[CityJournal] Reality may fail to measure up to cocktail party assumptions, but the chit-chat of the better people rings on, unchanged.
During the thirties, in the period when Nazism was rising and the conditions of a second world war coalesced, fashionable opinion in Great Britain regarded Winston Churchill as a crackpot and extremist. He was deplorable.
One learns to distrust fashionable opinion. When I was a boy in Washington, D.C., the best people said that Whittaker Chambers was a dreadful fellow—a sinister little fat man with bad teeth, a strange and neurotic ex-Communist, not to be trusted. Ideologically fashionable people have their standard of Not Our Class, Dear. Chambers was N.O.C.D. Alger Hiss, on the other hand, was very much Our Class—slim, urbane, the Fred Astaire of the American establishment. |