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“The formerly Marxist immigrant Jews [who were] at the forefront of the movement had trained rigorously for political warfare in the hothouse ideological environment of the Depression, most famously in furious debates in the alcoves of the cafeteria of the City University of New York. They came of age in the passionate belief that Communism was the inevitable wave of the future. They still suspected this—only now they dedicated their lives to vanquishing it, for the survival of the West in the ongoing war for the world. Détente, they believed, was a fatal delusion. The ever-expanding cadres of quisling liberals within both parties, who refused to grasp that Communism was determined to conquer the world, were the Kremlin’s objective allies.

“They also still believed, as the had in their Marxist youth, that the most effective way to change history was to organize in subterranean cells, vanguardists guiding the hand of history by deploying the power of ideas. Thus did they burrow within the establishment to tutor Republican and Democratic politicians in these dire imperatives before it was too late.

“Washington conventional wisdom had not been kind to them: it held that the world was ‘multipolar,’ and ‘interdependent,’ rivalry between the Communist and capitalist worlds no longer the central concern, that after the debacle in Vietnam the United States could no longer act as the world’s policeman.”

“Is this something that the government could help with? Of course it is. Community cannot be made by government prescription and mandate, but the government, in its proper role as promoter of the general welfare, preserver of the public peace, and forbidder of injustice, could do much to promote the improvement of communities. If it wanted to, it could end its collusion with the wealthy and the corporations and the ‘special interests.’ It could stand, as it is supposed to, between wealth and power. It could assure the possibility that a poor person might hold office. It could protect, by strict forbiddings, the disruption of the integrity of a community or a local economy or an ecosystem by any sort of commercial or industrial enterprise, that is, it could enforce proprieties of scale. It could understand that economic justice does not consist in giving the power to the most money.

“The government could do such things. But we know well it is not going to do them; it is not even going to consider doing them, because community integrity, and the decentralization of power and economy that it implies, is antithetical to the ambitions of the corporations. The government’s aim, therefore, is racial indifference, not integrated communities. Does this mean that our predicament is hopeless? No. It only means that our predicament is extremely unfavorable, as the human predicament has often been.

“What the government will or will not do is finally beside the point. If people do not have the government they want, then they will have a government they must either change or endure. Finally, all the issues that I have discussed here are neither political nor economic, but moral and spiritual. What is at issue here is our character as a people. It is necessary to look beyond the government to the possibility—one that seems to be growing—that people will reject what have been the prevailing assumptions, and begin to strengthen and defend their communities on their own.”