It is a great pleasure to be with you today, although, since I claim expertise only as a historian of the Old South, I speak on current issues with trepidation. I do hope that your invitation carries no sadistic intent--that you do not expect an autobiographical mea culpa. For while it is true that I have been a Marxist and a bitter-end supporter of the Soviet Union, I dislike autobiographies and admire the CIA's noble dictum, "Admit nothing, explain nothing, apologize for nothing."

I must beg your indulgence if I ramble a bit as I try to connect such themes as the root of the collapse of socialism, the prospects for an era of unbridled free-market capitalism, the Left's hopeless inability to meet unprecedented challenges, and the growing disarray on the Right. For I do believe, with my friend John Lukacs, that the "-isms" have become "wasms," and that, therefore, genuine possibilities for a broad shift in political alliances now exist.

Across the country, people who have spent their lives on the Left are beginning to assess the wreckage and to change course. To take one example, I have been pleasantly surprised by the positive response in some left-wing circles to my wife's book, Feminism without Illusions, which called upon feminists to break with the anti-family radicalism of the official women's movement and to modify their position even on the explosive issue of abortion. Disaffected left-wingers do, however, have a serious problem, for, at the moment, we have no place to go.

I do not speak of the organizations, journals, or principal spokesmen of the Left, who resemble the Bourbons in their determination to learn and forget nothing. Perhaps the most discouraging feature of the Left today is its flat unwillingness to permit internal debate on essential issues and to prefer instead to excommunicate anyone who challenges reigning pieties. Thus, it is simply impossible even to raise for discussion the social and political implications of the gay rights agenda. But it remains questionable that these media-anointed generals could long command their troops were plausible alternatives to arise.

By the "Left" I mean primarily those who have been to the left of liberalism in their open or surreptitious support of socialism at home and abroad. But today, as shown by the bemusing course of the Democratic Party and the ravages of "political correctness" on our campuses, the historic line between the socialist or radical Left and the liberal Center-Left has been virtually obliterated. Normally, such a coalescence would be welcomed by all left-wingers except the most intransigent sectarians. But the specific character of this coalescence promises a well deserved political and moral defeat. For, unable to offer a coherent alternative to capitalism as a social system, and with no socialist countries left to identify with, many left-wingers now wallow in a mindless hostility to Western Civilization and to their own identity as Americans--wallow, that is, in an extraordinarily destructive self-hatred.

The counter-revolutions in eastern Europe and elsewhere have decisively shattered the historic cause of the socialist Left. In particular, the collapse of the Soviet Union spelled the end of socialism, not merely of Stalinism and the more rigid forms of socialism. The Communists gave us the only socialism we have had, whereas the Social Democrats have everywhere settled for the regulation of capitalism. After one hundred and fifty years of Marxist thought and the political conquest of one-third of the world, albeit at the cost of tens of millions of lives, the Left cannot start over--much less start over when the industrial working class, our chosen agency of revolutionary change, is receding in numbers and power. And never mind that that working class never made a socialist revolution anyway.

Those who indulge in the fantasy of a socialism risen phoenix-like from the ashes no longer equate socialism with workingclass power and the abolition of private property. Rather, they embrace a caricature of classic liberalism that would free individuals from virtually all social restraint. But, with startling inconsistency and bad faith, they project this liberation under the watchful eye of a bureaucratic state that makes sure we all do the right thing. I am tempted to pursue the psychological underpinnings, but shall content myself with recalling a wonderful cartoon from the Sixties. It showed a sit-in in which a hippie was shouting, "I hate people who can't love everybody!"

The Left has suffered a political and moral Waterloo. To begin with, it has always been ravaged by a congenital disease for which Marxism, for all its faults and theoretical ambiguities, long provided a practical antidote. Wherever the Left has remained in opposition, it has been able to disguise the split in its own ranks--the split between those who at bottom oppose all authority and order, and those determined to impose a radically different social order. Once in power, as you must have noticed, the Left always settled these internal accounts, and rather disagreeably.

The collapse of socialism, understood as a social system based on state ownership of the means of production, has tellingly exposed the disease--the futility of the communist ideal of a radically egalitarian society of free and autonomous individuals. Yet what goes largely unnoticed is that, on much of the American Right, the traditionalist-conservative critique of modernity has largely given way to a free-market liberalism, the ideal of which would be hard to distinguish from the radical Left's version of egalitarianism. The traditionalists are entitled to gloat, for they have always regarded socialism as merely the logical outcome of bourgeois liberalism.

I may as well speak frankly of my political biases and admittedly fragile hopes. One of the many reasons that, whatever my sins, I have always fought for academic freedom has been a distaste for Manichaean views of political motivation, and a conviction that intellectuals have a responsibility to accept political engagement, accommodate to as much of the discipline of their chosen camp as they can swallow, and do their best to civilize whatever camp they choose. That conviction leaves room for a change of course when good sense dictates it.

But as I follow, often wide-eyed, the intense struggles within the Right today, I have a feeling of deja vu. For example, Murray Rothbard's recent bridge-burning at the John Randolph Club reminded me of nothing so much as the good old days when Stalinists, Trotskyists, and Social Democrats gleefully consigned each other to perdition. For reasons that should become clear, I have always felt more warmly toward the traditional Right than toward the Center, the free-market Right, or the Social Democrats for that matter, if only because I reject the liberationist philosophy of humanity that Marx arbitrarily imposed upon his great interpretation of history. Thus, although a nonbeliever, I accept much of the Christian view of man's fallen state and inherent tendency toward depravity.

