Leftism

One does not even have to use this many-faceted political term as a measuring rod. What about man? The Soviet, the Portuguese, the Cambodian, the Tanzanian representatives cannot possibly mean the same thing when they mention man. To one he is a biological accident in an inexplicable universe, to another a creature created in the image of God, to a third an odd animal tending into nothingness, and so forth.

At the present moment the United Nations in no way reflect the lasting values of this globe. Numerically they do only in a very remote way, qualitatively not at all. Their entire record ever since their inception is very poor. They had some successes in very minor issues, but they have failed in all crucial ones (the Korean War, the Hungarian Revolution, the Congo troubles, the many critical phases of the Southeast Asian or the Near East imbroglio, disarmament, etc.). In other words, we have another case of a typical leftist timetable error combined with an idealistic failure in the face of harsh realities. In (a) another time, (b) another form, and (c) another composition, the United Nations might be viable. Of course the argument might be raised that politics is the art of the possible and that, under the present circumstances, the United Nations is better than nothing. He who cannot buy a big, shiny, expensive new car has to content himself with a secondhand one. This argument sounds sensible but becomes questionable when we reflect that a ramshackle vehicle might be a death trap. Under such circumstances it is wiser to walk or go by bus.

The moderate leftist is not always aprioristically opposed to liberty. Often he sacrifices it with a sigh. Yet he has no higher reason to cling to it, and his weakness in opposing the radical forms of leftism partly comes from his Roussellian stand and partly from his inferiority complex. He sees in the unabashed totalitarians the wave of the future. They have “done things.” They are carrying out programs he himself has not the courage to advocate openly or, given the opportunity, to execute. He therefore falls into the category of Lenin’s “useful idiots.”

Finally we have that most dangerous of all types, the “halfway” man who sees in the Communist utopia the terminal station. He has no real argument against it except the trembling hope that it will come about in an evolutionary rather than revolutionary way: All that America can do is start to subordinate its temporary existence to the eventual coming of the Red Paradise. This is precisely the position of Alger Hiss and all the others like him (whether they actually acted on their convictions or not). It was a mere historic accident (explicable by the preceding evolution of general political thinking) that they did not in any appreciable number fall for the National Socialists.