From George Washington’s Neutrality Proclamation through the Monroe Doctrine and the Marshall Plan runs an American impulse that disdains war and instead seeks to spread freedom and prosperity. We have a natural respect for the individuality of others, and a concern for their well-being. These instincts make for a constructive foreign policy, one that commands the genuine respect of other nations—if we also show the resolve required of a great power.
And there, precisely, in that “if,” lies our greatest potential weakness, and the greatest danger to the West. There is no question that if there is to be an arms race, we can win it. There is no question that if there is to be an economic race, we can win it. There is no question that if there is to be a contest for the “hearts and minds” of the world’s people, we can win it. But there is a question whether we can win the contest we are actually going to be engaged in: a test of will and determination between ourselves and the most powerfully armed aggressive power the world has ever known.
• • •
William F. Buckley, Jr., once remarked that he would rather be governed by the first 100 names in the Boston telephone book than by the faculty of Harvard University. This reflects a shrewdly perceptive analysis of American strengths and weaknesses. The people as a whole often lack sophistication, but they have a good, gut common sense, and when necessary they can draw on an enormous reservoir of courage and will. But too many of America’s intellectual and cultural elite have shown themselves to be brilliant, creative, trendy, gullible, smug, and blind in one eye: they tend to see bad only on the Right, not on the Left. Extremely sophisticated about ideas in the abstract, they can be extremely simplistic and naïve about the realities of the actual global conflict we find ourselves engaged in. “War” is “bad,” “peace” is “good,” and posturing with words is everything.
The nation’s immediate problem is that while the common man fights America’s wars, the intellectual elite sets its agenda. Today, whether the West lives or dies is in the hands of its new power elite: those who set the terms of public debate, who manipulate the symbols, who decide whether nations or leaders will be depicted on 100 million television sets as “good” or “bad.” This power elite sets the limits of the possible for Presidents and Congress. It molds the impressions that move the nation, or that mire it.
America lost in Vietnam because this power elite persistently depicted first Diem and then Thieu as corrupt and dictatorial and the war therefore as not worth fighting—ignoring how much worse the alternative would be. The Shah of Iran and President Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua met the same fate, with the United States greasing the skids for their downfall. While still our U.N. ambassador, Andrew Young nominated the Ayatollah Khomeini for sainthood and praised Cuban troops as providing “stability” in Africa. Television romanticizes revolutionaries, thus greatly increasing the chances that Soviet-backed revolutionary wars can be waged successfully—just as the New York Times’ romanticizing of Fidel Castro two decades ago was a major factor in legitimating his revolution and securing his victory.
This complex of attitudes is nothing new. Reinhold Niebuhr once pointed out that communism was more dangerous to the West than the naked fascism of the Nazis, because “Russia comes to every nation, which it intends to subjugate, as a ‘liberator’ from ‘fascist’ and ‘imperialist’ oppression. . . . A corrupted ideal may be more potent than a frank defiance of all ideal values. The proof of that higher potency is given by the fact that Russia’s ‘fifth columns’ in the Western world are composed not of the miserable traitors who constituted the Nazidominated ‘Bund,’ nor yet of mere Communist party hacks. They contain thousands of misguided idealists who still think that Russia is the midwife of an ideal society, about to be born.” Communism’s greater subtlety would not make it more dangerous than Nazism if the leaders of Western thought were more discerning.
Even though Mussolini’s definition of fascism was a perfect description of Soviet communism, fascism has been identified as right-wing and therefore “bad,” while communism has been identified as left-wing and therefore, if not actually “good,” at least to be viewed in a sympathetic light that points up its promise while obscuring its crudities.
• • •
The forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture in the 1930s was one of the most monumental atrocities of human history, in many ways the model for the genocidal tragedy of Cambodia in our own time. Families were torn apart, peasants were slaughtered for trying to hold onto a pig or a cow; millions, their few possessions confiscated, were packed into cattle cars and sent to die in the frozen wastelands of Siberia. Children, orphaned or separated from their parents, wandered the countryside starving and homeless. But in the West the leaders of intellectual fashion were so infatuated with the romance of revolution that they closed their eyes to its gore and saw only its glory. Thus George Bernard Shaw, in the midst of the horror, could tell a press conference in Moscow that he was “more than ever convinced” that capitalist countries “must adopt Russia’s methods,” and write in his hotel guest book, “There is not a more interesting country in the world today to visit than Soviet Russia, and I find travelling there perfectly safe and pleasant. . . . Tomorrow I leave this land of hope and return to our Western countries of despair.”
Reflecting on his days as a Moscow correspondent for the Manchester Guardian during the Stalin era, Malcolm Muggeridge recently recalled “the extraordinary performance of the liberal intelligentsia, who, in those days, flocked to Moscow like pilgrims to Mecca. And they were one and all utterly delighted and excited by what they saw there. Clergymen walked serenely and happily through the anti-god museums, politicians claimed that no system of society could possibly be more equitable and just, lawyers admired Soviet justice, and economists praised the Soviet economy.” It was this, he said, that “touched off my awareness of the great liberal death wish, my sense that Western man was, as it were, sleep-walking into his own ruin.”
