Orwell, American Style

The Journal of David Q. Little, by R. Daniel McMichael. Arlington House, $6.95

THAT COMMUNISM MIGHT SUCCEED in conquering America by some jiu-jitsu of intellectual warfare is dismissed in most political discussions as alarmist speculation. R. Daniel McMichael views the matter otherwise, and has made the idea of Soviet America the central premise of a convincing and well-written novel. “David Q. Little’ is a twentieth-century Everyman, a middle-class suburbanite who concentrates his energies on questions of material well-being and is determined, where ideological questions are concerned, not to “get involved.” In consequence, he finds himself very much involved in the destruction of his liberties, his family and his country. His moral confusions represent, in microcosm, the confusions of the nation at large. As the story opens, the United States has negotiated a “friendship treaty” with the Soviet Union, assertedly averting nuclear holocaust and aiming toward “convergence” of the capitalist and Communist systems. A disarmed America is placed under the jurisdiction of an international police force controlled from Moscow. The treaty machinery is by degrees deployed to secure Bolshevik mastery of America, a program which begins by systematic public warfare on various “right-wing extremists’ who had the temerity to oppose the treaty in the first place. The narrator begins as an enthusiatic supporter of the treaty, which he views chiefly as a device for insuring his own physical survival. But he soon finds himself pressed into service as a show trial witness against his employer, subjected to increasingly tight regulation of everything he says and does, converted to a bureaucratic cog in the fulfilment of irrational economic plans. By the time successive outrages convince him of the truth, the takeover is complete. Little loses his freedom, his home, his family, and at last sinks to a life of crime and mendicancy. THE POLITICAL deterioration of the United States is reflected in the personal deterioration of the narrator. Everyman Little finds himself singularly unequipped to deal with the crises and challenges that successively confront him. Taught from youth to evade hard questions, to mantle everything in gray, to adjust and agree, he is perfect meat for the Communists. He compromises himself down the ladder of degradation until there is nothing left—not even the material comforts he thought he was preserving. At one point, this allegorical little David attempts to make a stand against the Bolshevik Goliath. But he is too perfect a “pragmatist,” too well trained in convenient equivocation, not to see the ambiguous angle in every obscenity. He excuses himself from the combat. If one cannot know for sure that he is right, what’s the sense of risking home, job and car—not to mention life? Better to go along and get along, to repeat the same litany of peace and change and welfare that everyone else is reciting. The themes of personal and national decadence are interlaced at countless points in Mr. McMichael’s story, principally through the rationalizations employed by diverse liberal spokesmen to justify every new surrender as “a blow for peace that can be opposed only by extremists.’”’ Mr. McMichael’s most interesting character, an excellent parody of our reigning liberal theoreticians, explains things this way: There have been some extremists who are doing a disservice to the cause of lasting peace by darkly implying that somehow the treaty of friendship is going to change the Constitution. . . . I have been nearly twenty years studying and teaching the role of government. One of the first things we discuss in the classroom . is the fact that the Constitution cannot be changed unless either it is amended or a Constitutional Convention is held. Maybe I missed something in the newspapers, or maybe I didn’t hear the President’s State of the Union message correctly, but he didn’t say anythng about changing the Constitution, did he? This is perfect. Walter Lippmann himself could not have done better: the false premise, the marshaling of irrelevant expertise, the muffling of sanity in the counterfeit of argument. This is precisely the way many liberals think and talk, and it is the great strength of Mr. McMichael’s book that he has managed to portray this particular form of modern madness without overdoing it. Such fidelity to the real world around us characterizes Mr. McMichael’s book throughout. The society he portrays is Orwellian, but all the instruments of tyranny and confusion are taken from the present. Constant yielding to Soviet demands, pathetic maunderings about ‘“convergence,” blind willingness to accept virtually anything labeled as an antidote to war, the dismantling of our constitutional system, rampant crime and violence protected by the courts, “new morality” and the decadence of the churches—these key elements of McMichael’s drama did not, unhappily, have to be invented. They are leading principles of our everyday experience. The author has merely integrated them into a coherent whole and projected their logical consequences. The result suggests that 1984, American style, could well be upon us before we know it. ‘Among many well-handled themes is the book’s demonstration that the liberal mind, committed at all costs to certain terminal objectives, is impervious to factual refutation. There is in the liberal view no conceivable development, from too much poverty to too much affluence, which is not a reason for augmented collectivism— so that when government interference leads to inflation or permanent recession, these things merely become pretexts for still more intervention. In foreign affairs, Soviet advances made possible by previous efforts at appeasement are likewise taken as a pretext for still further appeasement. This, too, is a portrait from life. As the novel closes, Little sets out to rehabilitate himself and, in conjunction with other disenchanted citizens, to launch a resistance movement. He comes to realize that the ultimate reason for Communist success lies not within Communism, but within himself. The Bolsheviks could not have triumphed if the Littles of the world had not averted their gaze, alibied surrenders, and refused to address themselves to the hard realities of the cold war era. This is, on any reasoned assessment of the available data, an accurate presentation. Mr. McMichael has made his point impressively in a first novel which causes us to hope he will continue his speculations in other volumes yet to come.

