Will Morrisey Reviews

Jean-Francois Revel (with the assistance of Branko Lazitch): How Democracies Perish. William Byron translation. Garden City: Doubleday, 1984.

Originally published in The Intercollegiate Review, Vol. 20, No. 3, Spring/Summer 1985. Republished with permission.

 

In 1970 the literary succès de scandale in Paris was a polemics entitled Ni Marx, Ni Jésus. Written by socialist pamphleteer Jean-Francois Revel, it owed its scandalousness to one remarkable thing: it was pro-American. Throughout the previous decade, anti-Americanism had numbered among the few sentiments uniting most of the French elites—whether the ‘Right’ of Algérie Française, the Gaullist center, or the various elements on the ‘Left.’ Dismissing all these elements as reactionary, Revel buoyantly asserted that in the 1960s “the only revolutionary stirrings in the world have had their origins in the United States,” and the question of whether or not “the revolution of the twentieth century” will spread “to the rest of the world depends on whether or not it first succeeds in America.” Without Marx or Jesus appeared in America a year later, supplemented by a properly friendly and skeptical “afterword” by Mary McCarthy and an “author’s note” in which Revel generously observed that “in the United States if the classical Left [as represented by Miss McCarthy) does not believe the new revolution is serious, at least it does not try, as in Europe, to stop it in order to be right.”

Americans today who remember the book remember it vaguely They remember Revel as a friend in a bad time, the time when anti-Americanism had become fashionable in America itself. They seldom remember Revel’s argument, and in some ways that is just as well. He made some sensible, astringent criticisms of those who imagined that the Soviet Union, Maoist China, the ‘Third World,’ or Scandinavia could bear a democratic revolution to the oppressed victims of capitalism. But he suffered delusions of his own, calling for “the abolition of international relations” by the establishment of a world government. This government would enable humanity to equalize economic and social conditions, stabilize the birth rate, preserve the environment without ending material progress, and free everyone from “sexual repression” (the latter program being “undoubtedly one of the surest signs of an authentic revolutionary struggle”). If this “total affirmation of liberty for all in the place of archaic prohibitions” sounds rather more like anarchism than anything that could establish a government, it must be said that Revel almost saw this: “We do not need a political revolution so much as an antipolitical revolution.” Even the American “hippies” were not sufficiently egalitarian and libertarian for Revel’s world. He fretted that they disliked technology, which brings material abundance to the masses; worse still, they tended toward religiosity. But at least the American ‘Right’ posed little serious threat. After Goldwater’s defeat, conservatism was surely dead.

A decade and a half later, Revel has abandoned many of his leftist illusions and most of his optimism. How Democracies Perish begins, “Democracy may, after all, turn out to have been a historical accident, a brief parenthesis that is closing before our eyes.” The contemporary world has become an “implacable democracy-killing machine” with components within both democracy and totalitarianism. Revel describes four of these components.

First, modern democracy directs energies inward, whereas totalitarianism directs energies outward. Democracy “tend to ignore, even deny, threats to its existence because it loathes doing what is needed to counter them.” Democracy succeeds in the pleasant task of improving its own material life. It fears the consequences of opposing its enemies because it would thereby risk souring its own agreeable existence. It even finds that “it is easier to win concessions from yourself than from the enemy.” Totalitarianism fails to improve its own material life and must therefor turn its attention elsewhere. “War is central to [the Soviet Union’s] ideological system,” as well as to its economic and political structure.