The quarrels on the Right do run deep and are, up to a point, clearly grounded in principles, but the real fault line seems to me to run between those primarily committed to inherited values and those primarily committed to a market society as such. Even the often intemperate exchanges between traditionalists and neo-conservatives over the concentration of power in the federal government and, with it, concessions to the welfare state, seem to be largely the result of a willful determination not to hear each other's voices. For unless, I am crazy--which no few people would tell you I am--the traditionalists and their favorite betes noirs, the neo-conservatives, are closer in essential views than either are to their particular libertarian allies. Thus, I was struck by Michael Novak's fine piece on the legacy of Reinhold Niebuhr in a recent issue of National Review. Never mind that I could happily drink a toast to it. What is more important, traditionalists, particularly southern conservatives, might be willing to join in that toast, if they would read the piece fairly. But then, since most neo-conservatives--I fear out of woeful ignorance--respond with unreasoned hostility to the South, southerners, and the southern conservative tradition, I suppose that we are looking at a game of tit-for-tat.

Until recently, these wars within the Right evoked sheer glee from people like me, but they have ceased to be funny. For a substantial portion of the mass base of the Left, and even a significant if limited portion of its intellectuals, might well be won to a program that only a broadly based Right now has the capacity to develop but seems determined not to.

World-historic events compel a reassessment of first principles as well as political and social policies. For those on the Left, that need not lead to a retreat from our lifelong struggle for social justice--our struggle against economic exploitation, racism, male supremacy, and the atomization of social life. But this struggle has often blinded us to the historic achievements of capitalism, upon which any civilized society must build, and not the least of those achievements has been an economic performance that has created expanded possibilities for individual freedom and political democracy for enormous numbers of people throughout the world.

The Left wishes to forget Marx's materialist premise--and promise--namely, that a socialist society would outproduce its capitalist rival and thereby provide the material foundations for an unprecedented human liberation. The woeful failure of socialism as an economic system has laid bare the delusive nature of the dream. For better and worse, capitalism, not socialism, has once again emerged as the world's greatest revolutionary--and self-revolutionizing--system, and, in so doing, it has established its claims to being immeasurably more congruent with human nature. But it has not thereby refuted the charge of its also being an economic system that undermines the foundations of civilized life by atomizing individuals, and undermines the inspiring concept of citizenship that it created in the first place. Rather, when considered in the light of the failure of socialism, capitalism today poses anew the challenge to construct a decent social order.

The economic failure of socialism cannot readily be ascribed to "Stalinism," although many specific horrors can. In the absence of market mechanisms, more flexible policies would not have enabled the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc to compete with the capitalist countries. And in a world of antagonistic social systems, manifested in national states, failure to prevail in economic competition spelled defeat.

What lessons has the Anglo-American Left learned from the collapse of the socialist countries? Here we may turn to a book of essays edited by Robin Blackburn, the talented editor of Britain's New Left Review. Entitled After the Fall: The Failure of Communism and the Future of Socialism, it contains contributions by such big guns as Eric Hobsbawm--easily the ablest intellectual on the English-speaking Left--as well as E. P. Thompson, Fred Halliday, Frederick Jameson, Juergen Habermas, and others. The good news is that the left-wing intellectuals have discovered that markets and even private property are necessary to economic rationality, growth, and development. Mr. Blackburn, to his credit, even calls for a belated engagement with the thought of von Mises and Hayek. Those of us who for decades unsuccessfully pleaded for such a course, and for a recognition that private property is necessary for a civilized political life, ought to be pleased. But alas, to invoke a famous line from Lenin, it is one step forward, two steps back.

Despite some good moments, After the Fall makes dreary reading. The collapse of the socialist countries, it seems, has little to do with socialism per se; indeed, it opens the way to a "true" socialism freed of Stalinist perversion. That no socialist regime--no regime of the radical Left at any time in history--has ever avoided political tyranny and mass murder goes unremarked, apparently on the dubious premise that there is a first time for everything.

Virtually all the contributors reassert the Left's opposition to stratification, inequality of condition, and what they call authoritarianism, and they insist that the solution to all social ills lies in the expansion of radical, participatory democracy at all levels of social and institutional as well as political life. Thus, Goren Thorborn spoke for the others (with the implicit exception of Hobsbawm) when he hailed the women's movement for what he correctly called its "radical individualism."

To grasp the full extent of the failure of the socialist countries, we need to grasp the fundamental contradiction in their experience. Marxism-Leninism asserted the possibility of creating a "New Man" and a "New Woman" by superimposing an idealist philosophy of humanity on its tough-minded interpretation of history and politics.

True, those of us who gave up that illusion a long time ago continued to believe that socialism would nonetheless prove a superior social system. But we never could--and still cannot--force a discussion of underlying principles in left-wing circles.

Be that as it may, the Communists, with reckless abandon, projected a "withering away of the state" in socialist societies that were effecting a frightening concentration of power. In theory, the communist movement, like the Left as a whole, preached a radical egalitarianism and an opposition to "hierarchy" that its own policies mocked. For it never could dispense with structures of authority, discipline, and inequality. But neither the Communists nor the Left as a whole have yet admitted a fundamental error of vision and rejected all such utopianism.