William Pfaff of The New Yorker notes that those “who believed in Russian Communism, and went enthusiastically to Moscow a half-century ago to see what they wanted to see, and no more, were not negligible men. They included John Reed, Bernard Shaw, André Gide (for a time), Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Julian Huxley.” More recently, he argues, “With Stalin dead and the Soviet Union discredited as a society of reform, the communisms of Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh assumed the function of ‘Beau Ideal’ for a new generation of European and American idealists.” These people “see in the political character and accomplishments of other countries what they need to see. . . . For admiring foreigners, Vietnam and China were too often countries that existed mostly in their heads. Since they were imaginary countries, they were preserved from the corrosion of existence, the wear of life. Faith in them could remain; they could be stubbornly believed societies of justice, warm human cooperation, mutual support, simple honesty, truth-telling.”
A comparable blindness in one eye exists with regard to Africa. Long before his fall the brutalities of Uganda’s Idi Amin were revealed beyond the capacity of any apologist to pretend they were anything but the most savage sort of butchery on a vast scale. Yet the hypocrisy of those African leaders who elected him president of the Organization of African Unity while hurling moral thunderbolts at the West was ignored. Harvard students demanded boycotts of the Republic of South Africa, not of Uganda or communist-dominated Mozambique. In South Africa blacks are consigned to certain areas and forbidden certain forms of fraternization; in Uganda the heads of black Ugandans were beaten in with hammers, their legs were chopped off, and they were forced to eat the flesh of their fellow prisoners before they too were put to death. But fashionable outrage is directed against apartheid, not against savagery.
Longshoreman-philosopher Eric Hoffer has commented:
One of the surprising privileges of intellectuals is that they are free to be scandalously asinine without harming their reputation. The intellectuals who idolized Stalin while he was purging m
illions and stifling the least stirring of freedom have not been discredited. They are still holding forth on every topic under the sun and are listened to with deference. . . . The metaphysical grammarian Noam Chomsky, who went to Hanoi to worship there at the altar of human rights and democracy, was not discredited and silenced when the humanitarian communists staged their nightmare in South Vietnam and Cambodia.
There is none so blind as he who will not see—and this has been the condition of much of America’s intellectual establishment through much of this century. Unfortunately, as Hugh Seton-Watson points out, “Nothing can defend a society from itself if its upper 100,000 men and women, both the decision makers and those who help to mold the thinking of the decision makers, are resolved to capitulate.”
Too many of those who should be most jealously preserving and defending what America represents have instead been paralyzed by a misplaced sense of guilt, which has led them to abandon faith in our own civilization. As Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz has put it, “The forces that have prevented both the strengthening of our military power and the energizing of our economic capacity seem to be based on the continuing conviction of many that the kind of society and civilization we have are not worth maintaining—neither worth defending by military means nor perpetuating by economic means.”
If America loses World War III, it will be because of the failure of its leadership class. In particular, it will be because of the attention, the celebrity, and the legitimacy given to the “trendies”—those overglamorized dilettantes who posture in the latest idea, mount the fashionable protests, and are slobbered over by the news media, whose creation they essentially are. The attention given them and their “causes” romanticizes the trivial and trivializes the serious. It reduces public discussion to the level of a cartoon strip. Whatever the latest cause they embrace—whether antiwar, antinuclear, antimilitary, antibusiness—it is almost invariably one that works against the interest of the United States in the context of World War III.
These trendies are ready with an opinion at the drop of a microphone, and their opinions are treated as news—not because they are authorities, but because they are celebrities. Their minds are impervious to argument, and their arguments are impervious to fact. Posture is all. Some see their posturing as a conspiracy, and suspect that it is directed from Moscow. But this misses the point. It is not a conspiracy, but a conformity. If it were a conspiracy, it would be easier to deal with. The trendies are an army of the gullible, steering by the star of fashion, drawn to the sound of applause. They call themselves “liberal” because “liberalism” is in fashion; but they have lost touch with the classic spirit of liberalism. As Michael Novak points out, “The liberal spirit believes in the potent energy of the individual spirit. It believes in a free economy in a free polity. . . . Liberals must begin to strengthen the mediating institutions of society which alone, as social organisms, can check the power of the state.”
There is a sort of Gresham’s Law that applies to public discussion: bad ideas drive out good, and attention given to empty posturing shuts the door on serious debate.
In a less hazardous age we could afford to indulge the prancing of the trendies on the stage of public debate. But now our national survival depends on learning to distinguish between the meaningful and the meaningless.
The issues that confront us are complex and the answers are by no means all clear. But this increases rather than decreases the need for calm, rational examination of alternative courses and alternative consequences. It also increases the need for the most meticulous care in ensuring that we decide on the basis of fact, not fantasy.
The defining characteristic of today’s intellectual and media elite is that it swims merrily in a sea of fantasy. The world of television is essentially a fantasy world, and television is today’s common denominator of communication, today’s unifying American experience. This has frightening implications for the future.
