftist program. As a matter of fact, leftists usually love armed conflicts because during modern wars the state necessarily has to take illiberal emergency measures.77 Leftists always hope that wartime policies will be made permanent. Their ideal is the secular monastery or the civilian barracks.
All these thirteen points, needless to say, are as characteristic of the leftist outlook in English-speaking countries as they are of the ideologies animating the French Revolution and its evil offsprings: socialism, National Socialism and communism. They have nothing to do with the convictions of men and women called “liberals” in the rest of the civilized world. And it must also be added that the leftist outlook in America and Britain has hardly changed since 1940 when this rather unique manifesto was published. In America, we must admit, there is today a highly increased emphasis on “racial equality”; yet leftist antiracism, it must be borne in mind, is of a very different character than that of the genuine right. And the same is true of the leftist stand towards (ethnic) nationality. Leftism with its strongly identitarian bent and a nonspiritual, materialistic enthusiasm either declares race and nationality to be supreme values to which everybody has to conform (as the Nazis did) or they want to “explain them away” and ignore them with iron determination. . . because they are an obstacle to identitarian uniformity. The Nazis wanted to eliminate by brute force those who did not racially conform, those nationally (ethnically) not conforming by cultural high-pressure methods. The “international leftists” wants us to close our eyes and ignore facts. This is just another process of “elimination.” The rightist, who is a liberal in the genuine sense of the term, keeps his eyes open and gladly and charitably accepts the diversity of mankind. Rejecting egalitarianism (no less than identitarianism), he knows that God’s gifts are distributed in mysterious ways—not only among persons but also among nations and races. Though they cannot be expressed in a simple scientific formula and never work out mathematically in time or space, they do not invalidate the rightist principle of suum cuique.