With supreme historical irony, the Left, in one essential respect, has been remarkably successful, for no one has espoused its basically rosy view of human nature and of limitless progress more fervently than the champions of the free market, who share a dangerously flawed estimate of human nature as either intrinsically good or as, somehow, constructively selfish. The fashionable ideals of Left and Right include such pernicious doctrines as that each generation has not only the possibility but the "right" to begin anew; that the past should be considered a "dead hand;" and that our great object should be to liberate all human beings to express themselves fully. We are, in consequence, left with the most irresponsible version of radical individualism, not to say unbridled egotism--a version that logically ends with the reduction of morals, social standards, and historically evolved community mores to the status of commodities, the value of which can only be determined in a marketplace of ostensibly free and autonomous individual consumers.

To be sure, if  there has been "progress" in morals, it has emerged from historic struggles that have expanded the prerogatives of the individual over those of the collective in a manner consistent with social order. Accordingly, a free society may be understood as one that mediates the claims of the individual and the claims of the community so as to place the burden of proof upon those who would restrict freedom in the name of order. Socialism reversed that burden of proof, with blood-chilling results.

Historically, the critique of corporate capitalism has come from both the Left and the traditionalist Right. The Left has favored nationalization or one or another form of centralized and bureaucratic regulation. The first has failed, and the second has exhibited such grave weaknesses that even its adherents are now calling for drastic reforms. The traditionalist Right, best exemplified in our own country by southern conservatives, has always denounced corporate capitalism for destroying private property and for creating a privatized version of socialist state property and faceless bureaucratic power. Traditionalists have, in effect, called for a return to small property and to the society of independent proprietors that constituted the ideal foundation for a republic of enlightened and engaged citizens.

If the nostrums of the Left have failed, those of the traditionalist Right have proven impossible of realization. For all the gnashing of teeth in journals like Chronicles, no one has yet satisfactorily replied to the neo-conservatives' taunt that a thorough dismantling of the welfare state is no longer politically possible or socially desirable. Nor have the traditionalists yet faced a dilemma of their own making. For they have long criticized capitalism for throwing weaker peoples onto the garbage heap of competitive struggles, and they have counterposed Christian stewardship manifested in institutions like the family, the church, and self-governing communities. But they have constantly denounced corporate capitalism for destroying those institutions and communities. One would think, therefore, that they would respond seriously to those on the Right--say, Jack Kemp, Irving Kristol, or William Bennett--who insist upon a reorientation of government, rather than a patently utopian rejection of it. Regrettably, most traditionalists refuse on principle to do so, while in practice they sensibly rally to state intervention against the moral decadence they hate and fear.

While the Left fumes over "Reaganomics," the traditionalists have been drawn into a Reaganite coalition that stands for much that they abhor. For they know that the free market and corporate capitalism have been history's most relentless and successful solvents of traditional values. It was, at least until recently, the genius of William Buckley in ideological work and of Ronald Reagan in party politics to forge a right-wing coalition out of disparate elements that stand at opposite philosophical poles. Southern conservatives know that Mr. Reagan is essentially a right-wing liberal, indeed a progressive. His optimistic view of human nature should warm the heart of liberal theologians;  his celebration of limitless material progress reaches poetic heights;  and his devotion to the free market could hardly be stronger. In short, his radical individualism and egalitarianism represent everything the southern conservatives have always loathed.

Southern conservatives rallied to Mr. Reagan for two reasons. First, as a matter of principle, they see socialism, big government, and the welfare state as the main enemy, and see Reaganism as the best politically available way to fight it. And second, Mr. Reagan takes traditionalist ground on social values and stresses family, church, and community, rather than the state. On these questions, he sounds very much like his southern admirers--much as Mr. Bush does whenever it suits him. And it is likely to suit him just fine in the months ahead. But southern conservatives do regard capitalism as history's greatest destroyer of their cherished traditional values. Whatever their misgivings, they know that Mr. Reagan has had every right to celebrate capitalism as the greatest revolutionary force in world history.

This contradiction has long plagued traditionalists, and it is now reappearing in the rebellious right-wing coalition that is rallying to Mr. Buchanan and that, I believe, has a chance to thrive in the years ahead, notwithstanding the results of this year's primaries. The Buchanan coalition, as you know, includes such disparate groups as traditionalists and free-market libertarians. Together, they defend traditional values, insisting, in the admirable words of Murray Rothbard, that to be a libertarian does not mean to be a libertine. Which is all well and good, but it does not answer the traditionalists' fundamental argument that human beings are frail creatures who, in a free market in which morals are commodities, will often choose to buy vice rather than virtue. Both groups also oppose big government. But while the traditionalists distrust the federal government and interference with private property, they also believe in the sinful nature of man--and therefore recognize the need for measured social repression. The libertarians, in contrast, would transform society itself into one grand marketplace for morals and everything else. As disagreements go, people have been known to kill each other over much less.

The era into which we are plunging features an unprecedented concentration of power in multinational corporations or "conglomerates." These corporations compete with each other and fall well short of constituting a conspiratorial oligopoly, but the world economy they increasingly dominate could not, without a lapse into high comedy, be confused with an international free market. Unless all signs deceive, the economy of the twenty-first century will be increasingly global, concentrated, integrated, and hierarchically directed. Private property and markets bid fare to result in vastly expanded production and distribution. To the chagrin of the Left, this new stage of capitalism may well generate the kind of gross economic performance that socialism long promised. The question remains: Can a global corporate economy sustain a civilized society while it breaks all records for producing commodities and inventing new ones?

