Young Man on the Make
C., L.
RADICALS OF THE THIRTIES, Travers Clement has recently suggested, can be classified as repenters and dissenters. The former predominate. Some magazines, such as Commentary, specialize in...
...One might at first surmise that Mr...
...Far from being insane, the man is a genius...
...He has a bright future...
...Petersen has hit upon a magic formula for the repenters...
...Capitalism is socialism, socialism is capitalism...
...but on second thought another idea occurred to me...
...Watch that young man...
...So far, the article is no different from scores of other exercises in repentance except for its especially shoddy logic...
...The November 1953 issue carries an article by William Petersen called "Is America Still the Land of Opportunity...
...No more guilt, no more bouts with analysts, no more blushes upon meeting old friends...
...This is the first successful application in the United States of George Orwell's "Newspeak...
...He tries to show in ten pages that the opinion of most sociologists to the contrary notwithstanding, the America of a beautiful war economy is still a land of opportunity...
...What is more, as Max Scheler has pointed out, he will engage in continuous acts of revenge upon his intellectual past...
...Petersen suffers from a semantic aphasia, a disturbance of the symbol sphere...
...It is based on the same essential factors — the enormous industrial production, the high and widely distributed income, the general distribution of equalitarian cultural values—that any socialist culture would rest on...
...He claims that "the United States . . . is becoming a socialist society" and that "the American economy is mixed but American culture is, in effect, socialist...
...He is likely to be more Catholic than the Pope, more loyal to the status quo than its habitual defenders...
...The former predominate...
...Others have laboriously persuaded themselves that capitalism is indeed preferable to "socialism-means-regimentation" but he 108 • DISSENT • Winter 1954 argues that America is socialist and thus defense of the status quo becomes, by a marvellous transformation, a defense of one's earlier ideals...
...you can prove both with quotations from Marx and Bukharin...
...Some magazines, such as Commentary, specialize in documents of repentance...
...And this is how I reasoned: It is expected that the repenter will be particularly concerned with emphasizing his loyalty to new associates...
...But his conclusions are more interesting...
...RADICALS OF THE THIRTIES, Travers Clement has recently suggested, can be classified as repenters and dissenters...
...But from all this also comes a certain uneasiness and unrest, only partly veiled by the stridency of his attacks...
...and Commentary, of course, prints it...
...Findings to the contrary are explained as distortions introduced by "scholarly myths," Marxism and "nostalgic Americanism...
...Now Mr...
Vol. 1 • January 1954 • No. 1