Second, modern democracy “treats subversives as mere opponents for fear of betraying its own principles,” notably that of toleration. Modern democracy tends to blame itself for its own enemies, internal and external, and generates “an industry of blame.” With not a single ideology but dozens contending inside it, modern democracy expends much of its energy on contestation as it were with itself. It has difficulty defending itself against real enemies. “Even conservatives seldom risk naming the threat of totalitarianism as the greatest menace of our time, for fear of seeming fanatical” and thus offending the modern ethos. As a consequence of this, democratic politicians, “whose influence depends, happily, on their persuasiveness, expend so much energy trying to show their undertakings in the best possible light that they eventually lose the habit of thinking about the issues’ substance”—that it, about reality itself. While looking hard at its own current faults, modern democracy often minimizes the faults of leftist totalitarianism, dismissing them as mere ‘stages’ of progress. This suggests that modern democrats often accept the premises of progressivist historicism underlying totalitarian belief and practice. Indeed, “the socialist cause was forged within the democracies themselves in the nineteenth century.” Totalitarianism treats its opponents as enemies, subversives. It never blames itself fundamentally or comprehensively, but limits “self-criticism” to the sort of corruption-baiting one finds in Pravda letters-to-the-editor. It generates an industry of propaganda governed by a single, all-encompassing ideology. But it firmly subordinates propaganda to political calculation, also governed by ideology; any mistakes of perception occur only insofar as the ideology fails to explain reality. But because its ideology encourages power-worship, it often perceives political reality quite acutely—as devotees will. While judging its enemies by their current faults, totalitarianism judges itself by its own alleged future. It can judge its enemies most severely because, according to leftist totalitarianism, its enemies have no future.

Third, contemporary democratic government no longer governs. “The democratic state has stuffed itself with more responsibilities than powers,” a weakness that causes political and social fragmentation. One might say that America retains Madisonian faction while trying to act like a welfare state. Our enemies need not divide us in order to conquer, for our divisions are already here to exploit. In their foreign relations, modern democracies also accept “responsibility”—that is, blame—without sufficient power to govern, or at least channel, the course of events. Democratic politicians vacillate and react; time is rarely on their side. Totalitarian government does not merely govern but tyrannizes. It exercises power without “responsibility” and imposes unity upon its subjects. Democrats falsely imagine that this repression and the misery it causes must eventually halt a totalitarian regime’s expansion. But “the notion that whoever holds power must clear out because his subjects are discontented or dying of hunger or distress is a bit of whimsy that history has tolerated wondrously few times.” It is a notion that “can only occur to a democrat,” who earnestly desires the world to be other than it is (no harm in that) but then confuses his desire with reason. Totalitarians plan, decide, and act; they “can afford to wait,” convinced that time is on their side.

Fourth, modern democracy is at most a neo-imperialism, that is, an economic imperialism. The gains it makes can therefore be threatened by totalitarian insurgents, without their violating “international law.” Totalitarianism is a true imperialism, seizing territory and direct political power along with economic power. Its gains cannot be threatened militarily without violating ‘international law.’ This is true even if those gains were made ‘illegally,’ as “sooner or later de facto power is accepted as rightful power.” ‘International law,’ then, is more than a bit of a fraud, a more useful fraud to totalitarians than to modern democrats.

Revel uses imagery, rhetoric, some facts, and clear deductive logic to show how these four components function. Deductive logic proves especially useful because democrats “eagerly believe the Communists’ pure propaganda, reserving their skepticism for the genuinely revealing doctrinal statements,” which “they dismiss as mere talk.” (He recalls that the French ambassador in Berlin yattered about “détente” with Hitler in 1937, and that the ambassador’s hapless successor excitedly supposed the existence of “hawks” and “doves” among the Nazi elite). In fact, totalitarian doctrine, ‘Right’ or ‘Left,’ has been the only consistently reliable guide to totalitarian action. Because totalitarianism attempts to unify theory and practice (but does not unify either with its rhetoric) its doctrine and the (often unstated) logical deductions therefrom tell us more than pages of data. For example, given the propensity of Communist subjects to flee their countries, “the only way to convince oneself and the rest of humanity that the socialist system is best is to see to it that there are no other systems.” Totalitarian imperialism serves first of all to convince; this is what it means to claim (as Leninists do) that there is a logic of history. It is a ‘logic’ that only real logic can expose—in both senses of that word. The ‘logic’ of history has military consequences. The Soviets’ alleged fear of encirclement, “the greatest strategic farce of modern times,” is inexplicable strategically. But not politically. “Let’s be logical: the only way for the Soviet Union to make certain its borders are not threatened, that they are fully secure, is to have no borders at all or, if you prefer, borders that coincide with the entire world.” One can call this paranoia, but it must be said it is a most purposeful paranoia, consistent with the allegedly dialectical progress of ‘History.’