Yet, for all of the Left's concessions--indeed, capitulation--to radical individualism, it continues, despite rhetorical bows, to choke on the claims of private property. It has begun to understand that a society without private property condemns millions of people to poverty and deprivation, but it resists the evidence that such a society also assaults the dignity of the individual and invites political despotism. In defense of the Left, however, it does sense that the largest and most powerful sectors of the economy are irresponsibly private in their exercise of power over the lives of individuals and communities. For the broad property base celebrated by our Founding Fathers as the necessary foundation for a republican polity continues to erode, and even the minority who actually participate in the formal ownership of corporate property have less and less influence over the larger decisions that influence their lives.

The shopworn calls of the Left for "democratic control" and "workplace democracy" have little to offer. At the root of our problem lies the question of property, which has everywhere been subject to some measure of regulation and to politically imposed limitations. It has nonetheless served as a baseline in our society, with all attempts at limitation and regulation thrown on the defensive. Continuing quarrels over who should draw the lines and where and how they should draw them promise little without a redefinition of property that combines the historically established claims of private property with full attention to the evils that have proven intrinsic to it.

Social property means property on which the community lays essential claims but which is placed in the hands of individuals who may not be deprived of it except under carefully specified and constitutionally sanctioned conditions. The unwillingness of the Left to discuss such matters flows, I believe, from its continued romance with socialism. Thus, with studied inconsistency, the same Left that advocates individual rights in such matters as abortion wants no part of individual rights in economic ownership. It refuses to recognize, for example, that the entrepreneurship and innovation upon which even social justice depends requires that property holders must be able to pass a substantial part of their estates to their heirs. In one respect, a perverse kind of consistency may here be in evidence. The demand for inheritance rights flows, first and foremost, from a strong sense of family, and the Left today, however irrationally, seems determined to destroy the family as society's core institution.

In any case, the radical egalitarianism of the Left renders it incapable of a response. Take a simple case: Corporate executives and economic managers must have the power to impose efficiency and provide goods to the greatest possible number of people. That much should be recognized even by those who want business subject to the equivalent of constitutional limitations that only a popular stake in property ownership could provide. Let us grant that a popular stake in property ownership, to be meaningful, must include a voice in decision-making. But the exigencies of nation-states embedded in a modern world economy require that that stake in decision-making be indirect, roughly analogous to republican representation with considerable power entrusted to authorized leaders--in this case self-selected entrepreneurs and corporation-selected managers, rather than publicly elected officials. This measure of economic democracy has little to do with a hopeless and destructive "participatory democracy" that would politicize everything, homogenize everything, assail all authority and leadership as illegitimate, and proceed on the assumption that equality of condition could ever replace some form of stratification and hierarchy.

Much more than the economy is at stake. Honest celebrants of the free market and its supposed corollary, parliamentary democracy, acknowledge that the beautiful liberal society they see in the making will be morally open-ended. Morality and social standards are themselves being transformed into commodities. We face the collapse of the family, the denigration of women, pornography--including the abomination of child pornography--appalling levels of violent crime, drugs, the flouting of virtually all authority as illegitimate and oppressive, flagrant contempt for the religious sensibilities of our neighbors: You may fill in the litany.

Now, celebrants of the free market have earned the right to call themselves the true egalitarians and democrats of our time. Their premises about human nature and the relation of freedom to society are barely distinguishable from those of the radical Left, and they may fairly claim to be superior to their strange bedfellows in logic and consistency of doctrine. Since free-market right-wingers join their radical left-wing adversaries in espousing a rosy view of human nature, it never occurs to them that, if completely free to choose, most people might succumb to temptation and choose commodities that are exciting, filthy, and "sophisticated" to commodities that are wholesome, conventional, and boring.

All around us--from Right to Left--we hear of a moral crisis: The family is disintegrating, with nothing to replace its great social functions. Divorce rates are rising to such improbable heights that we may now speak of sequential polygamy and polyandry as the norm. With extraordinary cynicism, liberals and leftists even claim to defend some new and higher concept of the family, while they encourage homosexuality, "alternate life styles," and every assault on parental authority and family stability.

For the rest, the widespread use of drugs, which sustains a vast criminal empire, apparently cannot be arrested. "Crime in the streets" and the decline of "law and order," however much invoked as racist code words, are in fact grave matters, not least for the black people who constitute the principal victims.

More than anything else, the broadened attack on the family exposes the Left as the cultural and ideological cutting-edge of the new international bourgeoisie. The more extreme radical feminists are brutally frank. For them and for much of the Left, the family is indeed the cradle of the state, the fountainhead of all authority, the most dangerous enemy of egalitarian nostrums. The attack on "patriarchal authority" quickly reveals itself as an attack authority per se and, despite a communitarian gloss, as an attack on community-defined moral constraint. To take a single example: The radical feminists of NOW have sustained Patricia Ireland's "right" to supplement her husband with a lesbian lover. Simultaneously, they demand that homosexual relations be recognized as marriages at law and in social policy. Thus, Ms. Ireland and her supporters, in effect, have accepted, not merely infidelity but bigamy as legal and social norms.

Or consider a more formidable group of left-wing theorists--those associated with the Critical Legal Studies movement. In every book or article of which I am aware, they relentlessly assault "illegitimate authority," and, when on the attack, they often perform admirably in exposing palpable injustices. But I defy anyone to find a concept of legitimate authority anywhere in their work.

Our nation's political institutions and ideals rest on the declaration that, as a self-evident truth, all men are created equal. Taken literally, no sillier statement could be imagined. If anything at all is self-evident, it is that no two human beings have ever been created equal. Our Founding Fathers were neither fools nor hypocrites. When they declared the equality of all men--that is, of all human beings--they meant what they said. They meant that we are equal in the sight of God, share a moral sense of right and wrong, and are entitled to respect and dignity. But they would have scoffed at the proposition that every human being was the intellectual, physical, or political equal of every other.

