Young Man on the Make

Radicals of the thirties, Travers Clement has recently suggested, can be classified as repenters and dissenters. The former predominate.

Some magazines, such as Commentary, specialize in documents of repentance. The November 1953 issue carries an article by William Petersen called “Is America Still the Land of Opportunity?” He tries to show in ten pages that the opinion of most sociologists to the contrary notwithstanding, the America of a beautiful war economy is still a land of opportunity. Findings to the contrary are explained as distortions introduced by “scholarly myths,” Marxism and “nostalgic Americanism.” So far, the article is no different from scores of other exercises in repentance except for its especially shoddy logic.

But his conclusions are more interesting. He claims that “the United States… is becoming a socialist society” and that “the American economy is mixed but American culture is, in effect, socialist. It is based on the same essential factors — the enormous industrial production, the high and widely distributed income, the general distribution of equalitarian cultural values—that any socialist culture would rest on.”

One might at first surmise that Mr. Petersen suffers from a semantic aphasia, a disturbance of the symbol sphere; but on second thought another idea occurred to me. Far from being insane, the man is a genius. And this is how I reasoned: