AT FIRST GLANCE
Coser, Lewis
When Voltaire was asked why he kept a Bible on his night table, he replied: "You have to know your enemies." I subscribe to Commentary on this Voltairean principle. As a result I got onto the...
...The widespread antagonism toward business, he argued, "is a formidable danger to democratic capitalism," which, he thinks, is "more likely to perish" through a loss of faith in its "ideas and morals than through weaknesses in its political system or its economic system...
...Don't believe the experts who discern a shift in public opinion in regard to the arms buildup...
...The Communist camp in Western Europe is breaking up...
...they have lost any support whatsoever in intellectual circles...
...The Communist mortgage on the labor movement has been lifted...
...False and dangerous ideas circulate through the culture...
...In Spain, even though they still control one of the two major trade unions, the CP suffered disastrous losses in the elections that brought the Socialists to power...
...The European Communist movement is either dead or dying...
...Things, it appears, fall apart...
...Their theories about popular opinion are almost as dangerous to our national security as a nuclear freeze or a significant cut in the defense budget would be...
...Their latest release, dated April 1, is a honey...
...The American Enterprise Institute, a brother under the skin of Midge Decter's outfit, also is worried...
...The Committee for the Free World is getting hysterical and paranoid...
...But be of good cheer nevertheless, argues Midge Decter: all these public opinion polls shouldn't interfere with the serious business of rekindling the flames of the Cold War...
...386...
...As a result I got onto the mailing list of Midge Decter's Committee for the Free World...
...According to the pollsters," they say, "there is large and growing public support for a nuclear freeze...
...The CP will probably be soundly defeated by the Socialists in the forthcoming Portuguese elections...
...If the polls indicate that people have become skeptical, don't listen to the vox populi...
...the Reagan center cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...
...I hope that they'll continue sending me their appeals...
...I must confess looking forward to receiving their periodic appeals...
...It has only marginal importance in the politics of Norway and Sweden and in the Low Countries...
...A few months ago they arranged a meeting in Washington, D.C., chaired by Michael Novak, author of the recently published book The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism...
...If the polls support their stand, more power to the people...
...The people polled are just a bunch of ignorant boobs led by the nose by unscrupulous and unpatriotic agitators who fraudulently claim to be "experts...
...the people who govern us, Democrats and Republicans, have lost confidence in themselves and us...
...The truth is that people are not fickle but confused...
...They recently have experienced major declines and are no longer a major political factor to be reckoned with...
...Just as there is no longer a "red belt" around Paris, there is no longer a genuinely 275 "red vote" in Italy...
...There is still hope in the land when the Cold Warriors, who only a short time ago seemed in the ascendancy, get panicky...
...if people are losing faith not only in the Cold War but even in American business, things can't be as bad as we are sometimes, in our fits of despondency, inclined to believe, Another bit of cheerful news comes from Europe...
...The CP is still a powerful factor in Italian politics, to be sure, but it rather resembles more and more a prewar Social Democratic party than a Leninist vanguard...
...In Mitterrand's France, the Communists also lost heavily in the recent municipal elections, and have been humiliated by being given utterly unimportant positions in the reconstituted government...
...they provide comic relief in otherwise often drab and depressing times...
...Politicians, who must be sensitive to popular feeling, have joined in the call for cuts in the defense budget...
...This is a development of world-historical significance...
...The defenders of the Free World are a strange variety of democrats...
...And it is badly split both in Greece and in Finland...
...When the local and provincial parties recently selected their delegates to the 16th national PCI congress in Milan, the pro-Soviet slates won a mere 5 percent of the seats...
...Good for us...
...In German politics, the CP is an insignificant fringe sect...
...He too was worried about the deplorable lack of Reaganite stamina among the American people...
...Cheer up, readers of Dissent...
...For the first time in many decades European socialists now can seize the day, provided they have the imagination and the guts to do so...
...The tide has receded and is most unlikely to ever reverse its course...
...The various Communist parties throughout Western Europe are fast losing significant influence and votes...
Vol. 30 • July 1983 • No. 3
