(4 of 5)
World War II had ended badly. Except on the military side, where Allied might and Allied generalship were crushing and supreme, it had never been fought well. The why of the fighting had never been adequately spelled out. Franklin Roosevelt, looking for a name for the war, could come up with nothing better than "The War for Survival." Arthur Koestler, viewing the whole catastrophe with detachment, said that it was a war in which a lie fought against a half-truth. In such a contest, the lie had had a tremendous psychological advantage.
The war was over, but peace was only the absence of war. Over Europe lay the heavy hand of political turmoil and hunger, the unfathomable problems of reconstruction and reparations. The Middle East was torn with strife, Asia racked by revolt. Even the fortunate Western Hemisphere contained some of the tightest dictatorships in modern history.
The struggle of freedom versus tyranny, of the individual against the power of the state—fought and won in the speciously clear-cut terms of war—was emerging again in the more dubious terms of peace.
In peacetime terms, as in the final analysis, it was the battle of the compromising democrat against the implacable Left. And in this conflict the democrat was under severe handicaps. Some of the handicaps were self-imposed. In the democracies, pundits and plain people alike were simply afraid of using the four-letter words of contemporary politics. They refused to recognize or admit that the Left was indeed implacable—as it was in Russia or in the words of Britain's Harold Laski. Like the notion of sex in a previous generation, this thought was too dangerous, or too horrible. It was not so much that the democrats did not have a creed as that they found it difficult and embarrassing to reconcile their belief with their actions.
Eternal Distinction. The democrat, who believed in the practical necessity of compromise and who acknowledged the innate imperfection and imperfectibility of man, had a creed of his own. He acknowledged the eternal distinction between the things of God and the things of Caesar, and the eternal distinction between fundamental principle and practical human expedience. He admitted that he did not understand the things of God; but to the pitifully small extent that he did understand them he called them principles—and on those he could never compromise. One of those principles, however hard of application, was Freedom. Another of those principles was that the end never justifies the means. And, putting those two principles together, he could never allow himself to say that it is justifiable to commit crimes in order to achieve for man a "larger freedom."
He did not say that it was his duty to establish moral or other Utopias; indeed, he knew that men are incapable of doing any such thing. He stood for compromise in all purely human affairs precisely because he did not dare compromise with the monstrous arrogance of the doctrine that the State is God.
The corollaries of this fundamental belief were these:
As a practical matter, the democrat searched the past for every bit of political or economic wisdom which he could fit into a pattern useful for the present.