Thorstein Veblen:
"The Red Terror and the Vested Interests"
THE OLD ORDER AND THE NEW

The Dial. A Fortnightly (New York)
Vol. LXVII (July 12 to November 29, 1919)

No. 798, September, 6, 1919, pp. 206.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
[206]
IN VIEW OF THE UNEXAMPLED INQUISITORIAL raids set afoot or connived at by panic-
stricken officials, and in view of the consequent increasing insecurity of 
person and property, it should be worth while to take stock of the situation and 
cast up an account of these disquieting circumstances that are driving the 
Guardians of the Vested Interests to distraction and frightening the 
Administration into a muddle of unreasoned violence and subterfuge. Notoriously, 
an uneasy situation has arisen out of the war, and more immediately out of the 
highly remarkable Peace in which the war has been brought to a provisional 
close. There is much at stake in the way of vested rights, and the state of 
things is precarious enough. These disquieting circumstances which go to make up 
this uneasy situation all converge to the general upshot that Bolshevism is a 
menace to the Vested Interests of privilege and property. The dread reality of 
this menace to the Vested Interests is not to be denied or made light of. The 
Vested Interests are doubtless riding for a fall. But there is also nothing to 
be gained by over-statement and extravagant alarm. Hysteria is neither 
comfortable nor convincing.

The guardians of the Vested Interests in America are doubtless wise in taking 
all reasonable precautions; they are presumably right in their evident belief 
that the continued rule of these Vested Interests is no longer so secure as they 
would like; but the Guardians would doubtless be still wiser to confine their 
efforts to reasonable precautions instead of screaming Wolf! Wolf! when there is 
no wolf in sight. But it is not easy to keep an even temper when the blessed 
beatitudes of special privilege are in a way to be compromised. The Guardians of 
these blessed beatitudes have been swept off their footing by the discovery that 
a division is beginning to run between the Vested Interests and the underlying 
population, and that the Vested Interests are presumably the weaker of the two 
parties. No one is to blame for this rapidly maturing division of the community 
into the kept classes on the one side and the underlying population from whom 
their keep is drawn on the other side. Nor should it surprise or alarm anyone 
who is at all informed, or willing to be informed, as to the run of facts in the 
world of business and industry the past few years. It is all an outcome of the 
dispassionate sweep of forces which no man can withstand or deflect. Only the 
Guardians of the kept classes have been unable to see the matter in that light, 
because it is the whole duty of these Guardians of the Old Order to endeavor by 
all means, fair or foul, to deflect the sweep of events over which they have no 
control. Such a change of base as is now coming in sight is in the nature of a 
moral impossibility for the keepers of the Old Order.

Meantime the experience of the war and after has brought the Guardians to 
realize that the continued rule of these Vested Interests of privilege and 
property runs at cross-purposes with the material welfare of the underlying 
population, and to realize also that the underlying population is beginning to 
be aware of the same fact. But the Guardians fail to realize that a very 
stubborn and massive fabric of settled use and wont surrounds and supports these 
vested rights of privilege and property, and that the American population is 
very stolid and submissive in everything that concerns its inbred prejudices. It 
is known and is beginning to be notorious that the Vested Interests of business 
are driven by business considerations to waste, mismanage, and obstruct the 
country's productive industry, unavoidably and unremittingly, and to divert an 
ever-increasing share of the country's income to their own profit; and the 
Guardians are no longer able to avoid all knowledge of this notorious state of 
things; and they have let these known facts drive them to the hasty conclusion 
that so soon as the population at large come to know the same facts and to take 
stock of them, there must immediately follow a headlong popular revolt and a 
sweeping disallowance of all these obstructive vested rights of privilege and 
property. The Guardians of the Vested Interests are presumably right in 
believing that the existing state of things in business and industry should 
logically lead to revolt and dispossession so soon as the facts of the case are 
known; but they overlook the main consideration, that any effectual movement of 
overturn will have to proceed not on grounds of logic, but on grounds of 
sentiment and the strategic disposal of forces. Hence their excessive alarm. 
Popular sentiment, as well as the strategic disposal of forces, is still 
securely to be counted on to uphold the established order of vested rights and 
Business as Usual. The Guardians have allowed the known facts of the case to 
unseat their common sense. Hence the pitiful spectacle of official hysteria and 
the bedlamite conspiracies in restraint of sobriety.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------