AN AMERICAN ALARM WE are indebted to Professor Lerner for
a most able and stimulating challenge, with a title that could hardly be im- proved upon in this eleventh hour of the old civilisation. The alarm is sounded from an exceptional watch-tower. Mr. Lerner belongs to the radical intelligentsia of New York. He was for three years an associate editor of the Nation, and is now teaching law in one of the best of New England colleges.
The Crisis State is Professor Lerner's descriptive label for the forms of government under which all peoples are now struggling. The theories and techniques of the nineteenth century broke beneath the tide of forces for which there had been no serious preparation. The governing orders of the last age " identified lofty aims with class interest," being blind to the fact that the workers could not do other than apply the full democratic doctrine, since for them it was a matter of life and death. Liberalism is a soldier who has in the past " won many battles in the continuing war of the human spirit." But with the failure of parliamentarism and the coming of giant enterprise to replace the individual employer, the progressive parties were exposed as without dynamic political programmes and hence we have become aware of " the rootlessness of social theory in an era of fading liberalism." Fascism is no accident in contemporary Europe. Nor need we seek for an explanation of its amazing growth in the special conditions of Italy and Germany. Fascism, Professor Lerner argues, was implicit in all the systems and ruling philosophies throughout the century of capitalist industrialism. "The house of Fascist thought is built with bricks supplied by capitalist society everywhere." Given the crisis conditions of the post-War epoch, and the prevalent fear of dangers that "might arise from positive action to meet unemployment and collapse," and we have the result which is now so benumbing to that considerable portion of the business and professional classes which assumed that a - Fascist Government must of necessity uphold the established system ; " capitalists act as the dynamic for destroying, not only their opponents, but their own world."
Professor Lerner's subtitle is " The need for a militant democracy." To his mind " there is nothing so perilous and exciting as the adventure of democracy," and he is convinced that there is no alternative form of government that can be made tolerable for the world of tomorrow. But in the recent past we have been guilty of the worst indignity to democracy, by taking it for granted. Our political thinkers presented their opponents with the most effective of all weapons— patriotism and the national idea, with all the strength of the Past and its encrusted power of sentiment. Revolutions, says Professor Lerner, " are made by going with the strong emotional currents of the age "—as the Fascists saw at the outset, and Stalin realised in time to save the Soviets. Moreover, we have failed lamentably in political and social invention. We are entering upon the second decade of the greatest depression in history, and all creative movement is held up by " our idiot institutions," the weight of which is making a death-dance of activity within the Crisis State. In that agonised struggle it is later than we think. So this American voice proclaims. Its warning comes in the shape of a book that is at once cogent in logic, brilliant in style,
Previous page