To counter totalitarian imperialism, modern democracies have constructed the edifice of ‘détente,’ an attempt to elevate a condition between states (the word means relaxation of tensions) to the status of a principle, a ruling idea. Its purpose is clear enough: peace. But the means of obtaining genuine peace by the means of ‘détente’ elude democrats’ eager grasp. The “principle that inspired the first massive transfusion of Western aid to the Soviet Union after 1922” prefigured the economic principle of “détente”: “East-West trade will civilize Communism.” In the 1920s, “after several years of Western liberality, what really happened was the forced collectivization of the land, extermination of the peasants, purges and the Great Terror of the 1930s.” The results of similar Western liberality in the 1970s were less spectacular but far more damaging to the world as a whole. They included a massive Soviet arms buildup, domination of large sections of Asia and Africa, increased use of espionage and terrorism—all accompanied by a reversal of Khruschev’s ‘de-Stalinization’ at home. Faced with this contemptuous exploitation of their hopes, the democracies find it impossible to reduce trade with the Soviet Union for more than the briefest periods. They tell themselves that such a punitive action might only anger the Soviets. Once again, Revelian logic clears the artificial fog that makes these movie-set props believable. “Either Western economic cooperation is negligible to the U. S. S. R., which makes the whole theory of détente absurd, or it’s important to the U. S. S. R. and suspending it would be an effective sanction.” Not a supremely effective sanction, to be sure: grain embargoes cannot extract Soviet divisions from Afghanistan. But sanctions can at least make our own economic system, for whose health many democrats care more than anything else less dependent upon the actions of enemies who care neither for democrats’ comfort nor for that of their own subjects.

Given all this, Revel has earned his pessimism. His suggested policy changes, stated in necessarily general terms, seem rather weak. Two are negative: do not fear war because the Soviets avoid it when they see the possibility of losing; make no concessions without “manifest, equivalent and palpable counter-concessions.” Centrally, he suggests “mainly” economic reprisals against “any Soviet encroachment.” He would supplement this with espionage and some propaganda. Perhaps these suggestions might turn out to be more effective than they appear; up to a point, one might even say, “the more Soviet conquests, the more burdens for them and the more targets for us.”

But the problem remains. Democrats prefer not to target their enemies at all. The democratic character itself finds tyranny seductive and deadly. Plato’s Socrates describes the scion of democracy, his appetites sated, driven by the “sting of longing” to be “the leader of the idle desires that insists on all available resources being distributed to them”: “this leader of the soul takes madness for its armed guard and is stung to frenzy. And if it finds in the man any opinions or desires accounted good and still admitting of shame, it slays them and pushes them out of him until it purges him of moderation and fills him with madness brought in from abroad” (Republic IX, 537b). The problem of educating the young democrat to defend himself against those who would use his desires to serve tyranny remains the problem for those who cherish liberty. It is an increasingly formidable problem. Modern tyranny, totalitarianism, distinguishes itself from ancient tyranny in part because it is not so innocent of philosophy. So far as a polemicist may educate, the pessimistic Revel guards modern democrats from the tyrannical sting of longing, making amends for the earlier, dreaming Revel who let himself unguarded.

Don Cook: Charles de Gaulle. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1984.

Originally published in Chronicles of Culture, Vol. 9, No. 3, March 1985. Republished with permission.

 

“The head rules the belly through the chest,” C. S. Lewis writes. Reason cannot rule appetites directly; it needs what the Greeks called thumos, the soul’s “spirited element,” to rule the appetites so that reason can go free. Spiritedness cares for itself oneself and for those like oneself. Refined, it animates patriotism, courage, honor; at its best it animates magnanimity, “greatness of soul.” Unrefined, it animates warlikeness, rage, egoism; at its worst it causes madness. Lewis describes modern democratic ‘intellectuals’ as “men without chests.” Their heads, however well-trained, remain ineffectual. Our intellectuals lack “heart”—not only the compassion they feebly praise but the courage they ridicule, nervously, as machismo.

