Suicide of the West. James Burnham
of the Presidential office and the seldom-broken tradition of American governmental procedures, his liberal critics won a majority in the Senate for his dismissal. U.S. News and World Report does exist and even flourish among the mass weeklies; among the magazines of opinion, as they are somewhat deprecatingly called, there is also William F. Buckley, Jr.’s National Review; and the quarterly, Modern Age, founded by the unapologetic conservative, Russell Kirk, manages to penetrate a number of academic ramparts. The Richmond Times-Dispatch, Arizona Republican and Indianapolis News provide contrasting if provincial background for the Washington Post.
Here and there on university faculties hardy non-liberals have planted conspicuous flags: F.A. Hayek, Leo Strauss, Milton Friedman at Chicago; David Rowe at Yale; Warren Nutter at Virginia; Karl Wittfogel at Washington; Robert Strausz-Hupé at Pennsylvania; Hugh Kenner at California; Walter Berns at Cornell; at Harvard itself, Edward C. Banfield. The company of retired generals and admirals seems to be rather an assembly point for non-liberals: Generals Douglas MacArthur, Albert C. Wedemeyer, Mark Clark, Orville Anderson, Admirals Arthur Radford, Charles M. Cooke, Arleigh Burke—indeed, a random gathering of ex–general officers, even with a number of active generals and admirals included, would be one of the few occasions on which a liberal might not feel altogether at home: a fact that perhaps has a certain symptomatic importance. He would be lonely, too, though not isolated, at conventions of the National Association of Manufacturers or the United States Chamber of Commerce. At the extreme wings there are small sects of communists, anarchists, fascists, racists and crackpots outside both liberal and conservative boundaries.
And finally—though I should perhaps have listed it first—there is the Deep South, much of which is still, in a more general and institutionalized way, non- and indeed anti-liberal. There are liberals in the South, and their tribe has been increasing, as there are non-liberals in the North, East and West; and a fair amount of liberal doctrine has seeped gradually into the Southern mind, a good deal of it in fact on matters other than the South’s peculiar problem. But the South as a whole, or at any rate the Deep South, remains for elsewhere ascendant liberalism a barbarian outpost, under heavy siege but not yet conquered, in spite of manifestos, court orders, freedom riders and paratroops.
II
IN ASSEMBLING THIS SIZABLE mass of particular data, both positive and negative, I have stayed within American national limits. The ideology that Americans call “liberalism” is, however, by no means confined to the United States. It, and the typical sorts of persons who believe it—“liberals,” that is to say—are found in every nation outside the communist empire; and no doubt liberals are present, if silent, within the communist regions also.1 The ideology and its adepts bear different names in different places. Except where the American usage has become accepted, they are usually not called “liberalism” and “liberals,” terms that retain elsewhere a greater portion of their nineteenth-century laissez-faire, limited-government meaning. Still, the type, the species, is easily enough recognizable across the barriers of geography and language.
In political and ideological range, the tendency that Americans call “liberalism” corresponds roughly to what the French call “progressisme” and bridges what are known in Europe and Latin America as “the Left” and “the Center.” It covers most of the Left except for the communist parties and those dogmatic socialist parties that have not, like the German Social Democratic Party and the British Labour Party, abandoned orthodox Marxism. In the other political direction, it covers the left wing and much of the center of the Christian Democratic parties and the modernized (welfarist) Conservative parties like the British. The similarity between American liberalism and the corresponding tendencies found elsewhere is indicated by the interchangeability of rhetoric. No reader of the American New Republic would feel uneasy with a copy of the British New Statesman or the French L’Express. A Washington Post or New York Times editorial writer would need no more than a week’s apprenticeship to supply leading articles for the London Sunday Observer or, if he knew French, for the Paris Le Monde. At the international gatherings on all conceivable subjects that have become a feature of our era, the liberal professors, writers, journalists and politician-intellectuals from North America discover quickly that they speak the same ideological language as their progressive confreres from other continents, however many simultaneous translations must be arranged for the vulgates.
The American variety of this worldwide ideology—whatever name we may choose to give it—has certain special features derived from the local soil, history and intellectual tradition. It is somewhat more freewheeling, less doctrinaire, than the European forms; it bears the imprint of more recent frontiers, and of the Americanized pragmatism of William James and John Dewey. But the differences are secondary in terms of either basic doctrine or historical consequence. With only a few exceptions, which I shall note in each case, the analyses that I shall be making hold for the global ideology, not merely for the American variety. This is natural enough, because the categories of the ideology are universalistic, without local origin or confinement.
Though most of the analysis and the conclusions will thus be unrestricted, most (though not all) of the specific examples and references will be American, in order that we may not get lost in trackless mountains of data. I have stated as my underlying hypothesis the proposition that liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide. My Americanized procedure might suggest narrowing the proposition to: liberalism is the ideology of American suicide. On two grounds I think that the wider assertion may be retained: first because of the fact just noted, that American liberalism is only a local variety of an ideology (and historical tendency) present in essentials in the other Western nations; and second, because Western civilization could not survive as a going concern, as more than a remnant, without the United States. I take it to be too obvious to require discussion that, if the United States collapses or declines to unimportance, the collapse of the other Western nations will not be far behind—if it won’t have occurred beforehand.
III
HAVING GATHERED TOGETHER a laboratory load of specimens, it becomes my duty to get out the scalpels and begin more refined dissection. What, more exactly, is this “liberalism” that I have been writing about rather cavalierly so far, this prevailing doctrine which, I must have been assuming, all these many individual liberals and liberal institutions share?
The individual liberals I have named—I should more properly say, the individuals whom I have named as liberals—do not, certainly, share identical ideas on all things, even on matters political, economic and social. They differ among themselves, and they are notably fond of debates, panels, discussions and forums in which they air their divergencies. Some of them feel that a 91 percent top limit on the American progressive income tax is about right; some, that it should be 100 percent above a certain maximum income; others, that it might be lowered to, say, 60 percent. But all liberals, without any exception that I know of, agree that a progressive income tax is a fair, probably the fairest, form of taxation, and that the government—all governments—ought to impose a progressive tax on personal incomes.
Liberals dispute just how speedy ought to be the deliberate speed with which schools in the United States should, under the Supreme Court’s order, be racially integrated; whether the next summit meeting to negotiate with the Kremlin should be held before or after a Foreign Ministers’ meeting; whether private schools should or should not be granted tax exemption; whether the United Nations should or should not retain the veto power in the Security Council; whether the legislature, courts or executive should play the primary role in guaranteeing equal rights to all citizens in housing, employment, voting, education and medical care; whether Communist Party spokesmen deserve equal time with Republican and Democratic Party spokesmen in public forums; whether the legal minimum wage should be $1.25 or $1.50 or $1.75 an hour.
All liberals agree, without debate, that racial segregation in any school system is wrong and that government ought to prevent it; that in one way or another, whether at the summit or the middle, we ought to negotiate with the Kremlin, and keep negotiating; that, whether private schools are to be permitted to exist or not, the basis of the educational system should be universal, free—that is, tax-supported—public schooling; that whatever changes may be theoretically desirable in its charter and conduct, the United Nations