The popular doctrine of "equality of opportunity" solves nothing. For contrary to the ideology of the marketplace, there never has been and never could be "a level playing field" in a world that consists of markedly unequal people. Since no two people are likely to be able to start with precisely the same advantages, equality of opportunity translates in action as a guarantor of the original inequality. Thus traditionalists have always attacked the doctrine of equality of  opportunity as an invitation to social radicalism--to an agenda that ends with an unattainable and demagogic demand for equality of condition.

We may speak honestly as egalitarians and democrats but only with Churchillian restraint. Recall C. S. Lewis's witticism that we should be democrats because, since men are sinful and easily tempted into depravity, no one should be entrusted with more than minimal power over others. With Lewis, we need not disagree with Aristotle's assertion that some men are fit only to be slaves. But we must reject slavery--and all unnecessary concentration of power--because we see no men fit to be masters. The republican democracy of the Founding Fathers demands an ultimate resort to the will of the people as the repository of sovereignty. But democracy, to mean anything, must mean majority rule, and, as Clarence Thomas tried to explain to an uncomprehending Senate committee, majorities, if unchecked, often become fearfully tyrannical.

Respect for the dignity of the human personality and for the maximum expansion of individual freedom consistent with social safety are placed at high risk in a society that tries to democratize everything and, worse, insists that its democracy be "participatory." It is not possible to make wise and socially constructive decisions about everything by counting votes. A modern economy could not function that way, and neither could many of our most precious institutions. The extent of democratic participation in everyday life must be determined within communities and institutions and not by ideological fiat. Freedom and democracy are compatible, but they have always been mutually wary bedfellows. The sooner we end the pretense that they are identical, the better our chances of attaining the best society we are capable of.

The consequences of the ever-more strident egalitarianism of both Left and Right appeared starkly in the infamous Senate hearings on the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court--that attempted high-tech lynching, as he justifiably called it. Poor Anita Hill--just a simple country girl. Surely we should understand the reasons for her ten-year silence--even when a man she described as a malicious pig was being elevated to the most powerful appellate federal court in the country, where he would decide cases of the greatest urgency for women. Now, the general arguments invoked do have great force for the overwhelming majority of working and professional women--perhaps as many as 95 percent of them. We should understand their reluctance to speak up and file charges in cases of sexual harassment, not to mention rape. For they face painful conditions that ought forcefully to be corrected.

But Anita Hill, by choice, entered the ranks of the  remaining 5 percent--entered the "political class" and put both her hands on the reins of power. She therefore assumed the heavy responsibilities and duties that should accompany all claims to political, institutional, and bureaucratic power. To allow any such person to excuse her silence is to trivialize the travail of the working women who are in fact often caught in a terrible vise and in whose name she and her handlers have had the temerity to speak.

Why then, did the Republicans join the Democrats in obscuring this central issue? Incredibly if inadvertently, William Buckley and the editors of National Review have provided an illuminating clue. Repeatedly, these advocates of law and order have called for soft penalties for white-collar criminals, especially big businessmen who are caught with their hands in the till. It seems that, with the jails overcrowded, we should note that such criminals are unlikely to repeat their crimes and that, besides, they are being severely punished by a loss in social status and money.

By current standards, Professor Hill and those genteel crooks have every right to invoke their respective excuses for what, in other days, would have been taken as a betrayal of public trust. (I say nothing of bad character and therefore, in Professor Hill's case, of a strong reason not to believe a word she said.)  After all, egalitarian and radical-democratic premises make it virtually impossible for us to speak of a "political class" or to admit that, yes, a well-ordered society must necessarily acknowledge elites with duties and responsibilities to accompany their formidable privileges and power. Professor Hill thereby becomes the soul-sister of every beleaguered secretary with children to feed and nowhere to turn for protection against male abuse. That people who enjoy society's privileges and wield considerable power over others ought to be held to rigorous standards of behavior and to understand that they are what these days are called "role models," apparently does violence to the delightful pretense that we live in--or should aspire to live in--a classless society.

The American Left is unprepared to reevaluate its position on such issues, as its total incoherence on foreign policy forcefully demonstrates. To the extent that it has a foreign policy, it consists of a knee-jerk hostility to virtually anything that any conceivable American government might do. Thus the Left reacted mindlessly to the Gulf War. Its leading spokesmen knew all about the Iraqi regime, which was in the process of building nuclear weapons and had already used other weapons of mass destruction. They knew that the Ba'ath Party arose in the 1930s with an unabashedly Nazi ideology, and that it had a long record of butchering communists and other left-wingers. One might have thought that, at the very least, these trifles would have evoked some concern on the Left. But all that its spokesmen chose to see was Washington's hostility to a Third World regime. And since the United States is not really a classless society and is, to boot, a great power, it follows that its policies must be opposed, no matter what the circumstances.

Consider the depths of this irrationality. The Left stands for economic regulation and a measure of popular control, both of which, in a world of sovereign national states, would be difficult to effect without a "new world order." Only the content of that order should remain in question. What makes the current drift into a new type of unregulated or privately regulated world economy so ominous is the irresponsibility of its leaders. They may well be decent men of social conscience, but their primary concern must be with the profits of their particular sectors in a vigorously competitive world market. With the best of intentions, they could hardly be expected to feel responsible if tens of thousands of people at home and millions abroad have to be written off as uncompetitive and beyond salvation.

