Last Chance

THE millionaires in all countries,” wrote Lenin, “are behaving on an international scale in a way that deserves our heartiest thanks.” It now seems likely that the millionaires of the United States will have an opportunity to deserve the heartiest thanks of Lenin’s successor.

In every other major nation on earth the capitalists and businessmen have either been reduced to a condition of badgered political impotence, or they are dead. Yet the United States is in a fair way to have what it has not had since Franklin Roosevelt stepped jauntily into the White House in 1932: a businessman’s government. And the plain fact is that if this businessman’s government is not a great deal wiser and more imaginative than its predecessors, this country and the world face a bleak future indeed. For a great effort of the imagination will be required of the conservatives who seem likely to take over the direction of our affairs. Unfortunately there is very little evidence that they are capable of making this effort.

The basic issue with which these conservatives will have to deal is the world-wide challenge of the Soviet Union. This challenge has resulted in the enormous contest between the Soviet Union and the West which is now everywhere being waged.

It is a contest of two kinds.

First, it is a political contest, of the sort which the world has known since the concept of nationality first began to arise around the borders of the Mediterranean. Our wealth, our power, and our geographical position have together conspired to force the United States to take the lead in this struggle, to the end that further Russian expansion may be halted, and a total upset of the world power balance may be prevented.

Second — and more fundamentally — it is a contest between two ways of life. And nothing is more certain than Soviet victory in this contest, if the Western way of life obviously fails, if the Western conception of Freedom comes to mean the freedom to starve in your own way. Both contests, political and ideological, will have been won by the Russians by default. That is the measure of the responsibility which will rest on the conservatives who will now take power in the United States.

It is a curious responsibility. It means that the conservatives, if they are to have any hope at all of successfully meeting the Russian challenge, must take measures, and must support regimes, which are hardly consistent with the mouthings about “free enterprise” and “regimentation” to which American conservatives are so addicted. To understand the quality of this responsibility, it is necessary to consider the United States through Soviet eyes.

It is a cardinal point of Soviet doctrine that the United States will surely have a desperate depression in the near future. Stalin himself has preached the inevitability of the coming American depression — first to Eric Johnston during the war, and on many subsequent occasions. This conviction has a corollary: that the United States, thrown into domestic upheaval by the collapse of the capitalist system, will withdraw from Europe and the world, leaving the field free for the unlimited expansion of the new Russian Empire.

The second cardinal point of Soviet, and hence Communist, doctrine is that the greatest threat to the Soviet way of life comes from the social democrats — the non-Communist left. The most abusive epithets in the extensive Soviet vocabulary of invective are reserved for the social democrats. Lenin once wrote of Arthur Henderson, the British Socialist, that if he were a British Communist he would “support Henderson in the same way that a rope supports a hanged man.” The Soviets and their allies, the Communist Parties of the world, have consistently followed that doctrine. In the peculiar jabberwocky of the Communist jargon the phrase “social democrat” is spat out with more anger and contempt than any other. And with good reason. For the social democrats promise the advantages of economic and social security through planning, and add to that the boon of political and personal freedom. That is one promise the Communists cannot top, and they know it.

The Soviets thus do not welcome a contest with the non-Communist left; they know that the desire for personal liberty is still strong in men’s hearts. But they eagerly welcome a contest, with such sterile and reactionary regimes as those which exist today in Greece and Spain. They believe, and rightly, that such regimes cannot last, and that when the pendulum swings, it will swing right over to the Communists. It is this which calls for the great effort of imagination which the American conservatives must make if they are to meet the Soviet challenge. For American conservatives are all too apt to assume that anyone — either at home or abroad — who spends a great deal of time shouting about the Red Menace is sure to be on their side. And on the other hand, anyone at home or abroad who does not go down the line for “free enterprise” seems to many conservatives “socialistic” and practically the same thing as a Communist.

But the sad fact is that “free enterprise” is as dead in Europe today, and throughout the world except in the United States, as the Holy Roman Empire. Talk to a European, amid the devastation of the European economy, about free enterprise, and he will stare at you blankly and uncomprehendingly. In the contest with the Soviet Union this country and the nations of the West of which it is the leader have one enormous advantage: namely, that the Russians are attempting to export their political system without essential change, when in fact it is highly inappropriate to the economy and cultural pattern of almost any other nation. But this advantage will be thrown away if the American conservatives also attempt to export the American political and economic system without essential change. The doctrines of Messrs. Lenin and Stalin are sheer nonsense when applied to most nations outside the Soviet grip. But so, unhappily, are the doctrines of Senator Bricker and even the more moderate Senator Taft. It is not too much to say that the whole future of the world is bound up in whether or not the American conservatives are willing to recognize this truth.

The plain fact is that the choice outside the United States is no longer one between socialism on the one hand and capitalism on the other. It is rather the choice between a socialism in which the fundamental personal freedoms of man are protected, and Communism, which is the negation of all freedom. In Great Britain, China, France, Austria, Italy, indeed throughout the world, the United States, whether under conservative or other leadership, must in its own interest support regimes of the non-Communist left. Otherwise we shall find ourselves burdened with more governments like those in Spain and Greece. And the simple fact is that such regimes are a poor investment. They cannot last. That is the fact which American conservatives must face. If they fail to face it, if they complain angrily about “socialistic” regimes, if they sneer at the necessary measures of world rehabilitation, which this country alone is in a position to undertake, as mere “ globaloney,” then nothing is more certain than Soviet victory in this contest over two ways of life.

Finally, if the Soviet anticipations of an American depression are fulfilled, the Soviets will also win. If the rich giant of the West again, in the next few years, presents the sorry spectacle of mass unemployment and mass misery, there will be two results. First, the economies of our Western allies will be dragged down into chaos with ours. Second, the American ideals of democracy and personal liberty will become meaningless, not only in the eyes of the people of other nations, but in our own eyes. The conservatives must realize the absolute necessity of taking those measures, however costly and however apparently inimical to immediate business interests, which will prevent the occurrence of another 1929.

These enormous issues, with which we have been confronted by the new expansionist policy of the Soviet Union, constitute both a challenge and a test. As there are many able men of good will on the American left, so there are also on the American right. There is thus no good reason why the challenge cannot be met, and the test surmounted, by American conservatism. Yet there are too many conservatives, both in business and politics, who still happily mouth the sort of nonsense which led to disaster in the early thirties. There are too many conservatives who cannot bring themselves to believe that the world outside the United States in fact exists, and who believe all loo readily that it is really possible to return to our provincial and ungoverned past. If it is to such men that the responsibility of American government is given, then it is certain that the challenge will not be met.

It is possible to judge the price of failure by the disaster which overtook the conservative interests in this country after 1929. The conservatives paid the price of their failures in domestic policy then by sixteen years of political impotence. If they fail again, not only at home but also abroad, it will not only be the end of American conservatism. It will be the end of the whole Western way of life.

JOSEPH ALSOP, who graduated from Harvard in 1932, served as an Aide to General Chennault and was captured by the Japanese while he was in Hong Kong, out of uniform and with identification papers as a journalist. He spent nine months in the Stanley Prison Camp, and on his release returned to China, where he was eventually commissioned as a Captain on General Chennault’s staff.

STEWART ALSOP, who graduated from Yale in 1936, enlisted as a rifleman in the British Army after having been turned down by all branches of our Army and Navy, saw action in Italy as commander of a machine-gun platoon, and was then attached to the Special Air Services. He received his commission in the OSS and was parachuted to join the Maquis behind the French lines.