As between Jerome Zukosky (p. 40), who argues that the urban crisis is largely an “insubstantial construct,” and Irving Kristol (p. 44), who considers the crisis real but rooted far more deeply in the ideas so many of us carry around in our heads rather than the conditions under which most of us, white and black, now live in the cities of America, I myself on the whole tend to agree with Mr. Kristol, and especially with his emphasis on the role played in the creation of this crisis by the widespread dissemination of attitudes which used to be the lovingly nurtured patrimony of an intellectual elite and their concomitant debasement and vulgarization into the staples of a mass culture (or “counter-culture,” as its loyalists, in their characteristically pretentious style, like to call it) more complacent, more arrogant, and if not actually more philistine then at least more insidiously so than any the world has ever seen before. To the various trahisons of the New York Review against the defining values of the intellectual life which Dennis Wrong (p. 49) discusses, I would wish to add the central responsibility that periodical shares for the speed and efficiency with which this process of vulgarization has managed to consolidate itself during the past five years or so.

Now of the many ideas which have thus been cheapened through promiscuous cohabitation with every passing mind, the idea that we are experiencing a major historical crisis is quite possibly the most beaten and bedraggled of all. In this sense Mr. Zukosky, I think, is right in calling for skepticism as the most sensible response to the “crisis-mongering” which—as he is also right in seeing—has become the conventional wisdom of those who write editorials and those who take the “extremely rarefied translation of reality” produced by the newspapers and television for reality itself. Where Mr. Zukosky goes wrong, in my opinion, is in his notion that the idea of crisis comes from a mistaken or an intellectually parochial view of the world which can be corrected by exposure to the evidence. The truth is that this idea has never had much to do with the kind of evidence Mr. Zukosky is talking about. It is not an empirical observation, though it is by no means averse to posing as one when an opportune occasion arises; it is, rather, a political idea, and one whose potency depends in part on its not being recognized as such.

Not recognized, because a frank avowal of the purpose served by the idea would repel a great many people who, in all innocence and with the best will in the world, accept it at face value, and even many who not only accept but propagate it and would be horrified to discover—or in some cases merely to admit to themselves—its true political nature. This purpose, to describe it plainly, is the effort to destroy the democratic pluralism of the American polity and to replace it with some other form of government. How does the idea of crisis serve that purpose? By the judgment it pronounces on the capacity of the “system” to cope with the problems that confront it. The fact that serious problems exist, including even problems which are not social at all and would persist under any conceivable set of political arrangements, is assumed to be sufficient testimony to such incapacity. Sometimes the “system” is said to “antiquated”; sometimes it is said to be remote and “unresponsive”; sometimes it is said to be rotten or corrupt. Often, with an effrontery which only fails to take the whole country’s breath away because the general degradation of the democratic idea of which Mr. Kristol speaks has dulled our collective political sensibilities, the oldest and still one of the very few democratic polities on earth—namely, the one that maintains a complex living existence in the United States of America—is even said to be undemocratic. Not long ago, for example, Robert Paul Wolff, who teaches philosophy of all things, declared that anyone who still believes that the United States is a bastion of democracy belongs in a mental hospital;¹ about a year after delivering himself of this authentically philosophical judgment, Professor Wolff could be found declaring his opposition to terrorism as a mode of social protest.² He did not explain on what ground of principle anyone who shared his view of the United States should refrain from acts of terrorism in order to bring it down. Or are we to suppose that his brave opposition to trashing and bombing constitutes a symptom of an unfortunate mental breakdown of his own? If so, it were better for us all that he not enjoy any too speedy a recovery.

To harp on the idea of crisis is in effect to declare a state of emergency in which extraordinary measures become necessary; at that point the enemies of democracy converge from all sides offering solutions unavailable to the antiquated or rotten or unresponsive system. It may be that they offer a species of Gaullism; it may be that they offer a species of totalitarian Communism; it may be that they offer a species of fascism; and it may be that they offer a species of nothingness out of the nihilism of their bitter souls. To be sure, none of these solutions presents itself by its proper name. Except for an occasional writer like Edgar Z. Friedenberg, the enemies of democracy are rarely frank in the profession of their true political beliefs; often, indeed, they seem unaware of the anti-democratic implication of the things they like to say. Conscious or not, however, the hatred of democracy, especially in the pluralistic form democracy takes in America, is well served by the idea of crisis whose prevalence is itself a major cause of the reality it purports to describe but which in fact it does not so much describe as help to call into being.

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p>¹ The New York Times Book Review, September 7, 1969.

² See his letter to the New York Times, September 13, 1970.