I do not wish to contest the insistence of free-trade theorists that in an open world market all nations would benefit economically. Let us assume that they would. But first, that market carries with it a powerful tendency to compel the homogenization of cultures as well as economies, and many peoples reasonably consider the price much too high. And second, some kind of world political order, in whose justice all peoples could repose confidence, would be necessary. For in a world of nation-states, political independence must depend on the military power that industrial development makes possible, even if it comes at the cost of a dose of economic distortion.

The Left, which one might think well positioned to take up these questions, condemns itself to irrelevance, in no small part because its mindless anti-Americanism renders it incapable of a sober analysis of the exigencies of international power. Our new America-firsters, who joined the Left in opposition to the Gulf War, are not in much better shape. Suppose we grant that, ideally, political power should rest with independent nation-states and, in our own country, should be returned to states and localities. Suppose we agree to view all attempts to concentrate power in the national government with suspicion. To try to disperse economic power in a world economy controlled by multinational corporate conglomerates would mean to disperse only the least significant kinds of power and to leave ourselves open to domination by those very faceless corporate bureaucrats whom the traditionalists as well as leftists are trying to rein in.

The emergence of a large number of new nations exposes a similar problem. The cry for self-determination arises not only in Eastern Europe but everywhere, and constitutes, in part, a desperate attempt at self-assertion by peoples whose lives and national cultures are in danger of being swallowed by a homogenized international marketplace and attendant cosmopolitanism. But small and economically weak nation-states--even those in political revolt against international centralization--would be grist for the mill of those in command of a global economic system, whether one that is genuinely international or a consortium of a few powerful nations.

On these matters, the Left rather than the traditionalist Right is playing the more destructive game. The denigration of our country and of Western Civilization proceeds apace, especially in our colleges and schools, and, despite all pretenses, it constitutes a frontal assault on the constitutional order that alone makes freedom and democracy viable. Increasing numbers of students are being taught that the history of Western Civilization has been a history of slavery and colonialism, racism and sexism, oppression and social injustice. And indeed it has been. But few are being taught that the same could be said about the history of every other great--and not-so-great civilization. The West has been different in that it, and it alone, has generated effective moral crusades and mass social and political movements in opposition to those enormities.

The American nation, from its very beginnings, has embraced many peoples, but its genius has been its ability to forge them into a single nationality and people. Under the cover of "diversity" and "multiculturalism"--intrinsically unexceptionable slogans--the reactionary tendencies within the Left have been mounting a ferocious attack on the very idea of an American nation, nationality, and people. They have especially aimed at the peoples of northwestern Europe, who, in fact, did make the original and decisive contributions to the formation of our nation. The blows fall especially on the values and political institutions that the British peoples, in particular, implanted in North America. Now, foremost among those values and institutions have been individual freedom and a representative democracy that respects minority rights. No genuine respect for the contributions of diverse peoples to American life is possible without equal respect for the political culture that has provided the context for those contributions. And on precisely this issue the liberals, on our campuses and in the national Democratic Party, are letting themselves be wagged by their radical tail.

But there is precious little in right-wing marketplace ideology to combat this onslaught. To the contrary, as the capitulation of many big corporations, foundations, and universities demonstrates, the assault readily serves the purposes of those for whom nationalism looms as a major obstacle to global economic centralization. And here, the traditionalists, for all of their occasional irrationalities, are displaying sound instincts. Just as the emergence of small and economically weak nations provides an opportunity for exploitation, so does the loss of national purpose in large and powerful nations. In this and other ways, the cultural program of the Left performs yeoman service for the international big business Establishment it is supposedly attacking. I only hope that the Establishment is as perceptive as Lenin was in recognizing its own "useful idiots."

The United States has had a generous policy of welcoming people from abroad, but no country has a moral obligation to welcome those who are unwilling to accept to its national culture and to raise their children as nationals of the host country. The new immigrants are not the problem, and it is sad to watch Mr. Buchanan and his supporters turn on them. If we reject racist arguments, there is no reason to believe that these newcomers would prove any more resistant to assimilation than their European predecessors--unless, of course, our media, schools, and political leaders preach such resistance a noble cause. The problem, then, lies with those who are now campaigning against the very idea of an American nationality or, worse, who virtually define American nationality as the criminal oppression of those invited to assimilate.

The black situation is a different matter--so different that I must bypass it today, except for one observation. With the collapse of socialism and its pet nostrums, a triumphant Right trumpets the free market and the ideology of unbridled individualism as the solution to all ills that may be considered curable. Yet this solution, at best, offers no more than a way out for a minority of blacks, while a large majority is tossed upon a scrapheap and kept there by police power. We shall, it seems, simply have to live with the unpleasant thought that millions of people must be written off as losers in a competitive struggle in which we pretend that they supposedly had a chance to participate as equals.

It should be enough to ask: Could this nation, without losing its soul, tolerate the realization of the statistical projections of 75 percent of black males dead, on drugs, or in jail by the age of twenty-five? And with 50 percent of black teenagers out of school and 40 percent--three times the rate of whites--out of work, no one need be surprised at this statistical projection. Behind these statistics, as we all know but somehow cannot discuss openly, lies not merely the problem of the unemployed and underemployed, but of ever larger numbers of the unemployable. Yet the emerging new world economic order could live comfortably with all of this--at least up to the point at which any of it seriously threatens business.