Few political men have opposed this dispiritedness. Charles de Gaulle was among the greatest to do so. His latest biographer, an American journalist, describes a man of thumos caught in but also defying, sometimes exploiting, the entropic forces of the modern age. On the force commonly taken to symbolize late modernity, Cook writes that de Gaulle “had not the slightest interest in the question of the control of nuclear weapons, in nuclear disarmament, in a test-ban treaty, in the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, or in any of the treaties that were spawned in Geneva…. He had no interest in think-tank theories about the use of nuclear weapons or the risks of one country triggering another into holocaust. He had only one theory and that was nuclear retaliation.” During the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, de Gaulle met American and Soviet representatives. To Kennedy’s envoy, Dean Acheson, he said, “You may tell the President that if there is a war, France will be with you. But there will be no war.” He added, characteristically, “I must note that I have been advised, but not consulted.” With Serge Vinogradov, the Soviet ambassador to France, de Gaulle deployed fewer words but greater irony. As was customary, he opened the meeting by saying, “Well, Mr. Ambassador, I am listening.” Vinogradov ran on about the possibility of the annihilation of France; de Gaulle remained silent. The ambassador continued, and de Gaulle’s silence continued. “At last the Soviet ambassador ran out of things to say. De Gaulle then rose from behind his desk with heavy and ponderous motion, stretched out his hand in farewell to Vinogradove and said: ‘Hélas, Monsieur l’Ambassadeur, nous mourirons ensemble! Au revoir, Monseur l’Ambassadeur.'” [“Alas, Mr. Ambassador, we will die together! Goodbye, Mr. Ambassador.”)

Thumos serves reason here in two ways: It defends reason against tyranny, including the psychological tyranny totalitarians seek to impose; more subtly, it defends the mind from excessive fear, allowing de Gaulle to see that the Soviets are not likely to risk Moscow for the sake of missile bases in the Caribbean. The complementary insight is de Gaulle’s famous suspicion that the United States might not risk its existence for the sake of France. He told Eisenhower, “I know, as you yourself know, what a nation is. It can help another but it cannot identify itself with another.” De Gaulle accordingly ordered the construction of France’s own nuclear arsenal, forcing any would-be attackers to consider how much they want to risk for the sake of conquering France. Thus thumos and practical reason allied themselves in the service of moderation—or, at least, restraint.

Thumos defends its own. Even when the schoolboy de Gaulle played with toy soldiers he insisted, “France is mine!” Wounded and captured by the Germans during the Great War, he used his enforced confinement to study the enemy’s language, “return[ing] home from thirty-two months as a POW with a suitcase full of materials for future writings and lectures”—many of which would warn against German military resurgence. In 1919 he saw action in Poland, participating in “the miracle of the Vistula” when Polish troops and foreign volunteers unexpectedly defeated the Red Army and saved Poland from foreign domination. Decorated by the Polish government, de Gaulle evidently regarded Poland as an exception to the perfidious general run of foreign countries. He condemned the Yalta settlement from the beginning and, as late as 1967, visited Gdansk and said, “The obstacles that you think are insurmountable today, you will without any doubt surmount them. You know what I mean.” Poland too had become “his,” and there can be little doubt that he also viewed it as a potential buffer against Russian and German ambitions in France’s neighborhood.

No tyrant, de Gaulle admired thumos in others. In the interwar period he saw the French colonies in the Middle East and wrote, “My impression is that we haven’t really made much impact here, and that the people are as alien to us—and we to them—as they ever were.” The French must therefore either compel obedience or “get out.” His disband France’s colonial empire, decades later, followed from this recognition of both the strength and the limits of thumos.

“A statesman is needed.” De Gaulle wrote that on May 3, 1940 to the Third Republic’s last prime minister, Paul Reynaud, who proved unequal to the need. As the Nazis conquered France and his mentor, Marshall Pétain, capitulated, de Gaulle reacted simply to France’s “men without chests.” “I saw treason before m eyes, and my heart refused in disgust to recognize it as victorious.” Not only military and political timeservers but many intellectual luminaries endorsed Pétain; these included Gide, Mauriac, and Claudel. “In those days,” Cook writes, “it was not men of experience or leadership, it was not the intellectuals or politicians or administrators or serving officers who were the first Gaullists and rallied to the Cross of Lorraine. They did not come from the châteaux or the cathedrals, but from the parish churches and the synagogues,, the French of the Paris Métro, the fishing villages, the factories, for whom all was clear and simple.” When de Gaulle founded Free France in London, less than one-sixth of the French then on British soil joined him; those likely to be on foreign soil—businessmen, diplomatic personnel—were unlikely to respond to a simple call to honor.

