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As their self-confidence grew, Americans squeezed most of the religion out of their idealism. Virtue and prosperity became gilt-edged synonyms, and the sky was the limit for a hustling fellow who believed in himself. The mind of the U.S. came to harbor the classic defect of the "liberal culture," a tendency "to regard the highest human possibilities as capable of simple historical attainments." There was nothing in life, by this standard, which American scientists could not measure. Man in the U.S. long ago fulfilled Niebuhr's definition of an "ironic creature"—one who "forgets that he is not simply a creator, but also a creature."
Innocence at Bay. The ironies in U.S. materialism became physically dangerous when the country was thrust, by its own power and success, into the leading position in world politics. Americans had always felt guilty about using power (except, of course, in an economic way); suddenly they found themselves forced to rely on an ultimate form of power, the atom bomb, to preserve peace. Americans had thought of themselves as the "tutors of mankind in its pilgrimage to perfection," innocent of ulterior ambition or guile. Now they found themselves "condemned in a court of public opinion" by have-not nations, who regarded the virtuous prosperity of the U.S. as a sign of imperialism and international sin.
In the troubled world of 1952, the Pursuit of Happiness had brought no peace. The innocent nation suddenly found itself fighting world Communism, which proclaims its own innocency and purity of motive in even sharper shades of black & white. The Communists, in their way, held the same conviction as the American liberal idealists: that man or groups of men can make history jump through hoops. Where liberals said evil was caused by ignorance, bad social institutions or other "manageable" human defects, the Communists narrowed it down to the institution of property. For the liberal idea of the natural goodness of man, Communists substituted "the exclusive virtue" of the proletariat. "In every instance, Communism changes only partly dangerous sentimentalities and inconsistencies in the bourgeois ethos to consistent and totally harmful ones." This surface similarity made it hard at first for American liberals to realize the danger of Communism, especially since their philosophy did not allow them to comprehend the "evil" to which the Communist adapters stooped.
A Hidden Kinship. When the U.S., aroused to Communism's dangers, quickly took up the anti-Communist crusade of "good nations" against "bad nations," Niebuhr fears that it underestimated the attraction and the complication of the "utopian illusions" which Communism borrows from liberal society. The rise of Communism he compares to the rise of Islam and its challenge to Christian civilization in the Middle Ages. Communism, like Islam, has exploited many just and legitimate grievances against the society it found, and the fight against it is automatically complex and devious. It may be impossible to stamp it out. The U.S., like the Crusaders,*-may have to watch its enemy decline only through "its own inner corruptions."