today, or to the 10-15 billion there will probably be tomorrow. It is readily apparent that the planet can only support such volumes of production ... for a short time to come."

These considerations refute conventional optimism (though the real despair lies in a refusal to confront them at all), and both the right and left therefore prefer to talk about something else—for example, to exchange accusations of fascism and socialism. But the ritual deployment and rhetorical inflation of these familiar slogans provide further evidence of the emptiness of recent political debate. For the left, fascism now embraces everything to the right of liberalism and social democracy, including such disparate configurations as the Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran, the opposition to the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, and Reaganism itself. For the right, communism (or "creeping socialism," as it used to be called) embraces everything to the left of, and including, the New Deal. Not only have these terms lost their meaning through reckless expansion, but they no longer describe historical alternatives at the end of the twentieth century.

It ought to be clear by now that neither fascism nor socialism represents the wave of the future. Gorbachev's momentous reforms in the Soviet Union, followed by the collapse of the Soviet empire in eastern Europe, indicate that socialism's moment has come and gone. As for fascism, it cannot be regarded as a generic configuration at all, and certainly not as the final stage of capitalist decay. Nor does the looser concept of totalitarianism provide an acceptable substitute. The history of the twentieth century suggests that totalitarian regimes are highly unstable, evolving toward some type of bureaucracy that fits neither the classic fascist nor the socialist model. None of this means that the future will be safe for democracy, only that the danger to democracy comes less from totalitarian or collectivist movements abroad than from the erosion of its psychological, cultural, and spiritual foundations from within.

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