MS

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M. Stanton Evans

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The Journal of David Q. Little, by R. Daniel McMichael. Arlington House, $6.95

THAT COMMUNISM MIGHT SUCCEED in conquering America by some jiu-jitsu of intellectual warfare is dismissed in most political discussions as alarmist speculation. R. Daniel McMichael views the matter otherwise, and has made the idea of Soviet America the central premise of a convincing and well-written novel. “David Q. Little’ is a twentieth-century Everyman, a middle-class suburbanite who concentrates his energies on questions of material well-being and is determined, where ideological questions are concerned, not to “get involved.” In consequence, he finds himself very much involved in the destruction of his liberties, his family and his country. His moral confusions represent, in microcosm, the confusions of the nation at large. As the story opens, the United States has negotiated a “friendship treaty” with the Soviet Union, assertedly averting nuclear holocaust and aiming toward “convergence” of the capitalist and Communist systems. A disarmed America is placed under the jurisdiction of an international police force controlled from Moscow. The treaty machinery is by degrees deployed to secure Bolshevik mastery of America, a program which begins by systematic public warfare on various “right-wing extremists’ who had the temerity to oppose the treaty in the first place. The narrator begins as an enthusiatic supporter of the treaty, which he views chiefly as a device for insuring his own physical survival. But he soon finds himself pressed into service as a show trial witness against his employer, subjected to increasingly tight regulation of everything he says and does, converted to a bureaucratic cog in the fulfilment of irrational economic plans. By the time successive outrages convince him of the truth, the takeover is complete. Little loses his freedom, his home, his family, and at last sinks to a life of crime and mendicancy. THE POLITICAL deterioration of the United States is reflected in the personal deterioration of the narrator. Everyman Little finds himself singularly unequipped to deal with the crises and challenges that successively confront him. Taught from youth to evade hard questions, to mantle everything in gray, to adjust and agree, he is perfect meat for the Communists. He compromises himself down the ladder of degradation until there is nothing left—not even the material comforts he thought he was preserving. At one point, this allegorical little David attempts to make a stand against the Bolshevik Goliath. But he is too perfect a “pragmatist,” too well trained in convenient equivocation, not to see the ambiguous angle in every obscenity. He excuses himself from the combat. If one cannot know for sure that he is right, what’s the sense of risking home, job and car—not to mention life? Better to go along and get along, to repeat the same litany of peace and change and welfare that everyone else is reciting. The themes of personal and national decadence are interlaced at countless points in Mr. McMichael’s story, principally through the rationalizations employed by diverse liberal spokesmen to justify every new surrender as “a blow for peace that can be opposed only by extremists.’”’ Mr. McMichael’s most interesting character, an excellent parody of our reigning liberal theoreticians, explains things this way: There have been some extremists who are doing a disservice to the cause of lasting peace by darkly implying that somehow the treaty of friendship is going to change the Constitution. . . . I have been nearly twenty years studying and teaching the role of government. One of the first things we discuss in the classroom . is the fact that the Constitution cannot be changed unless either it is amended or a Constitutional Convention is held. Maybe I missed something in the newspapers, or maybe I didn’t hear the President’s State of the Union message correctly, but he didn’t say anythng about changing the Constitution, did he? This is perfect. Walter Lippmann himself could not have done better: the false premise, the marshaling of irrelevant expertise, the muffling of sanity in the counterfeit of argument. This is precisely the way many liberals think and talk, and it is the great strength of Mr. McMichael’s book that he has managed to portray this particular form of modern madness without overdoing it. Such fidelity to the real world around us characterizes Mr. McMichael’s book throughout. The society he portrays is Orwellian, but all the instruments of tyranny and confusion are taken from the present. Constant yielding to Soviet demands, pathetic maunderings about ‘“convergence,” blind willingness to accept virtually anything labeled as an antidote to war, the dismantling of our constitutional system, rampant crime and violence protected by the courts, “new morality” and the decadence of the churches—these key elements of McMichael’s drama did not, unhappily, have to be invented. They are leading principles of our everyday experience. The author has merely integrated them into a coherent whole and projected their logical consequences. The result suggests that 1984, American style, could well be upon us before we know it. ‘Among many well-handled themes is the book’s demonstration that the liberal mind, committed at all costs to certain terminal objectives, is impervious to factual refutation. There is in the liberal view no conceivable development, from too much poverty to too much affluence, which is not a reason for augmented collectivism— so that when government interference leads to inflation or permanent recession, these things merely become pretexts for still more intervention. In foreign affairs, Soviet advances made possible by previous efforts at appeasement are likewise taken as a pretext for still further appeasement. This, too, is a portrait from life. As the novel closes, Little sets out to rehabilitate himself and, in conjunction with other disenchanted citizens, to launch a resistance movement. He comes to realize that the ultimate reason for Communist success lies not within Communism, but within himself. The Bolsheviks could not have triumphed if the Littles of the world had not averted their gaze, alibied surrenders, and refused to address themselves to the hard realities of the cold war era. This is, on any reasoned assessment of the available data, an accurate presentation. Mr. McMichael has made his point impressively in a first novel which causes us to hope he will continue his speculations in other volumes yet to come.