From Anti-Communism to Anti-Totalitarianism

Abstract

The very nature of democracy makes its defense difficult. In a democracy, the majority has the right to be wrong and the opportunity to make public its private passions while acting on its personal interests. What is more, democratic tolerance of pluralism and recognition of social conflict ensure that democracy will be characterized above all by self-criticism. As a result, when it is threatened, its enemies will find at least some domestic support from citizens who despair of democracy, or at least of this democracy, and who convince themselves that a better, more substantial or less superficial, democracy can be brought into being. Such critics of the really existing democracy are convinced that they are acting in the name of real democracy. So it was, for example, that the General Secretary of the American Communist Party in the 1930s, Earl Browder, could claim that communism is “twentieth century Americanism.” Following the same logic, the CIA took it upon itself to support not only opposition to Soviet influence but also to encourage and finance what Frances Stonor Saunders calls the “cultural Cold War”¹ The shared logic of the CIA and the CPUSA turns out to be, as the saying goes, no accident.