In discussing the bigoted attitudes toward the general American populace which have become so widespread within the intellectual community in the past few years, James Hitchcock (p. 64) confines himself to examples drawn from domestic life, no doubt because that is the arena in which these attitudes have mainly found expression. Not long ago, however, the idea began to gain ground that the American people, in addition to being racists, materialists, and philistines, also share in a “moral or criminal culpability . . . in relationship to the Vietnam war.” The words I have just quoted were spoken by Dr. Robert Jay Lifton at a recent conference on “Questions of Guilt” to which his contribution consisted of what he himself describes as “a rather delicately stated version of collective guilt which . . . is relevant to us now in America.”¹ So far as Vietnam is concerned, Dr. Lifton takes it for granted “that guilt that can be judged externally and guilt that can be experienced subjectively is there.” Indeed, he says, “Living in America now in 1972 is sufficient cause to feel guilty” in itself. Unfortunately “that doesn’t mean that the majority of Americans so feel.” Either they lack the “moral sensitivity” to see that they share responsibility for the evil done in their name, or they lack the courage to acknowledge the guilt which, in spite of “blockage or numbing processes,” they actually feel. They are, then, triply damned: as criminals, as brutes, and as cowards.

The doctrine of collective guilt is a terrible doctrine. It holds individuals responsible for actions which they themselves never committed; and in Dr. Lifton’s “delicately stated version,” it even holds individuals responsible for actions which they have protested against or otherwise opposed. Thus, although everyone at the conference he was addressing has been a strong antagonist of American policy in Vietnam, he implicates them all—and himself as well: “I think that, since all of us are part of America and we, one way or another, live in the American realm and contribute to national and military efforts, we share a certain culpability. . . . I would venture to say that most of us in this room can think of certain moments where a certain exquisite conjunction of shared and very special private guilt came together.” Now, in my opinion, Robert Lifton can be accused of a great many sins: if, for example, he were to indict himself for shoddy thinking and unctuous moralizing, no one familiar with his writings would have any difficulty in concurring. But having consistently fought against American policy in Vietnam, he simply cannot be accused, by himself or anyone else, of complicity in what the American government has done there.

Be that as it may, and even supposing that American participation in the Vietnam war was criminal or immoral—rather than, as some of us have believed from the very beginning, tragically ill-conceived—in what sense were the American people responsible? The decision to enter the war was made by John F. Kennedy and his advisers; the decision to escalate the war was made by Lyndon B. Johnson and his advisers; and the decision to withdraw from the war gradually rather than all at once was made by Richard M. Nixon and his advisers. None of these major decisions owed much, if anything at all, to popular pressure. The people went along, but they were never enthusiastic over the war, feeling for the most part incompetent to judge and willing on the whole to give their leaders the benefit of the doubt. For America the war in Vietnam was not a people’s war, it was a war of the elites, conceived and executed by “the best and the brightest” who later—and with exactly the same dogmatic assurance—opposed and denounced what they alone had wrought. (Consider Daniel Ellsberg.) As for the people, most of them came to think that going into Vietnam had been a mistake in the first place, but that, once in, it would be a mistake to accept a humiliating defeat. In other words, they disagreed with the original judgment of “the best and the brightest” over the strategic necessity of American military intervention in Vietnam, and then they disagreed with the revised judgment of “the best and the brightest” as to the moral necessity of an unconditional American withdrawal.²

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I think Mr. Hitchcock is right to caution us against romanticizing the general populace and to remind us of the dangers of an unbridled majoritarianism. The people are not necessarily wise, nor are they necessarily virtuous, and populism must always carry with it a sinister potential. But Mr. Hitchcock is surely also right in pointing out that in the decade just past, “it has often been the general populace which preserved its sanity in the face of the peculiar hysteria of the highly educated” rather than the other way around. Mr. Hitchcock is here talking about the doggedness with which the general populace has skeptically resisted many of the disastrous schemes of the intelligentsia for reordering domestic affairs. Yet now that American military involvement in Vietnam has finally come to an end, we can see that with respect to the war the general populace has been equally resistant to “the peculiar hysteria of the highly educated”—whether that hysteria manifested itself in the anti-Communism of the early 60’s which got us into Vietnam, or the anti-Americanism of more recent years of which the doctrine of collective guilt revived by Robert Lifton is one of the more sickening symptoms.

¹ An edited transcript of the proceedings appears in the latest (Fall 1972) issue of Partisan Review.

² See “The Election and the National Mood” by Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab in the January COMMENTARY for the evidence on popular sentiment concerning both the decision to intervene and the idea of an unconditional American withdrawal.