The child was given by God to the parents;rnhe was not given by God to the state.rnThis was by now a quaintly reactionary notion. What were childrenrnif not apprentice soldiers? Like their isolationist allies, thernCatholic Workers suffered years of “decline, suspicion, and hatred”rnduring the Good War. Girculation of the Catholic Workerrnplummeted from 190,000 in May 1938 to 50,500 in Novemberrn1944. By 1944, only nine of 32 Houses of Hospitality werernoperating.rnThe Cold War transmogrified the American right: anticommunismrnbecame its warping doctrine, yet a remnant ofrncantankerous, libertarian, largely Midwestern isolationists heldrnon, though the invigorating air of the 1930’s, when left andrnright might talk, ally, even merge, was long gone. The fault liesrnon both sides.rnThe unwillingness of the Catholic Worker’s editors to explorernavenues of cooperation with the Old Right led them, at times,rnto misrepresent the sole popular anti-militarist force of the latern1940’s. In denouncing the North Atlantic Treaty which createdrnNATO, the Catholic Worker claimed that “the only seriousrnopposition in the Senate is from a group of the old isolationistrnschool, and their argument is that it costs too much.” This isrnflatly untiue—the isolationist case was far more sophisticatedrnand powerful, and it rested on the same hatred of war and aggressionrnthat underlay the Catholic Workers—but to have beenrnhonest and fair would have placed the Catholic Worker onrnElm Street and Oak Street, whose denizens might have taughtrnthe boys in the Bowery a thing or two.rnPostwar Catholic isolationists would be condescended to asrnparochial morons by the Cold War liberal likes of JamesrnO’Cara, managing editor of Commonweal, who snickered atrnLIBERAL ARTSrnFUNDING THErnNEW WORLD ORDERrn”Intrastate conflicts are today’s deadliest political disasters.rnAt the end of history’s bloodiest century nearly allrnnations are at peace with each other, but many are at warrnwith themselves. . . .rn”At a time when the tolerance of diversity among statesrnhas never been greater, intolerance of diversity withinrnthem has rarely been more virulent. A defining dilemmarnfor 21st-century statecraft looms; can the internationalrncommunity find ways to limit the abuse of power withinrnstates without triggering new abuses of the power of interventionrnand aggression in relations between states?rnThe World Bank has an important supporting role tornplay in helping resolve this dilemma.”rn—from ]ohn Stremlau and Francisco R. Sagasti, PreventingrnDeadly Conflict: Does the World Bank Have arnRole? (Carnegie Corporation of New York, 1998)rnthose mossbacks who refused to recognize that “American powerrnis a fact” and that “modern science has devoured distancernand made neighbors of us all.” What good is personalism in arnworld of atomic bombs? What mattered the small? FatherrnJohn C. Rawe’s experimental school of rural knowledge, OmarrnFarm, near Omaha, was shattered when all but two of its studentsrnwere drafted to fight World War II. Liberal Catholicsrncontinued to support the conscription against which pacifistsrnand right-wingers railed, although, as Patiicia McNeal has writtenrnof the League of Nations debate, “the majority of AmericanrnCatholics supported the popular movement towards isolationismrnand rejected any idea of collective security.” But thernLeague aside, we all know which side won. The state side. Thernliberals who do not know us but, as they so unctuously assurernus, have our best interests at heart.rn”The greatest enemy of the church today is the state,”rnDorothy Day told a Catholic audience in 1975, soundingrnmuch like the libertarian right that was her natural, if too littlernvisited, kin.rnThe powerful libertarian strain in the Catholic Worker wasrnsimply not present in other postwar magazines of the “left,” exceptingrnPolitics, edited by Day admirer Dwight Macdonald.rnAmerican liberals had made peace with—had made sacrificesrnto —Moloch on the Potomac. As Catholic Worker editorrnRobert Ludlow argued in 1951,rnwe are headed in this country towards a totalitarianismrnevery bit as dangerous towards freedom as the other morernforthright forms. We have our secret police, our thoughtrncontrol agencies, our overpowering bureaucracy.. . . ThernAmerican State, like every other State, is governed byrnthose who have a compulsion to power, to centralization,rnto the preservation of their gains. And it is the liberals —rnThe New Leader, New Republic, Commonweal variety—rnwho have delivered the opiate necessary for the acceptancernof this tyranny among “progressive” people. It isrnthe fallacy of attempting social reform through the State,rnwhich builds up the power of the State to where it controlsrnall avenues of life.rnTo which the New Republic-style liberals replied: welcome tornthe real world.rnThe inevitable Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in The Vital Centerrn(1949), his manifesto of Cold War liberalism, wrote,rn”One can dally with the distributist dream of decentralization,”rnbut “you cannot flee from science and technology into a quietistrndreamworld. The state and the factory are inexorable: badrnmen will run them if good abdicate the job.”rnAlas, most on the “right” crawled into the devitalizingrncenter. A dispersion of property, a restoration of ownership, thernreclaiming of the land, a foreign policy of peace and noninterference:rnthese were the dreams of losers, of fleers from reality’,rnof shirkers of responsibility, of—most damningly—amateurs.rnNon-experts. In 1966, in the just-as-inevitable NationalrnReview, Anthony T. Bouscaren mocked Day and otherrn”Catholic Peaceniks” because, “sinfully, their analysis of the situationrn[in Vietnam] goes directly counter to that of the distinguishedrnlist of academicians . . . who support U.S. defense ofrnSouth Vietnam.” Grounds for excommunication, surely.rnIn all this worry about the other side of the world, few partisansrnbothered to notice the dirt under their feet. Distiibutismrn20/CHRONiCLESrnrnrn