Ideas that fit on bumper stickers are not ideas at all, they simply are attitudes. And attitudinizing is no substitute for analysis. Unfortunately, too often television is to news as bumper stickers are to philosophy, and this has a corrosive effect on public understanding of those issues on which national survival may depend.
• • •
Only in very recent years has the notion taken hold that life is meant to be easy. Coddled, pampered, truckled to, a generation of Americans has been bred to believe that they should coast through life—and that any disparity between American society as it is and a gauzy, utopian ideal is evidence that society is corrupt. The principal threat to a highly developed society is not that overconsumption depletes its resources, but rather that insulation from the hardscrabble challenge of basic existence dulls its sense of reality and leaves it prey to the barbarians who are always at the gates. Where abundance comes easily, it becomes too easy to assume that security comes with comparable ease. “Street smarts,” jungle savvy, that edgy wariness that comes naturally to those whose precarious existence keeps them ever on the alert—these atrophy in the cushioned luxury of a life in which ease and deference are taken for granted.
Given the choice, most people would rather cruise the Caribbean than drill with the militia. It thus becomes very tempting to consult our hopes rather than our fears, and to drape an optimistic view of human nature with the cloak of moral virtue. It becomes much easier, much more indulgent, to denounce as alarmists those who tell us we must prepare for the worst in order to preserve the best. It takes an effort of will to rouse ourselves from lethargy, to put aside the pursuit of pleasure, to defend our liberty. Laxity is the affliction of the comfortable, and this is why every past civilization that has achieved comfort has been destroyed by another less advanced. Our task is to make sure that this does not happen to us.
• • •
If the West loses World War III, it will have been because of an unwillingness to face reality. It will have been because of the compulsion to live in a dream world, to infuse the public dialogue with romantic fantasies and to imagine that cold steel can somehow be countered with simplistic moralisms.
The key thing to recognize about America’s decline in will is that it has not been a failure of the people; it has been a failure of the leaders. Robert Nisbet notes: “We appear to be living in yet another age in which ‘failure of nerve’ is conspicuous; not in the minds of America’s majority but in the minds of those who are gatekeepers for ideas, the intellectuals.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn has pointed to “a decline in courage” as the most striking feature of the West: “Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. . . . Should one point out,” he asks, “that from ancient times decline in courage has been considered the beginning of the end?”
America is a sleeping giant. It is time to wake up that giant, to define his purpose, restore his strength, and revitalize his will. Nothing less will save the West and the institutions of freedom around the world from the merciless barbarism that threatens us all. As Solzhenitsyn has also argued, “no weapons, no matter how powerful, can help the West until it overcomes its loss of will power. In a state of psychological weakness, weapons become a burden for the capitulating side.”
The war in Vietnam was not lost on the battlefields of Vietnam. It was lost in the halls of Congress, in the boardrooms of corporations, in the executive suites of foundations, and in the editorial rooms of great newspapers and television networks. It was lost in the salons of Georgetown, the drawing rooms of the “beautiful people” in New York, and the classrooms of great universities. The class that provided the strong leadership that made victory possible in World War I and World War II failed America in one of the crucial battles of World War III—Vietnam.
They had their excuses. They said it was the wrong war in the wrong place (as if any war were ever the right war in the right place). They said Thieu was a corrupt dictator. They said th
at by aiding South Vietnam, we were only bringing death and destruction. They said South Vietnam was unimportant and not worth saving. Since then the flood of refugees from Vietnam and the tragic fate of the people of Cambodia have torn at the consciences of many. Now they have both an obligation and an opportunity to help restore the strength of America’s leadership, and thus to ensure that such tragedies are not repeated on an even larger scale.
• • •
The greatest institutional change in America’s leadership class has been the development of enormous new power in the hands of the media. But the failures of the leadership class go beyond the intellectual and media elite. The leaders of “big business” once were a bastion of support for American strength, just as they once were rigorously independent. Now, with some admirable exceptions, they have become timid, reluctant to roil bureaucratic waters or offend consumer spokesmen; as huge corporations have become huge bureaucracies, corporate leaders themselves have become bureaucratic. There are few big business leaders I would have put in the ring with a healthy Brezhnev. A George Meany or a Frank Fitzsimmons, however, would have held his own. When the chips were down, when America’s future was on the line and I needed support for the really tough decisions, I seldom got it from the corporation chairmen or university presidents. I did get it from labor leaders, from smaller businessmen, from “middle America.” They had the strong heart, the solid will, the guts, that have saved America before and will save it again.
Now that the passions of Vietnam have subsided and the Russians are brazenly using the Red Army itself to absorb countries directly into their empire, there are stirrings among the intellectual elite of a new awareness that the Soviet challenge is real. France, where the Left was so long ascendent in intellectual circles, is now producing some of the toughest and most realistic thinking in the West. I hope that this is a trend throughout the West and that those in America whose natural function is to lead will soon begin once again to lead in those directions that national survival requires.
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