I wrote those lines before the recent Los Angeles riots and would now add only one thought. If we are, as a nation, as yet unwilling to confront these issues, so are we unwilling to confront their flip-side. A government--any government--that cringes in the face of massive looting, rioting, and defiance of social order does not deserve to survive and probably will not long survive. If the American people are forced to choose between urban terrorism and authoritarian repression, it would be surprising if they did not choose the latter. And they would have every moral as well as political sanction for doing so. For if any "right" is well grounded in human nature, historical experience, and common sense, it is the right of self-preservation.

I began by suggesting that the collapse of socialism has exposed the false premises on which the Left has proceeded, but that it has done so at a time in which the Right is embracing many of those premises--notably, personal liberation and radical egalitarianism. And I have tried to suggest that the great questions of our time require a simultaneous reassessment of socialist and bourgeois assumptions. For in truth, I do find it hard to believe that, however much we must accept a market economy, we could expect to live as civilized human beings in a society that makes the market the arbiter of our moral, spiritual, and political life. Thus traditionalists and neo-conservatives both properly are calling for a reexamination of the relation of church and state and of religion and society. But they must know that the obstacles include the capture of our mainstream churches by theological as well as political liberals who have manifestly repudiated virtually all of the essentials of historic Christian doctrine and who are prepared to defeat the purposes of institutional autonomy by subjecting their churches to prevalent political ideology.

In any case, I also know that I could be making the wish father to the thought--that a market society may well be what we are going to get. Forty years ago, Richard Weaver, the great southern conservative social theorist, opened his searing book, Ideas Have Consequences, by observing: "There is ground for declaring that modern man has become a moral idiot....For four centuries every man has been not only his own priest but his own professor of ethics, and the consequence is an anarchy which threatens even that minimum of consensus of value necessary to the political state." Weaver thereupon plunged into a brave effort to rouse the faithful to struggle for something better. Yet even he, reflecting on the ravages of what he called the "hysterical optimism" of modern man, felt compelled to consider a grim possibility: "Whether man any longer wants to live in society at all or is willing to accept an animal existence is a question that must be raised in all seriousness." May I respectfully suggest that, while you celebrate your impressive victory over socialism, you consider that, yes, Weaver's question must be raised--and in all seriousness.

But to do so would require a reevaluation of democracy and its limitations in the spirit of the republican origins of our nation, and it would require a scuttling of radical individualism and egalitarianism. I do not agree with those who, on grounds of a supposed realism, protest that frank talk on such matters would be politically suicidal. Yes, Americans would fiercely and justifiably reject an arbitrary summons to deference, but these are the same Americans who are demanding effective action from leaders who are willing to assume responsibility and act boldly when necessary.

Let us agree that respect for the dignity of the individual--for that which Christians call the irreducible element of divinity in everyman--must be defended at all hazards. The terrible human cost of the socialist experiment ought to have driven that lesson home once and for all. But the perversion of that doctrine into an ignoble dream of individual liberation, whether in its communist or free-market form, has proven the most dangerous illusion of our time. For the battered remnants of the Left, as for all others, the struggle for a humane, just, and responsibly free society will have to begin with the repudiation of that illusion.

Appendix on the Black Experience

The black experience in America is another matter. Unlike other peoples, who were absorbed into a national culture they enriched by their Old World experiences, blacks came as slaves whose masters imposed a strange new religion; assaulted their family relations and indeed denied them legal sanction for any family at all; and did everything possible to destroy their African cultures while denying them access to much in white American culture. As a rich and many-sided scholarship has demonstrated, the blacks not only survived physically, they survived spiritually by forging a culture that interpenetrated with white culture and yet emerged as an Afro-American culture apart.

The black experience differed from that of European immigrants in another way. However harsh the discrimination against the Irish, Jews, Italians, and others, they did steadily force their way into business, the professions, and positions of political power. They did not face anything analogous to the kind of racism that put them wholly beyond the pale, and, in consequence, they were able to consolidate every upward movement in the socioeconomic scale.

For blacks the reverse was true. Repeatedly, they were hurled backwards from positions won through hard struggles. Thus, when freedom came to slaves in cities like New York--when, paradoxically, they found themselves deprived of the protection of their masters--skilled blacks of all kinds were driven from their trades by white violence. This widespread northern pattern recurred during Reconstruction in the South, when a nascent black leadership class, formed in the interstices of the slave regime, was crushed by legal and illegal methods designed to maintain racial dictatorship. Indeed, until recent decades, most of the so-called race riots in American cities were actually white assaults on black communities. And those singled out for the hardest blows were not the antisocial elements suspected of some offense or other, but precisely the successful, upwardly mobile, "respectable" blacks who had accepted the standards of the white middle class--who had become uppity and forgotten their place. Until recently, there was virtually no room at the top--or in the middle--for blacks who tried to play by the rules of the marketplace and of bourgeois society.

The enforced segregation that replaced slavery did provide room for a small professional and middle class within the black community itself but virtually for none in the larger society. In consequence, the black cultural development of slavery times was able to flower, along with the cultural denigration that constantly threatened to overwhelm a people trapped by an unparalleled racial enmity and with little hope of rising above poverty. Segregation, however deplorable, did strengthen the cultural strivings for an autonomous cultural and community development.

And by no means just cultural strivings. For as W. E. B. DuBois emphasized in his famous critique of Booker T. Washington, blacks were entering the world of cities and modern industry at the moment at which the triumph of big business was ending the possibility for the creation of substantial black big bourgeoisie. The tragedy of Booker T. Washington's efforts, from this point of view, lay not so much in his accommodation to white power, which could be defended as a necessary tactic for a people at bay, but in his dream of black participation at the top of a business society that no longer had much room at the top. It is noteworthy that DuBois himself ended not only as a socialist and then a communist, but as a strong supporter of much of the black-separatist program he had long opposed.

