In a famous passage in A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway noted that World War I discredited words like "honor," "glory," and "sacrifice." For the American left, it also discredited the concept of loyalty, now associated with nationalistic fanaticism, hatred of the Hun (later displaced onto the Bolsheviks), "100 percent Americanism," and a growing intolerance of political dissent. The left had been suspicious of particularism all along, but the war confirmed these suspicions and foreclosed the possibility of further debate about cultural pluralism and "loyalty to loyalty." Indeed the war put an end to a whole series of interlocking debates about democracy, the intensity of which had made the intellectual climate of the prewar years so invigorating. In the years to come, the assimilationist, consumerist, distributive version of the democratic dogma would seldom be subjected to such searching criticism.

The value of "progressive" social thought, the label notwithstanding, was that much of it worked against the progressive grain. "Progressivism" was not completely compatible with the ideology of progress. It is true that the syndicalist movement in America never mounted a head-on challenge to that ideology, as it did elsewhere, but the wide-ranging discussions of "industrial self-government" launched by Croly and others served to remind people that large-scale production might destroy the worker's sense of responsibility and thus undermine the moral foundations of democracy. The controversy about the democratization of culture, as we have seen, raised some of the same issues in another form. Those who took the position that leisure and abundance would democratize leisure-class standards of beauty had to contend with a much livelier conception of democracy, according to which the rehabilitation of work, not the democratization of consumption, ought to be seen as the principal goal of cultural criticism and political action alike. The controversy about assimilation and cultural pluralism raised these issues even more sharply. Advocates of particularism challenged one of the central tenets of enlightened ideology, the equation of progress with the eradication of tribal loyalties and their replacement by an all-embracing love for the whole human race.

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