By 1941, de Gaulle “had made up his mind that the war would be long, that Britain and the Allies would win, and that his priority from then on would be to claw back everything he could for a victory for France.” The clawing among de Gaulle and Churchill, Roosevelt, and the anti-Gaullist French elements drew blood. Although Churchill quarreled angrily with him (going so far as to threaten, “If you obstruct me, I shall liquidate you!”) de Gaulle found Roosevelt and the French elites more consistently hostile. The American president dreamed of a new, postwar state, “Wallonia,” to be fabricated from “the Walloon parts of Belgium with Luxembourg, Alsace-Lorraine and part of northern France.” Considering various explanations of Roosevelt’s allergy to de Gaulle, Cook finally decides that “there can be no rationale or explanation of what amounted to a personal obsession.” It is surely true that Roosevelt distrusted de Gaulle’s military background, recalling such adventurers as Napoleon Bonaparte and Boulanger; it is also possible that Roosevelt, exemplifying the American liberal’s ambivalence toward thumos, resent a man ‘of one piece,’ a man who at once the liberal’s ambitions but who did not share the liberal’s moral reservations concerning ambition.

As for the French, during the war de Gaulle contended with the old right (the Vichyites condemned him to death in absentia); after the liberation “it was a struggle between the Communists and the Gaullists,” a struggle de Gaulle won by the spirited expedient of ordering the Communists to the front lines. It was the postwar exhaustion of thumos that caused de Gaulle to resign as prime minister. “Although de Gaulle could be master of any parliamentary debate he chose to enter, he was never cut out for the maneuvers and cut-and-thrust of parliamentary democracy…. It was not his idea of how to run a government.” The French viewed his departure with relief and did not expect him to return. When he did, in 1958, it was of course on his own terms. Foremost among these was a new constitution, a presidential regime that ended parliamentarism while retaining parliament as a separate branch of government. The men without chests, talkers who confused action with the force of inertia, found themselves once more defeated by the man of thumos.

In previous books, Cook has written extensively on World War II, and sixty percent of this book concerns the war and its aftermath. The chapters on de Gaulle’s founding and defense of the Fifth Republic are well supplemented by Bernard Ledwidge’s recent biography (De Gaulle, New York: St. Martin’s Press), by two excellent chapters in Stanley Hoffman’s Decline or Renewal? France Since the 1930s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), and by Malraux’s Le Miroir des Limbes, parts of which were translated into English as Anti-Memoirs and Felled Oaks (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston). De Gaulle’s constant theme during those years, la grandeur, inspired fear and hatred, admiration and ridicule. Cook does not quite understand de Gaulle’s intention, but he does present the words and actions of a statesman attempting to bring a thoroughly modernized, democratized populace to the unmodern virtues of courage and moderation, a statesman forced to use modern tools for unmodern ends.

Cook gives the two customary explanations of de Gaulle’s failure to complete his second term as president: from 1958 to 1968, French university enrollments tripled and de Gaulle did not sufficiently anticipate the resulting tensions; in 1968, the Soviets crushed Czechoslovakia’s experiment with civil liberties, thus refuting de Gaulle’s claim that Soviet ideology mattered less than Russian nationality. In both instances, the man of thumos underestimated the power of ideologies. (The French university students were not only numerous; a significant fraction of them had put on ideological costumes, stitching together patches of anarchism, pop psychology, and the teachings of Mao Zedong). De Gaulle rightly considered these ideologies absurd. He wrongly dismissed them as irrelevant to modern politics. That is, he underestimated the power of intellectual absurdity in human life, a power that never lasts at its peak but reappears with the persistence of dandelions. If allied with reason, thumos can rule the appetites. But in late modernity the appetites have themselves made alliance with reason, using reason to build ideologies, distinguished from religions and philosophies by their egalitarianism. And thumos also makes alliance with reason, but now as the dominant partner, serving ambition or ‘the will to power.’

Statesmen are still needed.