Chambers was right, however, in the sense that Communists and Fascists betrayed the actual institutions they lived under in the name of an abstraction, whereas the others had not. Benedict Arnold and other loyalists to the Crown acted to preserve the system they lived under. So did the American founders who fought to defend what they considered “the rights of Englishmen,†which they believed the Crown had denied them. They fought for a reality they knew, while invoking abstract ideals to justify their rebellion and to articulate the principles they for the most part lived by. But Communists and Fascists were not defending any reality. Like contemporary radicals, they were motivated by an abstraction – the vision of a future that did not exist and had never existed, but which they were convinced they could create.
It is this abstraction, this monde ideal that accounts for the otherwise incomprehensible fact that for Communists “the future is more real than the present.†The belief in this “reality†is why radicals discount the apparent privileges, freedoms and benefits of the actual world they live in. Their eyes are fixed on the revolutionary future that is perfect and just. Measured by this impossible standard, any actually existing society – including America’s — is easily found deficient, even to the point where it is worthy of destruction.
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