The Liberal Line

Walter Berns’ new book1 would be a “must” for readers of national review even had he contented himself with doing that which we have already noticed, namely: making clear the incompatibility between the Liberal cult of freedom as the highest good and the requirements of good government as defined in the Preamble of our Constitution. Actually, however, Berns does much more than that: he pursues Liberal constitutional thought and practice to their very bases in Liberal political theory, and reads the Liberals the sternest lectures they have ever heard from an American political scientist. And the sternest of these lectures is in connection with the problem of loyalty.

Berns holds that the Smith Act, under which Eugene Dennis went to jail, adds a “new dimension” to our constitutional law: Congress, with the blessing of the Supreme Court in the Dennis case, has now given us a statute that makes it a crime to hold certain ideas. The “evil that Congress sought to prevent” in passing it was not the overthrow of the government by force and violence, but “advocacy of this idea”; the Act “does not say that such advocacy is bad only when there is a danger that it will lead to the overthrow, but . . . that such advocacy, like heresy of old, is always bad.” The question in the Dennis case, therefore, was whether, in passing such a law, Congress had exceeded its constitutional powers. “The case represents the end of a one-way street for our liberal justices who have regarded free speech as a right of American citizenship . . . [and it] might possibly contain a lesson worth our while to find and reflect upon.”

WK

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Willmoore Kendall

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Walter Berns’ new book1 would be a “must” for readers of national review even had he contented himself with doing that which we have already noticed, namely: making clear the incompatibility between the Liberal cult of freedom as the highest good and the requirements of good government as defined in the Preamble of our Constitution. Actually, however, Berns does much more than that: he pursues Liberal constitutional thought and practice to their very bases in Liberal political theory, and reads the Liberals the sternest lectures they have ever heard from an American political scientist. And the sternest of these lectures is in connection with the problem of loyalty.

Berns holds that the Smith Act, under which Eugene Dennis went to jail, adds a “new dimension” to our constitutional law: Congress, with the blessing of the Supreme Court in the Dennis case, has now given us a statute that makes it a crime to hold certain ideas. The “evil that Congress sought to prevent” in passing it was not the overthrow of the government by force and violence, but “advocacy of this idea”; the Act “does not say that such advocacy is bad only when there is a danger that it will lead to the overthrow, but . . . that such advocacy, like heresy of old, is always bad.” The question in the Dennis case, therefore, was whether, in passing such a law, Congress had exceeded its constitutional powers. “The case represents the end of a one-way street for our liberal justices who have regarded free speech as a right of American citizenship . . . [and it] might possibly contain a lesson worth our while to find and reflect upon.”