The most important event in the recent history of ideas is the demise of the socialist dream. Dreams always die when they come true, and fifty years of socialist reality, in every partial and plenary form, leave little room for idealistic reverie. In the United States, socialism chiefly rules in auditoria and parish parlors, among encounter groups of leftist intellectuals retreating from the real world outside, where socialist ideals have withered in the shadows of Stalin and Mao, Sweden and Tanzania, gulag and bureaucracy.
The second most important event of the recent era is the failure of capitalism to win a corresponding triumph. For within the colleges and councils, governments and churches where issue the nebulous but nonetheless identifiable airs and movements of new opinion, the manifest achievements of free enterprise still seem less comely than the promises of socialism betrayed. If socialism is dead, in some sense intellectually bankrupt, morally defunct, as they say, why does the capitalist vision seem to teeter so precariously over the same ash can of history? Why do the same writers who most tellingly confute the collectivist argument sing the praises of free enterprise only in an almost elegiac tone, writing staunch conservative tracts that end in the cadences of a dirge for their favored beliefs?
The dirge is sung in varied harmonies and arrangements. But it is undeniably a dirge. It is a curious fact that the celebrated group of neoconservative intellectuals, heralded as saviors of business, discuss the nature and future of capitalism in the same dolorous idiom used by some of the chastened but still assured advocates of "socialism." Meanwhile, the intellectuals of the Old Right have usually shunned altogether the challenge of reconciling their philosophies and their economics, and they are equally unlikely to confide a belief that capitalism is in decline. William F. Buckley's National Review, which for two decades has waged brilliant battle for the free economy, publishes anti-Communist and Christian "socialists," if they are culturally conservative, with much of the enthusiasm and frequency that it devotes to the cause and philosophy of private enterprise. Conservatives give Solzhenitsyn and Malcolm Muggeridge, both impassioned critics of the works of business, a place in their pantheon equaled by no contemporary businessman or philosopher of capitalism. Both are great writers and inspired Christian voices, and perhaps there are moments when carping is beside the point. Still, it is important for conservatives to deny with some comparable passion that capitalism is a historic and moral failure.
Yet Daniel Bell could survey the writers of the Right over the last seventy-five years and conclude that "romantic or traditionalist, Enlightenment or irrationalist, vitalist or naturalist, humanist or racialist, religious or atheist--in this entire range of passions and beliefs, scarcely one respectable intellectual figure defended the sober, unheroic, prudential, let alone acquisitive, entrepreneurial, or money-making pursuits of the bourgeois world." This statement must be qualified, since many important thinkers have defended capitalism. But Bell is right that the defenses have usually not resounded clearly; they have been almost always faute de mieux, praising free enterprise for the lack of an alternative that accorded more easily with the writer's religious and aesthetic convictions and with his sense of the way in which the world was going. Capitalism has been presented as a transitory and conditional compromise: the worst possible system, as Churchill once said of democracy, except for all the others.
