New York, April 20—I have been kid-watching for the last few days, trying to explore the mood of those who listen and think about the current disorders, the causes and the cures thereof. I have been advancing at the colleges the thesis that precisely what is needed these days, properly understood, is very solid doses of repression: not in a spirit of vindictiveness, but in the spirit of teaching those who wonder, that the United States is very serious about surviving the current doubts about itself, and about the worthwhileness of its essential institutions.
I have advanced the proposition that the toleration of revolutionary dissent is something that America has traditionally practiced (at such times as we have practiced it) primarily as a demonstration of our own complacency, not out of respect for any abstract right to revolutionize. It is a high form of self-indulgence to stroll through Hyde Park and listen lazily to the orators who denounce the nation’s free institutions, while we know them to be utterly safe —rather like the child’s dream of waking in a jungle surrounded by wild beasts who however are powerless to hurt, because you are surrounded by a bubble of glass that is proof against their aggressions.
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