Thorstein Veblen "World Safe for the Vested Interests" THE OLD ORDER AND THE NEW The Dial. A Fortnightly (New York) Vol. LXVII (July 12 to November 29, 1919) No. , July 12, 1919, pp. 26. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [26] AMERICA'S SPOKESMEN SET OUT WITH A HIGH and well-advised resolve to make the world safe for democracy; but it was to be a democracy founded in commercialized nationalism, after the pattern of mid-Victorian times, which being interpreted means a democracy for safeguarding the vested interests of property. Now between the date of the President's high pronouncement on open covenants and safe democracy and the date of the peacemaking conclave there intervenes the unlooked for episode of Soviet Russia, the substantial core of whose policy is the disallowance of these same vested interests of property which make up the substantial core of that mid-Victorian commercialized democracy that was to be saved. It is easily to be seen that the Bolshevism of Soviet Russia is a menace to that commercialized democracy which mid-Victorian statesmen are concerned to perpetuate. Indeed, it is easily to be seen that the material interests of the underlying population in the other nations would incline them to fall in with its policy of disallowance, just so soon as these underlying populations come to realize that they have nothing to lose, which is believed to argue no distant date. At least such appears to be the universal conviction among those statesmen who speak for the maintenance of law and order. The situation therefore calls for heroic remedies. The safety of those vested interests of property that now make up the substance of things hoped for could not be jeopardized to make the world safe for a democracy devoid of vested interests. Bolshevism is a menace to these vested interests, and to any mid-Victorian statesman it is a truism that these interests must and shall be preserved from this menace at any cost the cost to be paid by the underlying population. This cost at which the menace of Bolshevism is to be averted involves more or less costly and undesirable working arrangements with all the forces of reaction, since none but the forces of reaction can be counted on to take the field openly in the prosecution of such an enterprise. And arrangements of this kind for the support and subsidy of reactionary enterprise, responsible and irresponsible in effect, for the support of any enterprise sufficiently reactionary to take the field cannot be openly arrived at by spokesmen of any democratic commonwealth. Hence the secret conclave and the smoke-screen of the seven censors. It is a sufficiently difficult passage, not to say a desperate quandary. However, it appears that under cover of night and cloud arrangements of this kind have been reached which it is hopefully believed will be sufficient; arrangements for the comfort and success of reactionary enterprise in Finland, Livonia, Esthonia, Poland, Czecho- Slovakia, Roumania, and the reactionary factions in Russia, north, south, and east. It is an unfortunate circumstance that all this making of terms with the forces of reaction for the safeguarding of the vested interests will not bear the light. It is unfortunate, but there is no 'help for it. Needs must when the devil drives, and Bolshevism is largely believed to be that breed. So it is devoutly to be hoped that these transactions that will not bear the light, these enforced but distasteful concessions of the democratic statesmen to the more shameless powers of reaction, will duly bring in that good fruit of domestic tranquillity which is bargained for at such a price and all beneath the spreading chestnut tree of commercialized nationalism. Quod bonum, felix faustumque sit! -----------------------------------------------------------------------------