The Anti-American Fallacy

Check out the "The Anti-American Fallacy" by Fred Siegel. It's about Bernard DeVoto, and the stand he made against the literary culture of his age. A sample:

DeVoto insisted on “the democratic view of life . . . that holds quite simply that the dignity of man is unalienable.” What the courage and sacrifice of World War II demonstrated was that the word bankruptcy best described not the lives of most Americans but rather the ideas of the literary culture that had so cavalierly pronounced judgment on the freedoms of modernity. It was ordinary men and women steeped in a way of life supposedly not worth saving who stepped forward to defend the freedoms on which the literary men depended.

Read the whole thing. Really.