It is true that today room is appearing for a minority of blacks in the professions and lower ranges of the corporate structure. It is also possible that we are witnessing a disintegration of the authentic black culture to which I have referred. But even the wholesome changes are occurring in the worst possible way and with ominous effects. Permit me to double back a bit and elaborate briefly on the cultural question. Religion provides a case in point. Blacks have not only preferred to worship in their own churches and in ways that reveal African influences. They have developed distinct theological perspectives on Christian doctrine. From slavery times onward, their preferred doctrines of sin and soul have also revealed strong African influences that have served as counterpoints to orthodox Euro-Christian doctrine. For example, they rejected the doctrine of original sin while southern whites remained strongly attached to it, and they reinterpreted the nature of sin and of the soul so as to reduce the emphasis upon a one-on-one relation to God and to include an equal emphasis on the relation of the individual to the collective spirit of both earthly community and the kingdom of the other world. The political aspects of these African-based adaptations of Christianity contributed enormously to their ability to survive the rigors of slavery and racism.

To be sure, these differences with white Christians have been increasingly obscured, for the white churches have, for better or worse--I fear mostly worse--abandoned orthodoxy for massive concessions to basically Unitarian, Universalist, and other doctrines once regarded as flagrantly heretical. Even in the South, The Word has largely been abandoned for The Spirit--with the Spirit interpreted to mean whatever individuals want it to. I do not wish to ruffle anyone's religious sensibilities, but I must confess that when I hear preaching in the mainstream churches these days, I cannot help thinking that Flip Wilson's Reverend LeRoy and "The Church of What's Happening Now" satirize white churches even more readily than black.

Similarly, much in family life, sexual mores, and the work ethic that represented necessary and often admirable black adjustments to a painfully oppressive reality seem much less startling to whites today since, superficially, similar attitudes are now the rage. But what constituted strategies for survival for a people at bay in the one case have now emerged, in a radically different context, as celebrations of self-indulgence and the abandonment of time-honored moral standards.

A partially successful racial integration, praiseworthy in itself, threatens a disaster for black communities everywhere. Since the 1960s American society has been increasingly open to a minority of blacks who have access to the suburbs and white society. In consequence, the great majority of blacks are being stripped of their natural leaders and most solid elements, with their communities left to fend for themselves in what are euphemistically called "inner cities"--inundated with unprecedented levels of drugs, crime, hopelessness and supported by a soul-destroying public dole.

Throughout American history, the black response to slavery, segregation, and racism has been two-edged: integrationalist and black-separatist. And neither has worked. For reasons I need not belabor, the demands for a separate national-state have proven absurd in a country in which blacks hold no contiguous territory. But blacks have always struggled to combine the elements of the two responses--to project a black-national identity while fighting for equality in the life of the American nation. It should be enough to recall that Martin Luther King rejected separatism and black nationalism and promoted integration through a movement based upon black communities and their churches, with black leadership, and, for that matter, a black following, however many whites were allowed to participate as spear-carriers. Had Dr. King taken any other road, he would have had no prospects.

In these and many other ways, blacks continue to assert their claims as a nation-within-a-nation, no matter how anti-separatist their rhetoric and pro-integrationist their genuine aspirations. They do so because the black experience in this country has been a phenomenon without analogue. It has uniquely forged a people at once culturally and politically American and yet a people apart in discernible ways that provide a legitimate basis for demands for a measure of self-determination.

I am not among those who think that every problem has a solution, and I am prepared to believe black America will take the full blow implicit in ghastly statistical projections to which I have referred. But I am not prepared to believe that we can preserve our national soul and live as decent human beings if we let it happen. So far as I can tell, no one today is offering a solution that inspires confidence or even that makes much sense, and I am no exception. But the most chilling aspect of our present crisis is that, as a society, we have not even developed a framework within which a rational and humane solution could be found. And in this respect, the fate of black America stands as a particularly grim example of that which threatens America and the West on all fronts.

Appendix on Radical Liberalism

The irrationalities prevalent in Academia now wrack the Democratic Party and will, if I am not mistaken, send it down to a well deserved defeat in November. For those very irrationalities constitute the bedrock of the virtual merger of the radical Left with center-left liberalism on an ideological program of radical individualism incoherently assimilated to big-government intervention in institutional and indeed private life. The left-liberals have, to all intents and purposes, simply sloughed off the restraints formerly imposed upon them by religious convictions or a sense of civic responsibility. To be sure, the Left continues to speak the language of groups, collectivities, communities, but as Elizabeth Fox-Genovese--my favorite feminist--has demonstrated in her Feminism without Illusions, these communities, once scratched, turn out to be political associations of those who claim individual rights and entitlements against the collective interests of anything recognizable as a community.

Who on the Left, for example, is willing to show the slightest respect for the collective will of those communities that choose to restrict abortion or oppose affirmative action or provide even a modicum of religious morality in their schools? It should be clear--to take another example--that a collectivist solution to the terrible problems of black Americans would have to begin with a frank recognition of the historical claims of black nationalism. Yet the Left incessantly campaigns for collectivist measures while pretending to support a racial integration that makes sense only on individualist premises.

Eugene D. Genovese is a distinguished scholar in residence at University Center in Georgia.