Knowledge And Decisions

Almost by definition, the movement to totalitarianism is a one-way movement. No totalitarian government has ever chosen to become free or democratic, though a free and democratic nation may choose to move toward totalitarianism, as Germany did in 1933. If governmental choice were the only variable, the eventual worldwide triumph of totalitarianism would be inevitable, since choices in one direction are reversible and choices in the other direction are not. Nazi totalitarianism was smashed by external military power and its empire liberated by invading armies. But the invasion of Normandy that led to the liberation of Western Europe can hardly find a new counterpart to liberate Eastern Europe in a nuclear age. That the Western democracies had to stand by helplessly while Soviet tanks crushed Eastern European uprisings in the 1950s was grim proof of the new realities of nuclear annihilation. Perhaps in a very long run, political erosions might sap the vitality of totalitarianism or economic efficiency claims modify it incrementally (as it has already in agriculture) to the point where ultimately it no longer resembles its present centralized model. But even these remote hopes are lessened if the surviving examples of free and democratic nations are lost before this can happen.

In the nuclear era, the international survival of the nontotalitarian world rests ultimately on an American nuclear deterrent. Otherwise the nuclear power of the Soviet Union would be irresistible as a threat in international power politics, whether or not it was ever actually used. Seldom has the survival of human freedom rested so decisively in the hands of one government, or the survival of the species in just two.

The spread of totalitarianism — communism since World War II — has been at the expense of all kinds of nontotalitarian governments: a democracy in Czechoslovakia, a kingdom in Laos, a Latin American autocracy in Cuba. These various forms of government, whatever their merits or demerits otherwise, tend to be changeable. A dictatorship like Spain could liberalize after Franco, and Portugal could swing to the left after Salazar. As of any given moment, some of these governments might seem not very different in their degrees of freedom from communist dictatorships. But a communist dictatorship has a permanence that these other forms of government cannot approach. Inasmuch as most of the governments on the planet are nondemocratic as well as noncommunist, stemming the spread of totalitarianism necessarily means American cooperation with nondemocratic nations. To some Americans, but especially intellectuals, such cooperation appears as a violation of the democratic creed, and should be contingent on the nondemocratic nation’s adoption of democratic institutions. This is a special case of the general implicit assumption of a single scale of values applicable to all. The historical recency and rarity of constitutional democracy makes the universal application of such a model especially egocentric and arbitrary. As a precondition for cooperation to stem the tide of an irreversible totalitarianism, it suggests either a low estimate of the threat or an unwillingness to face the historic responsibility implied by it. The central assumption of a single scale of values applicable to all is a force in domestic as well as international politics. It has facilitated the imposition of many specific laws and policies resented by the population, and — more important — it has altered the enduring political framework to make such impositions possible through courts, administrative agencies, and other institutions and processes insulated from public feedback and responsive to smaller, more zealous constituencies. Domestically as well as internationally, freedom as the general preservation of options gives way to the imposition of one group’s preferred option. Their influence greatly exceeds their numbers, partly because they are perceived as objective “experts” and partly because of the moral nature of their arguments and the apparently moral high ground that they themselves occupy (as contrasted with the arguments of conventional special interest groups in these respects).